Historians From The United States

"Kirk's understanding of conservatism was so unique, idiosyncratic, transcendental, elitist, and in certain respects premodern and European, that it bore little resemblance to political conservatism in the United States. Conservative Mind successfully launched an intellectual challenge to postwar liberalism, but the variety of conservatism Kirk preferred found few takers, even within the American Right."

"American thinker Russell Kirk (1918­–1994) was among the few commentators, and possibly the only one among non-specialists, to underline that Plato’s “The Republic” is not a blueprint for political action. It is rather a philosophical metaphor on the ideal city of men and women. It must not be taken literally, but it serves its purpose best when considered as a mythical description of the theoretical coordinates that should limit and shape public life to obtain the highest level of decency for human beings. Plato’s endeavor in “The Republic” is in fact highly moral. In that book, the Greek philosopher aims at setting the standards that a community of human beings must observe to prosper, benefiting each of its members. And Plato aptly describes the “polis” as a “macroanthropos.”"

"For Spinoza, my mind is simply an idea in God’s intellect; in particular it is God’s idea of my body."

"As always with Spinoza, it is helpful to begin with God. The system of ideas that are parallel to modes of extension constitutes God’s infinite intellect."

"For Spinoza, obviously, the human mind, as well as the human body, are individuals (actually, they are the same individual). However, this individuality of the human mind would be threatened if the human mind were made up of ideas whose contents were relatively disparate, if these ideas were not all focused around a particular unified thing, such as the human body."

"Spinoza’s naturalism and rationalism are nowhere more evident and more relevant to contemporary philosophy than in his philosophy of mind. All there is to thought is the having of ideas, representations of certain things. Thus, in laying down requirements on what it is to have an idea or representation of an object, Spinoza is articulating the essence of the mental."

"I think that one who appreciates the fact that, if there are to be genuine causal connections, they must amount to conceptual connections, is Hume. Hume, of course, denies that there are conceptual connections among distinct things and so he is unable to come up with genuine cases of causation. But, in a way, Hume does accept the rationalist demand that, if there is to be genuine causation, it must amount to conceptual connection. Spinoza accepts this rationalist demand too. But, unlike Hume, he sees there as being genuine conceptual connections, i.e. causal connections, in the world."

"Unsurprisingly, then, Spinoza has not solved the mind-body problem. But he has advanced our understanding of it. He has shown how, if one skillfully and consistently wields the PSR and the conceptual barrier between thought and extension, one can construct an argument for the view that there is one substance and one can undermine the Cartesian intuitions that material things and physical things cannot be identical."

"How many things are there in the world? Spinoza’s answer: one."

"Spinoza’s metaphysics is, in many ways, an effort to tap into the underlying rationalist motivations of Descartes’s metaphysics and to follow through on these motivations more consistently than Descartes ever did. Employing the Cartesian notions of substance, attribute, and mode, and wielding strongly rationalist principles only hinted at in Descartes—such as the PSR and the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles—Spinoza is able to mount a powerful argument for substance monism, for the view that there is, fundamentally, only one thing in the world."

"Spinoza’s parallelism embodies in many ways a deeply anti-Cartesian view. By keeping the causal chains of modes of extension somehow separate from the causal chains of modes of thought, Spinoza is guided by his overarching denial of any explanatory connections between the mental and the physical, i.e. of connections of the kind that Descartes, in his account of mind-body interaction, quite happily embraces. But precisely because Spinoza separates the causal chains in this way, there might be thought to be a crucial point of agreement between Descartes and Spinoza on the nature of mind-body relations."

"According to Spinoza’s system, all reality flows with strict necessity from the nature of God. With the geometrical method, Spinoza captures the structure of this reality by deducing philosophical conclusions about reality from definitions which express the nature of God."

"Rethinking Spinoza in light of the Principle of Sufficient Reason promises to be important not only for our understanding of Spinoza, but also for our understanding of the philosophical issues Spinoza deals with and that continue to trouble philosophers today."

"The purity of Spinoza’s commitment to explanation can best be articulated in terms of his commitments to the Principle of Sufficient Reason (hereafter, the “PSR”) and to his naturalism."

