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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms) Alexis de Tocqueville

Hitler, 18

In chapter 3 of Brendan Simms’ book on Hitler we can read:

Hitler now moved to reorganize and expand the NSDAP. By the end of 1921, membership stood at about 6,000. The party moved from Sterneckerbräu to larger premises at Corneliusstrasse 12. Local groups were founded in Hanover, Zwickau and Dortmund. Hitler tightened his control over the party, including the cells outside Germany. In the spring of 1922 the Austrian and Bohemian NSDAP accepted Hitler’s authority. Collegial decision-making was abolished…

Ideological purity rather than control for its own sake seems to have been his main concern.

The day before yesterday I mentioned a recent article by Matt Parrott just to quote a few comments from its comments section, but I omitted the subject of the article: the recent demise of a racialist party in his country that had barely been formed.

Early critics of the United States told great truths about that country: truths that now seem much harder to see. Alexis de Tocqueville in his famous book wrote that freedom of speech did exist in the newly formed nation across the Atlantic, as long as opinion was confined to the paradigm accepted by most Americans.

Born on July 29, 1805, into a family of royalists that lost several of its members during the period known as The Terror of the French Revolution, the fall of Robespierre in 1794 spared Alexis’s parents from the guillotine. For that reason, he was suspicious of the revolutionaries all his life, and let’s remember that the ideologies that led to the founding of the US and modern France were twinned.

Alexis accepted a government mission to travel to the United States to study its prison system; his stay there lasted nine months. The fruit of this trip was a work on American prisons but his stay served him to deepen his analysis of the American political and social systems, which he described in his work Democracy in America (1835-1840).

Let us now think about the above quote from Simms’ book on the party that Hitler founded and Parrott’s piece. It is curious how the Old World without a First Amendment to the US Constitution, written in such clear prose, was de facto more tolerant than what is now happening in the New World. Someone might retort to me that Europe is currently more intolerant about us than the US, and it is true. But we should not forget the free speech gag laws that the Allies imposed in Germany and Austria after WWII.

Only when the dollar collapses and the US government has to withdraw the huge number of military bases it has around the world, including those still existing in Germany, will it be possible to see again the Teutonic character unmolested by the country Alexis visited.

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Alexis de Tocqueville Egalitarianism Film French Revolution Quotable quotes

The monkey

Much of my autobiographical work was studying a psychosis that broke out in my family that destroyed several lives, a work that took me decades to write. Today I remembered a few words from Brad Griffin when considering the final state of psychosis in which westerners find themselves: ‘Having brought down kings and queens and aristocrats in the name of “equality”, it was logical [for white liberals] to declare war on Nature itself’.

But already in the 19th century Alexis de Tocqueville had seen the first signs of the psychic cancer with the words: ‘They [the Americans] have an ardent passion for equality; insatiable, eternal, invincible… They can put up with poverty, subjugation, barbarism, but they cannot stand aristocracy’ (De la Démocratie en Amérique II.I. §1), and in a lapidary phrase he nails it: ‘The desire for equality becomes more and more insatiable as equality increases’.

What would de Tocqueville have said about the cultural revolution that we suffer today, even in the previous Catholic Latin America, about equalising, with all the power of the State, trans people with normal people?

But like Griffin, de Tocqueville didn’t do deep archaeology. It was Christianity that originally psychotized Europeans with the first cancer cells, which only until now reached their final metastasis. I’m referring to the universalism of the Eastern Imperial Church, which admitted all ethnic castes in Constantinople. In Rome itself, Catholicism also implied blatant universalism, insofar as ‘all are equal in the eyes of God’.

I mention this because many racialists assume that things only began to deteriorate in the 1960s. More cultured conservatives believe that aristocratic values only collapsed after the French Revolution. But the cancer had started much earlier although, due to the nobility of the Aryan man, the metastasis had been stopped and equilibrium was reached in Europe (an equilibrium that the foundation of the US and the French Revolution broke).

All this reminds me of one of those silly movies that Hollywood produces. Outbreak, titled Epidemia in Latin America and Estallido in Spain, is a film based on the novel The Hot Zone. Starring Dustin Hoffman, Rene Russo, Morgan Freeman and Donald Sutherland, the plot revolves around a small monkey carrying a virus that unleashed a global pandemic: a monkey that had been illegally captured and transported by boat from Zaire to the US. The plot of the film revolves around finding the infected monkey so that scientists may save the world.

We could see it as a metaphor. Let us find Subject Zero! Where did the first virus come that, in a state of a pandemic, is nowadays killing whites? (for newcomers, the masthead of this site may guide you). As William Pierce wrote in 1989: ‘If our race survives the next century it will only be because we have gotten the monkey of Christianity off our backs…’

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Alexis de Tocqueville Egalitarianism Jesus

Western Christian Civilisation – terminal stage

Destruction by Thomas Cole ~ 1835-1836

I have said that white nationalism has developed a myopic diagnosis of white decline: the Jewish question. I have also complained that American white nationalists have not published Who We Are by Pierce, and sell it as a bestseller, to expand such myopic diagnosis into a more accurate worldview. He who introduces the history of the white race encounters patterns that cannot be seen in most nationalist websites.

