Excavations


... nothing is more essential to public interest than the preservation of public liberty.

- David Hume



Thursday, May 30, 2019

Federalist No. 10: “factions”, taxes and Trump.


   By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community. …

… the most common and most durable  source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property.  Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society.  Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination.  A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views.  The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of government. …

     The apportionment of taxes on the various descriptions of property is an act which seems to require the most exact impartiality; yet there is, perhaps, no legislative act in which greater opportunity and temptation are given to the a predominant party to trample on the rules of justice.  Every shilling with which they overburden the inferior number, is a shilling saved to their own pockets.

     It is in vain to say that enlightened statesmen will be able to adjust these clashing interests, and render them all subservient to the public good.  Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.  Not, in many cases, can such an adjustment be made at all without taking into view indirect and remote considerations, which will rarely prevail over the immediate interest which oe party may find in disregarding the rights of another or the goo of the whole.

     The inference to which we are brought is, that the CAUSES of factions cannot be removed, and relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling its EFFECTS.

     If a faction consists of less than a majority, relief is supplied by the republican principle, which enables the majority to defeat its sinister views by regular vote.  It may clog the administration, it may convulse the society; but it will be unable to execute and mask its violence under the forms of the Constitution.  When a majority is included in a faction, the form of popular government, on the other hand, enables it to sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest both the public good and the right of other citizens.  To secure the public good and private rights against the danger of such a faction, and at the same time to preserve the spirit and form of popular government, is then the great object to which our enquiries are directed.  Let me add that this is the great desideratum by which this form of government can be rescued from the opprobrium under which it has so long labored, and be recommended to the esteem and adoption of mankind.[1]  

James Madison, Federalist No. 10 (1787)


[1] The Federalist Papers can easily be found online.

J.S. Mill on “diversity” in Quebec


The demand that all other people shall resemble ourselves grows by what it feeds on.  If resistance waits till life is reduced nearly to one uniform type, all deviations from that type will come to be considered impious, immoral, even monstrous and contrary to nature.  Mankind speedily become unable to conceive diversity when they have been for some time unaccustomed to see it.[1]

J.S. Mill, On Liberty (1859)



[1] John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, ed. Gertrude Himmelfarb (Toronto: Penguin, 1985), p. 140.  These are the last three sentences to Chapter III.

Saturday, May 18, 2019

Locke to Quebec on “toleration” (ii)

And if the example of old Rome (where so many different opinions, gods and ways of worship were promiscuously tolerated) be of any weight, we have reason to imagine that no religion can be suspected to the state of ill intention to it, till the government first by partial usage of them, different from that of the rest of the subjects, declare its ill intentions to its professors, and so make a state business of it.  And if any rational man can imagine that force and compulsion can at any time be the right way to get an opinion or religion out of the world, or to break a party of men that unite in the profession of it, this I dare affirm: that it is the worst, the last to be used, and with the greatest caution, for these reasons:

(1)    Because it brings that upon a man which, that he might be freed from is the only reason why he is member of the commonwealth, viz., violence.  For, were there no fear of violence, there would be no government in the world, nor any need of it.

(2)    Because the magistrate, in using force, does in part cross what he pretends to do, which is the safety of all.  For, the preservation, as much as possible, of the property, quiet, and life of every individual being his duty, he is obliged not to disturb or destroy some for the quiet and safety of the rest, till it hath been tried whether there be not ways to save all.  For, so far as he undoes or destroys the safety of any of his subjects for the security of the rest, so far as he opposes his own design, which is professed, and ought to be only for preservation, to which even the meanest have a title. ‘Twould be but an uncharitable as well as unskillful way of a cure, and such as nobody would use or consent to, to cut off so much as an ulcered toe, though tending to a gangrene, till other gentler remedies have proved unsuccessful, though it be a part as low as the earth and far distant from the head.[1]

Locke, “An Essay on Toleration” (1667)  






[1] John Locke, Political Essays, ed. Mark Goldie (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 149,150.

Locke to Quebec on “toleration” (i)


The other thing that hath just claim to an unlimited toleration is the place, time, and manner of worshipping my God.  Because this is wholly between God and me, and of an eternal concernment, above the reach and extent of polities and government, which are for my well-being in this world.  For the magistrate is but umpire between man and man; he can right me against my neighbor, but cannot defend me against my God; whatever evil I suffer by obeying him in other things, he can make me amends in this world, but if he force me to a wrong religion, he can make me no reparation in the other world.[1]

Locke, “An Essay on Toleration” (1667)



[1] John Locke, Political Essays, ed. Mark Goldie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 137.

Thursday, May 16, 2019

Montaigne on Quebec’s Secularism Bill 21


A chaque pied son soulier.[1]

-          Montaigne, Essais (1588 edition), Book III, Ch. 13.




[1] This has been translated as “For every foot its own shoe” by Charles Cotton in 1685.  More recently Donald Frame’s translation is “For every foot its own shoe.” And M.A. Screech has it as “For every foot its proper shoe.”  I am indebted to Peter Burke’s concise work on Montaigne in the Oxford “Past Masters” series which brought my attention to the metaphor, and he translates it as: “Let every foot have its own shoe”. 

See: Les Essais (eds. P. Villeny and V-L. Saulnier), online edition by P. Desan, University of Chicago, p. 1066; Essays of Michel de Montaigne, tr. Charles Cotton, ed. William Hazlitt, Project Gutenberg;   The Complete Works, tr. Donald Frame (Toronto: Everyman’s Library, 2003), p. 994; The Complete Essays, tr. M.A. Screech (Toronto: Penguin, 2003), p. 1209; Peter Burke, Montaigne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 33.

Thursday, May 2, 2019

Why the Chinese Communist Party leadership succeeds in holding power: A Toquevillean view


… the anti-hierarchical sentiment has always existed and the chief social contradiction is precisely the contrast between the necessity for hierarchy and the sentiment for equality.  Men then experience the need, not to destroy government – man is naturally an archic animal – but to destroy and weaken, as far as lies in their power, all the deputy governments, all the authorities, castes, classes, corporations, which come in layers between them and the central government.  What they commonly call Liberty is no other than this thing. The subject in the Oriental empire thinks he is free; the Roman people hailed Caesar as a liberator.  It is noticeable that people never, or very slightly, lavish a religious respect upon a caste, but very often and very easily do so upon a single master, an Oriental despot, a Roman Caesar, a French Napoleon.  He represents the popular force incarnate in one man.  In what way does he then represent it?  By suppressing hierarchy, which popular force always wants to suppress. In this way he represents not, it is true, the people itself, but one of the people’s instincts, and the keenest of them, in a state of victory.  Therefore the people is not entirely mistaken in seeing itself represented by him.[1]




[1] See Emile Faguet, “Tocqueville” in Politicians and Moralists of the Nineteenth Century, tr. Dorothy Galton (London: Ernest Benn, 1928), pp. 81,82.  This English translation of Volume 3 of Faguet’s, Politiques et moralists du dix-neuvième siècle (originally published in 1899) appears in the Library of European Political Thought series edited by Harold J. Laski.