"Spinoza’s own view is one according to which human beings and the rest of reality are not explained in such different ways, according to which human beings and all else operate according to the same laws. Such a unification of explanatory principles is the heart of Spinoza’s naturalism about psychology: human psychology is governed by the same fundamental principles that govern rocks and tables and dogs. Thus no new principles are needed to explain human psychology beyond those principles needed to explain the rest of nature anyway. More generally, Spinoza’s naturalism, as I understand it, is the view that there are no illegitimate bifurcations in reality."

"Spinoza can be seen as a pure philosopher, always seeking explanation, always refusing to be satisfied with primitive, inexplicable notions. This purity is most evident in his commitment to the principle that each fact has an explanation, that for each thing that exists there is an explanation that suffices for one to see why that thing exists. Although Spinoza does not himself use the term, this principle is known as the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR)."

"Jaffa was perhaps best known for his contributions to our understanding of Abraham Lincoln’s political thought."

"We owe a debt of immeasurable gratitude to Harry Jaffa for recovering for us the true Lincoln and for helping us remember our sacred heritage, our nation's founding devotion to the truth of human equality and liberty, a truth applicable to all men at all times."

"Jaffa, one of Claremont McKenna's most distinguished professors, wrote an article twelve year ago about the election of 1996. In an election where several states will be voting on whether or not the Constitution's 14th amendment means what it says and where one party under John McCain has come out against racial discrimination, while the other votes for its candidate, Barack Obama, who pretty much is the affirmative action candidate, Jaffa's remarks twelve years ago in The Wall Street Journal are all the more important today. It's a long slog until we realize the dream Lincoln saw for us, but it won't be for lack of trying, as we inch, little to little, to the land where all men are created equal."

"Remember, the ultimate object of Marxist Communism is to return to the Garden of Eden with no forbidden fruit. That’s the goal of libertarianism as well. And we’re marching rapidly in that direction. Morality is disintegrating in front of our eyes."

"I think if Obama is reelected, then that'll be a disaster of immeasurable proportions. If the government takes over large segments of the economy, we will become a socialist state. The salvation of the Republican Party, and of the country and of the world, will be changing the conservative moment to reflect the principles of Abraham Lincoln. The platform on which Lincoln was elected in 1860 quoted part of the Declaration of Independence. Government is based on the consent of the governed."

"Karl Marx; the great enemy of human freedom."

"Marx saw morality as the great enemy of human well-being and now the society of the future is one in which moral distinctions based upon the Judeo-Christian and Greek tradition will dissolve. Without even knowing it, we are moving into a Communist world. Without a revolution, we are moving into the world that Marx wanted."

"The "pursuit of happiness" in the Declaration of Independence didn't mean radical individualism. It meant the pursuit of virtue."

"The Secretary of State, the President, they all talk about "values". A "value" is a subjective desire, not an objective truth. George Washington said: "The foundations of our national policy will be laid in the pure and immutable principles of private morality." If you had said, "Oh, Mr. Washington, you mean in our 'values?'" Washington would have replied, "What the hell are you talking about?""

"We have to return to the political thought of the American founders and Abraham Lincoln. Nothing is at stake but the salvation of Western civilization."

"The issue between Lincoln and Douglas was identical to the issue between Socrates and Thrasymachus in the first book of Plato's Republic. Not similar to it. Identical. It is a question of whether the people make the moral order or the moral order makes the people."

"The art of politics is judging what circumstances permit and what they forbid. Look at the reputation of, say, John Brown and the abolitionists before the Civil War. Lincoln had very harsh things to say about John Brown in 1859. The Civil War vindicated John Brown."

"Lincoln thought slavery was wrong and he did not think a vote of the people could make it right."

"This changed attitude toward slavery was, however, part of a changed attitude toward morality in general that was sweeping over Western civilization. This change was marked by the apotheosis of "change" itself. What had heretofore been regarded as moral absolutes came to be regarded as merely relative to a particular time and place—to History or Progress—with no enduring claim upon our consciences. Lincoln praised Jefferson for embodying in the Declaration "an abstract truth applicable to all men and all times." But the idea of such truth, and of the correlation of such truth with justice, was increasingly repudiated by the most educated and influential minds in the Western world. Representative of this triumph of historicism and moral relativism was historian Carl Becker's assertion in a landmark 20th-century work that "To ask whether the natural rights philosophy of the Declaration of Independence is true or false is essentially a meaningless question.""