One of the most conspicuous elements of this pattern is the history of Christianity. And I do not mean only the destruction of the classical world by Christian fanatics in the 4th and 5th centuries. I refer to the Zeitgeist born in the West after such destruction.

In today’s world of florid psychosis, it seems that the fashion to empower transgender people has nothing to do with the Christian Zeitgeist. But this is precisely where the nationalist perspective appears to me as myopic. A few months ago I wrote ‘On Empowering Birds Feeding on Corpses’, where I try to explain that the most psychotic aspects of today’s egalitarianism can be traced back to a 14th-century Franciscan movement that wanted to carry the message of Jesus, in all its purity, to medieval Italy.

The Church of Rome was not tolerant with the egalitarian faction that took the gospel to the letter, and ended up chasing the Fraticelli as heretics. (For an entertaining narrative of that historical drama read The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco: a novel as didactic about the 14th century as Julian by Gore Vidal depicts the 4th century.)

Nobody could have predicted in the Middle Ages that the latent Fraticelli ideals were going to have their historical opportunity once the power of the Church was removed. But that was exactly what happened, centuries later, with the French Revolution.

As the readers of this site already know, the egalitarian ideals of the Enlightenment, implemented by force during and after the French Revolution, were inspired precisely by the gospel message. It may seem incredible to say, but even the most anti-clerical Jacobins subscribed the commandments preached by the fictional character called ‘Jesus’, created by the Jewish and Judaizing Hellenic authors of the New Testament. (*)

If we compare what the West is currently suffering with cancer, we can say that the first cancer cells arose since, in the 2nd century, a faction of Judaism, which Julian would call ‘the Galileans’, began to infiltrate the Gentile world in the outer provinces of the Roman Empire. The infection came to power with Constantine and the Roman emperors who followed him, despite Julian’s best efforts in his brief reign.

The noble spirit of the Aryan managed to tame, in the Middle Ages, the most ethno-suicidal aspects of this Levantine cult that was even imposed on the northern barbarians by force. But it was not until the Reformation and Counter-Reformation when they murdered, again, the revived pagan spirit of the Renaissance when the holy book of the Jews began to be taken seriously, especially in the Protestant world.

Nothing could be more suicidal than worshiping the sacred book of the Jews, insofar as both the Old Testament and the Talmud are sworn enemies of the Gentiles, especially the white man because He represents the best of the Gentile world. But the worst of all happened when this virus mutated from its religious phase to its secular phase.

The Western world of today is nothing but an ideological heir to the ideals of the Enlightenment. The so-called enlightened philosophers did not greet Reason, to use the language of the time, and much less the French revolutionaries. Those who truly began to greet Reason since the twilight of the Greco-Roman world were the eugenicists that we have been advertising in my most recent translations of Evropa Soberana. Only they broke away from the Christian dogma that ‘All men are equal before the eyes of God’, or the neo-Christian or secular version of the gospel, that ‘All men are equal before the law’.

The crux is that ‘All men are equal before the law’ has mutated, since the 1960s, as All men and women are ontologically equal: the final or end-stage cancer that currently kills the West.

As the Cassandra named Alexis de Tocqueville foresaw, the virus of equality always demands more equality. It is like a meme that multiplies itself to the absurd. And the absurd has come today not only with the demand that we must consider transgender people our equals, but trans children as well. But per Tocqueville’s observation this last metastasis won’t end with trans children! There are already Western countries that have legalised zoophilia and, in some of them, there are proposals to legalise pedophilia and even necrophilia…

Through this final metastasis, this runaway egalitarianism, the West is already sentenced and it will die. There’s no question about it. Or to say it more precisely, Western Christian Civilisation, which is in its terminal stage, will die soon as a conservative Swede predicted.

But the point is that everything had its origin in the radical message of Jesus: a message that seemed sublime to me at sixteen but that, at sixty, I see it as Semitic poison for the white man. As I said in ‘On Empowering Birds Feeding on Corpses’, the season of the horse of Troy of which Pierce wrote, that is to say the complete inversion of Aryan values into Gospel-inspired values, has finally arrived.

____________

(*) Whoever believes that Jesus was not a literary creation, but a man of flesh and blood, would do well to familiarise himself with the work of Richard Carrier.

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Alexis de Tocqueville Autobiography Psychiatry Psychoanalysis Voltaire

The hammer of the victims

To contextualise this series about psychiatry, see: here. Below, an abridged translation of a chapter of one of the books that I wrote in the last century:
 

This quotation explains perfectly why the so-called mental health professions have so much power in our societies:

To commit violent and unjust acts, it is not enough for a government to have the will or even the power; the habits, ideas, and passions of the time must lend themselves to their committal. —Alexis de Tocqueville [1]

Since psychiatrists and psychoanalysts diagnose people who are actually victims of insulting environments, their fundamental postulate is precisely to deny what they are. In psychiatric Newspeak the expression ‘victim of the environment’ has been eliminated; the aetiology of any disorder has to be looked for in the reign of the somatic. By doing this it is methodologically impossible that the profession will blame the parents even in cases of flagrant physical, sexual or emotional abuse toward the children (schizophrenogenic emotional abuse was what Helfgott and Modrow suffered). Thus psychiatry carries out an important function: to exonerate the family, the cell of civilisation, of the devastation manifested in the children.

