Truth and liberty: The present crisis in our culture

Review of Politics

Volumn 59, Issue 1, 1997, Pages 5-23

  Novak, Michael ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34248113825     PISSN: 00346705     EISSN: 17486858     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0034670500027133     Document Type: Article

References (32)

1. See Michael Lewis on Woody Allen, "The Very Last Lover," The New Republic, 28 September 1992, p. 11.
2. Planned Parenthood v Casey, 505 U.S. 120 L Ed 2d 674 (1992). Russell Hittinger parsed the destructive notion of liberty at the heart of Casey: "One would seem to have a right to do or not do whatever one pleases" ("What Really Happened in the Casey Decision," Crisis [September 1992], pp. 16-22).
3. In view of his earlier defense of nihilism, Camus sets forth, with some difficulty, his argument against Nazism in "Letters to a German Friend: Second Letter," Resistance, Rebellion and Death (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961).
4. Schlesinger wrote, "The American mind is by nature and tradition skeptical, irreverent, pluralistic and relativistic.... People with different history will have different values. But we believe that our own are better for us. They work for us; and, for that reason, we live and die by them" ("The Opening of the American Mind," New York Times Book Review, 23 July 1989, p. 26). A good statement of Rorty's views on democracy can be found in "Taking Philosophy Seriously," New Republic, 11 April 1988, p. 22, where Rorty writes, "No specific doctrine is much of a danger, but the idea that democracy depends on adhesion to some such doctrine is
5. For the testimony of Vaclav Havel and other East and Central European dissidents on the culture of the Lie, see Havel et al., The Power and the Powerless: Citizens Against the Stale in Central and Eastern Europe (Armark, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1990).
6. Solzhenitsyn was quoting, in his 1970 Nobel prize lecture, an old Russian proverb: "One word of truth outweighs the world; Nobel Lecture (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970), p. 34.
7. Berlin defined negative liberty as "not being interfered with by others. The wider the area of non-interference the wider my freedom; See Berlin's famous "Two Concepts of Liberty," in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 118-172
8. See my Morality, Capitalism and Democracy (London: IEA Health and Welfare, 1990), originally delivered as an IEA Health and Welfare Unit lecture in the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre in 1990. The lecture's original title was "Christianity, Capitalism, and Democracy," and it so appears in the Czech and Polish translations.
9. Still, note the neat connection between the third concept of liberty and the liberal concept of "negative liberty; The American regime permits liberty even to those who do not practice self-government, but are slaves (as all of us are in part) to their own passions. But it cannot survive unless a sufficient proportion of its citizens do practice self-government in their private lives, and so are prepared to practice it in public as well. If all are slaves to passion and interest, free institutions cannot stand. The state cannot command or coerce self-government in private life, but it can do two things: (a) it can avoid undermining it by its laws, its regulations, and its taxes; and (b) it can support it by structures of incentives and punishments.
10. For Russell, see Why I am Not a Christian (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1957), particularly pp. 14-15
11. Sartre's views are developed in The Words (New York: George Braziller, 1964
12. on Strauss's relationship to Judaism, see David Novak, ed., Leo Strauss and Judaism: Jerusalem and Athens Critically Revisited (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996).
13. Tocqueville wrote: "While the law allows the American people to do everything, there are things which religion prevents them from imagining and forbids them to dare. Religion, which never intervenes directly in the government of American society, should therefore be considered as the first of their political institutions, for although it did not give them the taste for liberty, it singularly facilitates their use thereof" (Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer, trans. G. Lawrence [New York: Anchor Books, 1966], p. 292).
14. In Niebuhr's words, "Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary" (The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of Its Traditional Defense [New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1944], p. xi).
15. During the constitutional debate of 1788, Madison asked: "Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks, no form of government, can render us secure. To suppose any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea. If there be sufficient virtue and intelligence in the community, it will be exercised in the selection of these men; so that we do not depend on their virtue, or put confidence in our rulers, but in the people who are to choose them" (Jonathan Elliot, ed., Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution [Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1907], Virginia, 20 June 1788).
16. Washington declared that "Virtue and morality is a necessary spring of popular government" ("Farewell Address," 19 September 1796, in The Early Republic, 1789-1828, ed. Noble E. Cunningham, Jr. [Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1968], p. 53).
17. For two recent studies of Washington's exemplary character, see Richard Brookhiser, Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington (New York: Free Press, 1996
18. and Harrison Clark, All Cloudless Glory: The Life of George Washington from Youth to Yorktown (Washington, DC: Regnery, 1996).
19. C. F. Adams, ed., The Works of John Adams, vol.9 (Boston: Little-Brown, 1854), pp. 609-660 (emphasis added
20. See St. Thomas Aquinas, I Politics, lect. 1
21. Aristotle, 1252b5
22. see also Thomas Gilby, Between Community and Society: A Philosophy and Theology of the State (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1953), p. 93.
23. See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967).
24. Lord Acton, Selected Writings of Lord Acton, ed. J. Rufus Fears, vol.3 (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1988), p. 491. See also pp. 29-30.
25. Pope John Paul II, Centesimus Annus (Boston: Daughter's of St. Paul, 1991), #46.
26. Pope John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor (Boston: Daughter's of St. Paul, 1991), #101.
27. Friedman's comments were part of a symposium on Centesimus Annus in National Review (24 June 1991). They were reprinted as "Goods in Conflict?" in A New Worldly Order: John Paul II and Human Freedom, ed. George Weigel (Washington, DC: Ethics and Public Policy, 1992), p. 77.
28. During the conference at which this paper was presented (at the Henry Salvatori Center of Claremont McKenna College, 18-20 April 1996), Professor Friedman emphatically renounced relativism: "I have no doubt that there is an absolute standard of truth, and that in any particular matter there is a truth to be recognized. But I don't know what it is. The overlooked element here is humility. We have to know we don't know; And later, "I am not an atheist. I see the importance of religion, I respect it, I believe it has an important place in life, but I just do not see, I do not have belief myself, open as I am to it; (Conversation with the author.
29. Blaise Pascal, Pensees, with an introduction by T. S. Eliot (New York: Dutton, 1958), #277.
30. See, e.g., Niebuhr's discussion on "Having, And Not Having the Truth" in The Nature and Destiny of Man (New York: Macmillan, 1943), p. 243: "The truth remains subject to the paradox of grace. We may have it; and yet we do not have it. And we will have it the more purely in fact if we know that we have it only in principle. Our toleration of truths opposed to those which we confess is an expression of the spirit of forgiveness in the realm of culture. Like all forgiveness, it is possible only if we are not too sure of our own virtue
31. Tocqueville quotes Cotton Mather: "Nor would I have you mistake in the point of your own liberty. There is a liberty of corrupt nature, which is affected by men and beasts to do what they list; and this liberty is inconsistent with authority, impatient of all restraint.... But there is a civil, a moral, a federal liberty, which is the proper end and object of authority; it is a liberty for that only which is just and good" (Democracy in America, p. 46). In the succinct formulation of Lord Acton, liberty is not to be defined as "the power of doing what we like, but the right of being able to do what we ought" (Selected Writings of Lord Acton, p. 613).
32. John Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress (New York: Viking Penguin, 1965).