"To ask whether what the American people in the Declaration of Independence had affirmed as truth was in fact truth, was now said to be meaningless. But if History or Progress or 'change' is to be our guide, if the truth of relativism is to replace the truth of the Declaration, then the cause for which the nation fought at its birth, and in the Civil War, was meaningless, too. White power, black power, the Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, are as justifiable as Jefferson, Lincoln, or the doctrine of the equal natural rights of all human beings. We may understand how the Rev. Jeremiah Wright could so awfully misunderstand the American political tradition, inasmuch as it has been so very misunderstood for so long in circles from whom a better understanding could be expected. But this misunderstanding is a cancer which can in the end prove fatal, not only to a political campaign but to our country."

"In the decade from the Declaration to the Constitution every state north of the Mason Dixon line, and north of the Ohio River, either abolished slavery or adopted measures leading to abolition. But in 1793 the cotton gin was invented, shortly after the power loom in England. This was the onset of the industrial revolution. Almost overnight, a new industry or rather a series of new industries, proliferating worldwide, was born. It began with the growing of cotton but was followed by its manufacture into a wide variety of products, especially cotton cloth and cotton clothing. Suddenly, slave labor became vastly more profitable. In the decade before the Civil War, the value of slaves doubled. Once again, greed overwhelmed all other motives. From being regarded as a temporary evil, as it was at the founding, slavery came to be regarded as a positive—and permanent—good."

"If we are to have a foundation upon which to continue to build a more perfect union, we must return unequivocally, as Lincoln returned, to the source of our greatness in the American Founding."

"Slavery came to the English colonies in North America in the 17th century because the colonists found themselves in possession of a vast continent, needing only cultivation to make it the homes of millions of free, prosperous, God-fearing human beings. Those who came from Europe would be refugees from the tyranny and oppression of feudalism, divine right monarchy, and religious intolerance. But converting this vast wilderness into cultivated lands required labor. It was nearly inevitable that someone would turn to tribal Africa for some, at least, of this labor. It is paradoxical but true that a large measure of the labor that turned America into a sanctuary for freedom came from slavery. The slave trade that developed between North America and the west coast of Africa is one of the great horror stories of western civilization. It resulted also from the unlimited greed of the African chiefs who enslaved their brother Africans, and then sold them to white slave traders. They in turn sold them, for vast profits, into the new world."

"The events of this story are morally indefensible. But the greed that motivated the human actors—excluding of course the slaves themselves—was so overwhelming as to be irresistible. It is impossible for us today who condemn the slave trade to imagine any effective opposition to it in the 17th century. A parallel in our time would be the unstoppable trade in narcotics. We can't stop the supply because we can't stop the demand. To the limitless demand for labor in the new world the slave trade was a limitless response. Like drugs today, laws against it were powerless, because the profits were so great. Opposition to the slave trade did come in time, in the principles of the American Revolution, but not before slavery had formed deep roots in the economy and polity of the United States. The foreign slave trade was outlawed by the United States in 1808, and it was made a capital crime in 1820, but the trade continued right up until the Civil War. It is good however to remind ourselves that no black slave was sold to a white slave trader, on the west coast of Africa, who had not already been enslaved by a black African. Slavery was an equal opportunity employer!"

"The South knew that it would never in future possess the same power relative to the North that it did in 1861. From that perspective, it was now for never or Southern independence, if slavery was to be preserved."

"The Declaration of the causes and Necessity of Taking up Arms, on July 6, 1775, was the very first occasion for the American people to speak to the world with a single voice. In its first sentence, the Second Continental Congress affirmed without equivocation that the idea of the ownership of some human beings by other human beings was an utter absurdity, and that to think otherwise was incompatible with reason or revelation. Thus from the outset—a year before the Declaration of Independence—the American people were committed to the antislavery cause, and to the inseparability of personal freedom and free government. The American people knew from the outset that the cause of their own freedom and that of the slaves was inseparable. This would become the message that Abraham Lincoln would bring to the American people, and to the world, for all time."