Civil society lives in denial too. It doesn’t want to see that inside its most sacred institution maddening abuses exist on its most vulnerable members: children and adolescents. Both present-day university professions and civil society are as ignorant and superstitious of this situation as the Middle Ages was about diseases caused by microorganisms.

Voltaire saw the learned inquisitors as what they were—instead of diagnosing as ‘heretics’ the persons that the Inquisition tortured and murdered. Henceforth his call Écrasez l’infame! against the church, with which he annotated his liberating letters.

Nowadays the therapeutic state took over the labour of social control of the theocratic state. The call Écrasez l’infame!—Crush the infamy!—can be no more pertinent to refer to a profession that tortures and murders souls of children through psychological re-victimizations and handicapping drugs.

The studying of perpetrators is a revaluation of values of psychiatry: a new science that in lieu of hammering the victims it studies the perpetrators, or simply perps. In this revaluation of all psychiatric values science has to re-orient itself to the study of maddening parents (cf. Helfgott’s life), re-victimizing psychiatrists (cf. Breggin), charlatans who call themselves analysts (cf. Masson), and the civil struggle to abolish the therapeutic state (cf. Szasz).

In addition to these lines of investigation and struggle, my dream is that the study of perps will eventually include a new type of literature to reclaim for biographers and autobiographers the study of the human soul which was usurped by politicians that people call psychiatrists, psychoanalysts and clinical psychologists (psychiatry, psychoanalysis and clinical psychology are pseudosciences). One of the paradigms of this new literature is the study by John Modrow, who contributed to solving the mystery of why some adolescents get mad (in psychiatric Newspeak, ‘schizophrenia’) if subjected to parental abuse and psychiatric re-victimization.

If this new kind of vindictive autobiography doesn’t develop in the future, the true study of the human psyche will stagnate. The Lithuanian poet Czeslaw Milosz, Nobel laureate in 1980, has said that events such as the Napoleonic Wars, the American Civil War and even the Trench Warfare of WW1 were not autobiographically recalled in a satisfactory way, independently of the fact that historians have written entire libraries about those events. [2]

The same can be said of the absent autobiographies of the victims of our society. Hundreds of thousands of Doras didn’t recall literarily their testimonies. Brilliant politicians like Eugen Bleuler and Freud took their words out of their mouths and spoke in their names. Hersilie Rouy, Julie La Roche, Modrow and a few others are the exceptions.

__________

[1] Alexis de Tocqueville, quoted in W.H. Auden and L. Kronenberger (eds.), The Viking book of aphorisms: a personal selection (Dorset Press, 1981), p. 297, quoted in a lecture by Thomas Szasz presented in the Foucault Symposium in Berlin University, May 1998.

[2] Czeslaw Milosz in La experiencia de la libertad/3: la palabra liberada (Espejo de Obsidiana Ediciones, 1991), pp. 102f.

______ 卐 ______

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Alexis de Tocqueville American civil war Blacks George Washington Philosophy of history Racial studies

Heisman’s suicide note, 11

Or:

A key to understanding the ethnosuicidal United States

I had said in the previous post that I would not read beyond page 500. But a friend on Facebook suggested that I read what Heisman says about the Norman Conquest and I have found oil. I wonder if those white nationalist scholars in the history of Britain and the United States know this thesis? Although Heisman was a Jew, in good hands his thesis could be a vital piece to put together the puzzle of the whys of white suicide, which leads the United States of America. Heisman wrote:
 
Remarkably, the Anglo-Saxons and Germans are very closely related in their cultural-ethnic origins. Yet during the Nazi period, the Germans continued a cultural-political path that lead to an idealization of the Jews as their greatest mortal enemies, the destruction of Western cultural values inherited from Christianity, and the systematic genocide of the alleged propagators of those values. The Americans ventured towards the total opposite historical trajectory becoming perhaps the most Christian nation of the developed world, the most culturally compatible nation with the Jews, and the greatest ally of the state of Israel. At the root of this historical divergence between the Anglo-Saxons and the Germans lay the Norman Conquest. […]
An essential inheritance of America’s Anglo-Protestant values is an inclination to forget ethnic origins, national rivalries, and presumptions of hereditary status that were characteristic of the Old World. The Anglo-Saxons planted the model of this morality of turning a blind eye to national origins for all other Americans to follow and this implicated the erasure of everyone else’s ethnic origins as well. The freedom to forget the past appears to be the obverse side of America’s traditionally optimistic vision of the future. But why is this past problematic? Why were hereditary origins an issue in the first place?
The “race problem” should not matter in America, yet somehow it is the most American issue, the most relevant innovation of the entire American experiment. The old answers, moreover, that attempted to account for the entire “race” issue simply do not add up. There is a lack of coherent answer to the question of why race matters.
American historian Gordon Wood observed that

the white American colonists were not an oppressed people; they had no crushing imperial chains to throw off. In fact, the colonists knew they were freer, more equal, more prosperous, and less burdened with cumbersome feudal and monarchical restraints than any other part of mankind in the eighteenth century.

What exactly were the colonists rebelling against, then? What was this world-historical commotion called “revolution” really about?
 
Conquering the Conquest, or, Enlightened Saxon-centrism
The unanswered questions about race and revolution can be concentrated into a single historical question: When did the Anglo-Saxon nation stop being conquered by the Normans? For the sake of empirical accuracy, let us refuse to indulge in vague abstractions or undemonstrated traditional assumptions of assimilation. If we demand a specific, empirical date or period that marks a distinct end to the Conquest, what can the study of history offer?
Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville, a descendant of an old aristocratic family from Normandy, wrote in his famous treatise on American democracy, “[g]eneral ideas do not attest to the strength of human intelligence, but rather to its insufficiency.” The holy abstraction of “freedom” has effectually pulled wool over the eyes of those who have mindlessly submitted to the authority of the metaphysics of freedom. Freedom, in this way, seems to grant freedom from rational reflection upon the authority of “freedom.” Instead of being misled by fuzzy, mystical, metaphysical abstractions such as “freedom”, let us ask, specifically and empirically, freedom from what? In its distinctive historical context, what exactly was it about the British political order that radicals such as Thomas Paine sought freedom from?
The very title of Paine’s book, The Rights of Man, might suggest a tendency to abstract or grossly generalize his particular anathema to “hereditary government” in England and France in universal terms. Yet this appearance does not fully stand up to scrutiny. In the case of England, he inquired specifically and empirically into the identity of its hereditary government and followed its very own hereditary logic back to its hereditary origins to discover:

that origin is the Norman Conquest. They are evidently of the vassalage class of manners, and emphatically mark the prostrate distance that exists in no other condition of men than between the conqueror and the conquered.

This means that the “prostrate distance” between the conqueror “class” and the conquered “class” was also a hereditary distance. This kinship discontinuity between rulers and ruled suggests possible grounds for ethnic hostility between the descendants of the aristocracy and the majority population.
In The English and the Normans: Ethnic Hostility, Assimilation, and Identity, historian Hugh Thomas documented the ethnic hostility that existed between the native English and Normans following the Conquest. Justifying a common tendency to conflate ‘Anglo-Saxon’ with ‘English’, he maintained that English identity ultimately triumphed over both Norman identity and ethnic hostility. His thesis implies a kind of democratic cultural revolution and a belief in Anglo-Saxon conquest through cultural identity imperialism. If Thomas was right, then we should really date the first “modern” step towards democratic cultural revolution around the beginning of the thirteenth century. But was the Conquest really conquered so easily?
If the Norman Conquest, Norman identity, and ethnic hostility were conquered so easily, then how does Hugh Thomas explain these words of Thomas Paine in The Rights of Man?

The hatred which the Norman invasion and tyranny begat, must have been deeply rooted in the nation, to have outlived the contrivance to obliterate it. Though not a courtier will talk of the curfew-bell, not a village in England has forgotten it.

This is a direct refutation of the Hugh Thomas’s thesis, in The English and the Normans, that ethnic hostility ended by the beginning of the thirteenth century. Paine provided a powerful refutation, not simply as an observer, but as a highly influential embodiment of ethnic hostility against the Norman conquerors and their legacy. So who is right, Hugh Thomas or Thomas Paine?
The historian noted, “[l]ong-standing ethnic hostility would have completely altered the course of English political, social, and cultural history.” This unverified assertion that ethnic hostility did not continue significantly past the period covered by his study (1066-c.1220) was also contradicted by Michael Wood’s recollection of his childhood encounter with Montgomery in the 1960s:

Monty, of course, still bore his name and still carried his flag. And that explained his take on the Conquest. For though he was as English as I was, he saw himself as a Norman—and that’s what counts when it comes to matters of identity… as far as I was concerned, Monty would always be a Norman.