"That all men are created equal does not mean that human beings are the same, or equal, in size, strength, beauty, virtue, or intelligence. There are obviously great differences in individual aptitudes and talents in sports, music, mathematics, speaking, and writing. They are also unequal in the virtues, among them courage, temperance, and justice. But as Jefferson once said, the fact that Sir Isaac Newton may be the most intelligent of living human beings does not give him any right whatever to my person or my property."

"But one may ask, how is it that slavery, or any other form of invidious discrimination, has played so great a role in American history? How could a nation, dedicated at its birth to the proposition that all men are created equal, have tolerated slavery and its effects so long? If we look to the long history of mankind, however, we will ask a different question. Slavery was lawful in every one of the original thirteen states. There was accordingly nothing remarkable in the fact that slavery was not abolished immediately on independence. What is remarkable is that a slave-owning nation would declare that all men are created equal, and thereby make the abolition of slavery a moral and political necessity. To accomplish that task would not be easy. We need to see the dimensions of that task to appreciate its difficulty."

"Let us contemplate two epochal events in the long human story. One is the annunciation of the unity of God at Mt. Sinai. That same God was said to have made man, alone among living beings, in His image. Implicit in the unity of God was the corresponding unity of the human race. But it was only after more than three thousand years, that the Declaration of this unity was made in Philadelphia. One need not believe in direct divine intervention to think that it has been the peculiar mission of the American people to testify to the unity on earth of God, and of man. Such testimony could take no more evident form than in the denunciation of chattel slavery in the founding itself. That denunciation is prominent beyond doubt or denial, in the documents of the founding. Men of reason can agree with men of faith, that neither God nor man could have devised a more dramatic event than our founding to demonstrate to the world the meaning inherent in this unity."

"Slavery in the British colonies of North America was more than a century-and-a-half old before independence. It was roundly condemned, at one time or another, by nearly all the important political personages of the Revolution. I know of no instance in which any of these personages contradicted the doctrine of the Declaration, or maintained that slavery was a positive good. We must recognize, however, that slavery next to the family was perhaps the oldest institution of civilized mankind. Its origin in the ancient world came with the discovery that it was more profitable to enslave an enemy defeated in war than to kill him. The ancient law of the ancient city may be seen in the Bible. When the Israelites conquered Jericho, they put to the sword everyone in the city—men and women, young and old, sheep, oxen, and asses. Only Rahab the harlot and her family were spared, since they had given shelter to the Israelite spies. Later, in the custom of ancient warfare, the males of a defeated people would all be killed, but the women and children would be carried into slavery. Eventually the entire population of a defeated people would be enslaved. Such are the steps in the human story. That defeat in war meant slavery was the rule for many thousands of years."

"He didn't care whether slavery was voted up or down, he cared only for the sacred right of the people to make that decision. Why the right of the people should have been sacred, if the results of the exercise of that right were indifferent, Douglas never undertook to say."

"The equality of mankind is best understood in light of a two-fold inequality. The first is the inequality of mankind and of the subhuman classes of living beings that comprise the order of nature. Dogs and horses, for example, are naturally subservient to human beings. But no human being is naturally subservient to another human being. No human being has a right to rule another without the other's consent. The second is the inequality of man and God. As God's creatures, we owe unconditional obedience to His will. By that very fact however we do not owe such obedience to anyone else. Legitimate political authority—the right of one human being to require obedience of another human being—arises only from consent. The fundamental act of consent is, as the 1780 Massachusetts Bill of Rights states, "a social compact by which the whole people covenants with each citizen and each citizen with the whole people that all shall be governed by certain laws for the common good." The "certain laws for the common good" have no other purpose but to preserve and protect the rights that each citizen possesses prior to government, rights with which he or she has been "endowed by their Creator." The rights that governments exist to secure are not the gift of government. They originate in God."