Still, in the twentieth century, the old ethnic identities mattered.
Did “Englishness” mean more than a quirk of geography, and more than “class”, to a hereditary Norman dominion eventually engulfed Ireland and Scotland as well? The label of Englishness certainly triumphed and the very core of the English language re-emerged. Yet England ultimately became something different, neither Norman nor English, but neither and both. Even if we ignore actual hereditary descent, the famous, and distinctively English “class system” dates from the Conquest and can itself be considered a long-term cultural triumph of Norman identity.
Genealogist L. G. Pine attested to the fact that the prestige of a Norman pedigree, associated with the identity of the “best people” or upper class, triumphed to the extent that many ambitious native English wanted to be Normans throughout post-Conquest English history. Ultimately, it was not so much that Normans became English so much that the English became British. The permanent occupation of the conqueror “class” formed the hereditary basis of the “British” Empire. While Thomas is fundamentally wrong, it is fortunate that he has clarified the issue by rightly raising the point that the reality of early post-Conquest ethnic hostility should wake people out of the complacent assumption that Normans and English should ultimately merge into one people.
Cultural assimilation is one thing; genetic assimilation, however, is quite another. Here the deficiency of historical studies that fail to account for biological factors and a general evolutionary perspective becomes most apparent. While Thomas’s scholarship offers many contributions to the debate, especially his balanced judgment on many topics, conclusions about the ultimate effects of the Conquest will remain fundamentally unbalanced if genetic factors are left out of the final equations.
Thomas writes history as if Charles Darwin never lived. Even if the Normans had completely assimilated culturally yet maintained a hereditary monopoly of leading positions within the country, that cannot be called full assimilation. The notion of special political-hereditary rights and privileges passed on from generation to generation that the American revolutionaries fought against in theory are the exact opposite of genetic assimilation.
Thomas’s thesis makes sense only if it can be demonstrated that the Anglo-Saxons are an ethnicity indifferent as to whether their government is or is not representative of “the people.” Thomas’s thesis could be saved only if the evidence verified that Anglo-Saxons are an ethnicity with no sense of the value of liberty, their fawning natural servility allowing them to live together with their new Norman aristocracy happily ever after. In summary, the real question of assimilation is whether the Anglo-Saxons assimilated to the notion that the Normans had a right to conquer them.
As L. G. Pine wrote, “The historian whose unthinking conscience allows them to justify the Norman Conquest, could as easily justify the Nazi subjugation of Europe.” Thomas’s perilous, conciliatory suppression of any negative attitudes towards Normans that could be construed as ethnic hostility led him to acquiesce in a neutral or sometimes even positive attitude of appeasement towards those exemplary Normanitas virtues expressed in ruthless military domination, genocide, and the crushing of all native ethnic resistance (a.k.a. conquest; the antithesis of the rights of man; the negation of the every principle that the most egalitarian of the American founders sought to bring to light in opposition to the founding of the British Empire in 1066).
Michael Mann’s The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing proposed two versions of “We, the people.” He proposed that the liberal version, exemplified by American Constitutionalism, is characterized by individual rights, class, and special interest groups. In the organic version of democracy ethnicity rivals other forms of interest and identity and in some circumstances can express itself in ethnic cleansing. This is the “dark side of democracy.”
In Central and Eastern Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union, Mann observed, “democratization struggles increasingly pitted a local ethnicity against a foreign imperial ruler.” The demos was confused with the ethnos. Was America any different? If the Normans conquerors achieved some degree of success in perpetuating their hereditary government over the centuries, and the original ethnic conflict that Thomas documented was not perpetuated with it, then how does one explain that? What would make the impetus of organic and liberal democracy so different from one another?
For the sake of argument, let us entertain this peculiar idea of hereditary separatism, just as John Locke does in his Second Treatise of Government (and try in earnest to assume this has nothing to do whatsoever with the Norman Conquest):

But supposing, which seldom happens, that the conquerors and conquered never incorporate into one people, under the same laws and freedom; let us see next what power a lawful conqueror has over the subdued: and that I say is purely despotical… the government of a conqueror, imposed by force on the subdued… has no obligation on them.

The Declaration of Independence proclaims, “to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” This assertion implies that the Norman Conquest was illegitimate. The Norman takeover was achieved despite the lack of consent of the governed. That government was instituted with strategic violence against any significant resistance from the governed. From the view of its author, Thomas Jefferson, the Norman Conquest was the institution of an unjust power against the rights of the people. It is thus not a coincidence that the hereditary “English” political tradition was founded in utter violation of the principles of the Declaration of Independence.
In The Rights of Man, Paine explained, “by the Conquest all the rights of the people or the nation were absorbed into the hands of the Conqueror, who added the title of King to that of Conqueror.” Paine posited a remarkable ambiguity between the “rights of the people” and “the nation.” King was equated with Conqueror. In 1066 there existed a right of conquest, but no “rights of the people.” The modern invention of the latter justified, at long last, the reclamation of Anglo-Saxon “rights” from the “hands of the Conqueror.”
The Declaration of Independence further asserts, “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.” America provided an opportunity to do just that.
Taking full advantage of this opportunity meant that America would truly be different from the old world. As The Rights of Man explained, “In England, the person who exercises this prerogative [as king] is often a foreigner; always half a foreigner, and always married to a foreigner. He is never in full natural or political connection with the country.” A lack of “natural” connection between the political elite and the people was significant for Paine. The contrast with America was clear: “The presidency of America… is the only office from which a foreigner is excluded; and in England, it is the only one to which he is admitted.” The new world would be different.
America, for Paine, was the place where foreigners were excluded from that high office. Democracy meant that “commoners” could finally be admitted. Revolution had turned the old order upside down: the rule of the people meant the triumph of Anglo-Saxon ethnocentrism over the legacy of the Norman-centric aristocracy.
It is unfortunate for believers in the distinct superiority of the liberal form of democracy that the organic and liberal varieties are more equal than they think. Faith in the categorical distinction between the liberal and organic expressions of democracy is only a display of naiveté towards the cunning of ethnocentrism. Democratic Saxon-centrism has prevented an appreciation of the ethnic diversity at the very heart of the American founding.
Are the Anglo-Saxon ethnically superior to ethnocentrism and thus superior to all other peoples on Earth in this respect or has something been overlooked? Is it true that Anglo-Saxons are always superior and never inferior to the power and influence of the Norman Conquest or is it at least possible that this unspoken assumption might have something to do with Anglo-Saxon ethnocentrism? It is as if a conquest of the Conquest has been attempted through an enlightened ethnic cleansing of the Norman impact on world history. The Norman conquerors of history, however, were not conquered so easily.
 
The Peculiar Revolution
For the title of original, permanent English colony in the New World, the Pilgrims of the Mayflower take second place. It was the English settlers of Jamestown, Virginia, who were the first permanent English colonists, thirteen years before the Mayflower. Jamestown was birthplace of the United States, and, it just so happens, the birthplace of American slavery of Africans. In 1619, a year before the landing of the Mayflower, the first black slaves were brought to Virginia.
America was born a land of slavery.
In the Old World, it had been “the Norman” who so often represented tyranny, aristocracy, and inequality. But surely things must have been different in America. In the land of freedom, democracy, and equality, perhaps only Southern slavery posed a truly fundamental challenge to these modern values.
The question nonetheless remains, who were these Southern slave masters?
It is as if recent historians have confidently assumed that, in all of human history, there could not be a case where the issue of race was more irrelevant. Never in human history was the issue of race more irrelevant than in regard to the racial identity of the American South’s essential “master race.” This is a truly fantastic contradiction: the South apparently fought a war in the name of the primacy of race, yet the distinctive racial identity of the South primary ruling race is apparently a matter of total indifference.
Virtually every other people in history, from the Italians, to the Chinese, to the Mayans, to the Albanians, possessed some form of ethnic identity. The French, the Germans, and the Russians did not and do not simply consider themselves to be merely “white.” The original English settlers of the North, moreover, are considered, not simply white, but Anglo-Saxon. Why, then, was the South’s “master race” nearly alone in its absence of a distinctive ethnic identity? Is this state of affairs only a consummation of the Northern victory?
Of course, that blacks possessed a distinctive African ancestry is admissible, but the ancestry of the South’s ruling race is apparently inadmissible. This must be a state of affairs almost more peculiar than slavery itself. Everyone else across the world is permitted a distinctive ethnic or racial identity except the great Southern slave masters. For some peculiar reason, the original Southern slave masters are not allowed to have a distinct ethnic or racial identity. This means that the only people in American history who apparently have no distinct ethnic or racial origins beyond being white are precisely the same people who thought other people could and should be enslaved on the basis of their ethnic or racial origins.
These aristocratic planters must have been the most raceless, bloodless, deracinated, rootless, cosmopolitan universalists ever known to history. We must conclude that of all white people, these aristocrats must have valued heredity or genealogy the very least. The Virginia planters were most peculiar, not for being owners of black slaves, but for being the least ethnically self-conscious white people in world history. Is this an accurate reflection of reality?
This is really one of the great, peculiar paradoxes of world history: the elite Southern planters, one of the most extreme, unapologetic, and explicitly racist groups in history, are precisely those who may have the most obscure racial identity in history. Their claim to fame has been tied to identifying blacks as a race of natural slaves and in identifying themselves as race of natural masters—a “master race” without a racial identity. Perhaps the time has come to recognize that they have also merited a claim to fame simply for the obscurity of their racial identity.
Who were they?
The Englishmen who first settled the North identified themselves as Anglo-Saxons. But what about the “First Families of Virginia”? Virginia’s Tidewater elite largely originated from the geographic entity of England. But did these racists consider themselves specifically Anglo-Saxon? This question must be posed as carefully as possible: did they or did they not specifically identify themselves as members of the Anglo-Saxon race?
Who were these American slave masters?
In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that the North possessed “the qualities and defects that characterize the middle class”, while the South “has the tastes, prejudices, weaknesses, and greatness of all aristocracies.” There could probably be no greater confirmation that South possessed a genuine aristocracy in the traditional sense. Yet this prescient antebellum observation begs the question: how did young America acquire an old aristocracy?
It is as if, in America, of all places, no explanation is required for this profound cultural difference between North and South. America was supposedly a country defined by “the qualities and defects that characterize the middle class.” But the idea of a slave race assumes the existence of a master race, not a bourgeois or middle-class race. The Union was not threatened by the leadership of poor Southern whites; it was threatened by the leadership of a subgroup of whites with an aristocratic philosophy that mastered the entire cultural order of the South.
If the Civil War was fought against slavery, and to fight slavery was to fight the slave-masters, then the Civil War was fought against the slave-masters. Since the slaves were not guilty of enslaving themselves, the argument that the Civil War was about slavery is practically identical to the argument that the Civil War was about the slave-masters. No matter which way one looks at it, all roads of inquiry into slavery leads to an inquiry into these peculiar Southern slave-masters.
Who were they?
“These slaves”, said Abraham Lincoln, “constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war.” Did Lincoln state here that slavery was the cause of the war? No, Lincoln stated that slaves, as property, constituted an interest, and this interest was, somehow, the cause of war. The question then becomes, whose interest did these slaves serve?
To speak of aristocracy is to speak, by definition, of a minority of the population. The original aristocratic settlers of Virginia were called Cavaliers. “[T]he legend of the Virginia cavalier was no mere romantic myth”, concluded David Hackett Fischer in Albion’s Seed. “In all of its major parts, it rested upon a solid foundation of historical fact.”
But who were the Cavaliers?
One year before the outbreak of the American Civil War, in June of 1860, the Southern Literary Messenger declared:

the Southern people come of that race recognized as cavaliers… directly descended from the Norman barons of William the Conqueror, a race distinguished in its early history for its warlike and fearless character, a race in all times since renowned for its gallantry, chivalry, honor, gentleness and intellect.