"The great difficulty in forming legitimate governments is in persuading those forming the governments that those who are to be their fellow citizens are equal to them in the rights, which their common government is to protect. Catholics and Protestants in sixteenth-century Europe looked upon each other as less than human, and slaughtered each other without pity and without compunction. It was impossible for there to be a common citizenship of those who did not look upon each other as possessing the same right of conscience. How one ought to worship God cannot be settled by majority rule. A majority of one faith cannot ask a minority of another faith to submit their differences to a vote. George Washington, in 1793, said that our governments were not formed in the gloomy ages of ignorance and superstition, but at a time when the rights of man were better understood than in any previous age. Washington was right, in that such rights were, in the latter part of the eighteenth century, in America, better understood. But they were not perfectly understood, as the continued existence of chattel slavery attests. A difference concerning the equal rights of persons of color made the continued existence of a common government of all Americans impossible. A great civil war had to be fought, ending the existence of slavery, reuniting the nation and rededicating it to the proposition that all men are created equal."

"According to Abraham Lincoln, public opinion always has a central idea from which all its minor thoughts radiate. The central idea of the American Founding—and indeed of constitutional government and the rule of law—was the equality of mankind. This thought is central to all of Lincoln's speeches and writings, from 1854 until his election as president in 1860. It is immortalized in the Gettysburg Address."

"The United States is engaged today in a great mission to spread democracy to the Middle East, beginning with Afghanistan, and continuing with Iraq. The inhabitants of Iraq are divided into many groups and factions that hate and distrust each other. The attitude of Sunni and Shia Muslims toward each other resembles that of Catholic and Protestant Christians in the sixteenth century, which persist today in northern Ireland, each regarding the other as heretics. Under the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, the minority of Sunnis persecuted the majority Shias. It is understandable that the minority Sunnis are today resisting majority rule, while the majority Shia favor it. The Sunnis clearly believe that majority rule by Shia will be used as a means of retribution and revenge. The Sunnis look upon majority rule by the Shia the way the South looked upon the election of Lincoln in 1860. It is inconceivable to the Sunnis that the rule of the Shia majority will be anything other than tyranny. Indeed, it is inconceivable to them that any political power, whether of a minority or a majority, would be non-tyrannical. The idea of non-tyrannical government is alien to their history and their experience. They regard our assertions of Jeffersonian or Lincolnian principles as mere hypocrisy, as they see no other form of rule other than that of force. Our government assumes that the people of the Middle East, like people elsewhere, seek freedom for others no less than for themselves. But that is an assumption that has not yet been confirmed by experience."

"The original intent of the 14th Amendment, and of the Congress and the American people who ratified it, can best be understood in the light of the change it effected in antecedent constitutional law. Taney's opinion in Dred Scott was still in effect as the Civil War came to an end. By it Negroes, whether free or slave, could not be citizens of the United States. Although the 13th Amendment abolished slavery, it did not settle the question of Negro citizenship. This was however decided by the opening sentence of the 14th Amendment. "All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." The intent of this sentence could however be frustrated if it were possible to make distinctions within citizenship, by which some citizens would have more rights, and others less. It was to prevent this that the Amendment went on to declare that "No State shall... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.""

"The 14th Amendment was intended to drive a stake through the heart of Dred Scott. The heart of that opinion consisted in the assertion that Negroes were so far inferior that they had no rights which white men were bound to respect. This meant that as far as the Constitution was concerned, the distance between whites and blacks was no less than the distance between whites and any other inferior species. A white man had the same right to rule a Negro as he had to rule dog or a horse. Hence according to Taney blacks were not and could not have been included in the proposition "that all men are created equal." Whether or not they were intended to be so included was among the questions most fiercely debated by Lincoln and Douglas."

"Our difficulty in pursuing a rational foreign policy in the Middle East—or anywhere else—is compounded by the fact that we ourselves, as a nation, seem to be as confused as the Iraqis concerning the possibility of non-tyrannical majority rule. We continue to enjoy the practical benefits of political institutions founded upon the convictions of our Founding Fathers and Lincoln, but there is little belief in God-given natural rights, which are antecedent to government, and which define and limit the purpose of government. Virtually no one prominent today, in the academy, in law, or on government, subscribes to such beliefs. Indeed, the climate of opinion of our intellectual elites is one of violent hostility to any notion of a rational foundation for political morality. We, in short, engaged in telling others to accept the forms of our own political institutions, without any reference to the principles or convictions that give rise to those institutions."

"No result of the Civil War was more fundamental than the authoritative assertion of the inclusion of human beings of any color and any ethnicity in the proposition of human equality. A consensus in favor of the colorblind Constitution is provided by the logic of reality and the logic of history."