Normans and Saxons: Southern Race Mythology and the Intellectual History of the American Civil War documented the thesis of Norman/Saxon conflict from a literary perspective. Its author, Ritchie Devon Watson, Jr., interpreted this thesis of Norman-Cavalier identity as “race mythology”, just as historian James McPherson has called this peculiar notion the “central myth of southern ethnic nationalism.” Yet how can this thesis be dismissed as myth without a thorough, scientific, genealogical investigation into the matter? Is it a myth, rather, that the Norman Conquest, the most pivotal event in English history, had no affect whatsoever on America? Is it true that representatives of virtually every ethnicity and race have come to America—with one peculiar Norman exception? Were the descendents of the Norman-Viking conquerors of England the only people in the world who were not enterprising or adventurous enough to try their fortunes in a new land?
“My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union,” Lincoln explained, “and is not either to save or destroy slavery.” Yet it has become commonplace to disagree with Lincoln and to propagate the myth that the Civil War was first and foremost about the slavery of black people. The repeated claim that the Civil War was about slavery can be deceptive because it serves as a means of avoiding focus upon the slave-masters, which further avoids facing the centrality of the identity of the Norman-Cavaliers. The American Civil War was fought primarily, not over black slavery, but over Norman mastery.
There is a sense, however, in which the Civil War was provoked by the slavery of a race of people. Norman-American George Fitzhugh, the South’s most extreme and comprehensive pro-slavery theorist, clarified the relationship between race, slavery, and the Civil War amidst that violent clash of two Americas:

It is a gross mistake to suppose that ‘abolition’ is the cause of dissolution between the north and south. The Cavaliers, Jacobites, and Huguenots of the south naturally hate, condemn, and despise the Puritans who settled the north. The former are master races, the latter a slave race, the descendants of the Saxon serfs.

This is a key piece of the racial puzzle of America. Fitzhugh implied that the North sided with a black slave race because the Anglo-Saxons themselves are a slave race. Fitzhugh depicted Anglo-Saxons as the niggers of post-Conquest England.
With these words, Fitzhugh verified that the Norman Conquest, in its origins, was a form of slavery of the Anglo-Saxon race. The foundational irreconcilability between North and South is incomprehensible without recognizing that North’s peculiar obsession with “freedom” evolved precisely from the fierce denial that they or their ancestors were, in fact, a Saxon “slave race” born to serve a Norman “master race.”
“True,” Horace Greeley admitted in an issue of his New York Daily Tribune in 1854, “we believe the tendency of the slaveholding system is to make those trained under and mentally conforming to it, overbearing, imperious, and regardless of the rights of others.” Would he have believed, too, that the tendency of the Saxon-holding system in England after 1066 was to make those trained under and mentally conforming to it, overbearing, imperious, and regardless of the rights of others? Could there be any connection between these two very peculiar tendencies?
Could revulsion against the very notion of a slavish Saxon-holding system be the root and source of the inordinately strong Anglo-Saxon tendency toward freedom? The key to understanding the modern fame of the Anglo-Saxons as a free race is to understand the medieval fame of the Anglo-Saxons as a conquered and enslaved race. The Norman-Cavaliers’ belief in the rectitude of slavery was a direct descendant of belief in the rectitude of the peculiar institution of the right of conquest.
Yet, as Fitzhugh made clear, he and other Cavaliers were not the only whites of the South, even if they were as decisive in forming the culture of South as the Anglo-Saxons were in forming the culture of the North. The Jacobites refer to the Scotch-Irish who became the majority of the Southern white population. A smaller population of French Huguenots followed the original Cavaliers and concentrated in South Carolina.
According to the late American political scientist Samuel Huntington, “American identity as a multiethnic society dates from, and in some measure, was a product of World War II.” Huntington believed that America has a Puritan essence. He implied that American identity is rooted in a single ethnic identity and that ethnic identity is Puritan and Anglo-Saxon. If this is true, then it goes without saying that ultimate patriarch among the “founding fathers”, George Washington, must have been a pureblooded Anglo-Saxon. Is this genealogically accurate?
According to one source, the very first Washington in England was originally named William fitzPatric (Norman French for son of Patric). He changed his name to William de Wessyngton when he adopted the name of the parish in which he lived circa 1180 A.D. Another source, the late English specialist in Norman genealogy L. G. Pine, related that George Washington and his family “has plenty of Norman ancestry.” He confirmed that this family was on record as owners of Washington Manor in Durhamshire in the twelfth century and of knightly rank. Since George Washington was the possessor of “a carefully traced decent from Edward I,” this implies that the first president of the United States was also a descendant of William the Conqueror. None other than the twenty-eighth president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, affirmed in his biography of Washington that his Cavalier ancestors “hated the Puritans” and that the first Washingtons in Virginia were born of a “stock whose loyalty was as old as the Conquest… They came of a Norman family.”
George Washington was a Norman-American and a classic representative of the aristocratic, slave-owning, Cavalier culture of Virginia. Unfortunately for Mr. Washington, Samuel Huntington has no room for the kind of diversity represented by America’s first president and his Puritan hating, Cavalier ancestors. Everyone must conform to the Anglo-Saxon, Puritan cultural model if they want to be counted as real Americans—even George Washington. Wasn’t that what the Civil War was about?
How is it even conceivable that Norman conquerors who developed into Southern slave masters could also have played a decisive role in the architecture of American liberty? Huntington, so keen to stress the English roots of American liberty, neglected to point out that Magna Carta was a product of Norman aristocratic civilization. It was the Normans who first invented the formal tradition of constitutional liberty that eventually conquered the world.
So while Washington was an heir to Norman aristocratic tradition, Magna Carta was a part of that tradition. Southern resistance to King George III in 1776 could trace its struggle for liberty to the resistance of Norman barons to King John in 1215 (and this also preserved their special privileges or “liberties” against the tide of assimilation with Anglo-Saxons). It was only in the seventeenth century that Anglo-Saxons exploited and selectively reinterpreted Magna Carta for their own purposes.
The ultimate foil of Hugh M. Thomas’s thesis that ethnic hostility between Normans and Anglo-Saxon went extinct by about 1220 is to be found in the endurance and persistence of Samuel Huntington’s question: Who are we? The “universalism” of the American founding actually emerged out of the attempt to preserve a rather peculiar form of multiculturalism that balanced the democracy-leaning North against an aristocracy-leaning, slaving owning South. The American Civil War resulted in the Northern conquest of the multicultural America that formed the character of the American founding. The Anglo-Saxon conquest of 1865 was the real founding of Samuel Huntington’s presumption of a single Puritan-based American culture.
What Hugh Thomas actually did was to dig up the root of the Anglo-Saxon cultural identity imperialism that late twentieth century multiculturalism began to expose. Thomas’s conclusion that the Anglo-Saxons culturally conquered the Normans in thirteenth century was made seemingly plausible only by nineteenth century conquests of the Normans. Thomas only uncovered the origin of this Anglo-Saxon way of cultural conquest through a struggle against the multicultural England of medieval times.
Multiculturalists who have promoted the contributions of women and minorities at the expense of the usual dead white males of history are following directly in the footsteps of Anglo-Saxon historians who downplayed the Norman impact on their history. The underdog biases of multiculturalism is not an aberration, but only a continuation of the majoritarian bias of democracy itself against a fair assessment of the contributions of Norman aristocracy to world history. William the Conqueror is the ultimate dead white European male in the history of the English-speaking world.
Hugh Thomas’s unspoken assumption is that Anglo-Saxons culturally conquered the Norman Conquest. They, the Anglo-Saxons, were ultimately history’s great conquerors. But is this true? Let this point resound around the entire world with utmost clarity: the issue here is who conquered whom? Did the Normans become victims of conquest by the Anglo-Saxons in modern times through characteristically modern methods?
Is it all possible that Anglo-Saxons might possibly be biased on the subject of the people who once defeated, conquered, and subjugated them? Most humans have submitted to the yoke of a “modern” Anglo-Saxon-leaning interpretation of long-term effects of the Norman Conquest. The repression of the impact of 1066 upon modern times has stifled a rational, evolutionary understanding of liberal democracy in the English-speaking world. The time has come for America and the rest of the English-speaking world to overcome this ancient bloodfeud and reclaim its Norman heritage, a heritage to goes to the very heart of the American founding.
In modern times, the Anglo-Saxon culturally conquered the Normans by Saxoning away their multicultural difference into presumptions of Anglo-Saxon “universalism.” To call America “Anglo-Saxon” is thus tantamount to ethnically cleansing George Washington of his Norman or Cavalier ancestral identity. Was George Washington the victim of a cultural form of ethnic cleansing by the Anglo-Saxon people?
[pages 654-675]

Categories
Alexis de Tocqueville Aristotle Aryan beauty Egalitarianism Manosphere Women

War of the sexes, 27

Update: The following text is rough draft. The series has been substantially revised and abridged, and the section by the YouTube blogger Turd Flinging Monkey is available in a single PDF: here.

______ 卐 ______

 

“Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.”

Alexis de Tocqueville

 
turd-flinging-monkeyAnd the blogger himself would rather be equal in slavery. For example, in his video “Debunking egalitarianism” he says: “I believe that it is egalitarianism, the belief in equality, that is the liberal problem in Western civilization.” But he just cannot see the elephant in the room: the ridiculous claim that all human races are equal. He merely wants us to realize that gender equality is a myth. His video “Debunking egalitarianism” is all about gender.

He says that even when westerners are persuaded that men have higher IQs than women they say that everybody is of equal worth. Yes: those who cannot refute the psychometric studies continue to stick to egalitarianism without defining what does it mean! Per Aristotle (“equals should be treated equally and unequals unequally”), by treating equally men and women, the liberals are discriminating men. It is like if in a surreal society adults were treated equally as children.

The video is addressed to those in the Men’s Rights Movement who continue to believe in equality. It strongly reminds me those in white nationalism that continue to believe that all whites are equal. The blogger concludes that “egalitarianism is a religion” and in a follow-up video he responds to his commenters thus: “The idea that everyone is of equal worth is a fundamentally religious concept. It has to do with the belief that all souls are equal in the sight of God.” Precisely: and white nationalists suffer exactly from the same problem, even those who claim to have given up religion.
 

Misogyny?

In another video, “Love women” the blogger responds to other common criticism: that he and MGTOW in general hate women. He counters by explaining the concept of “red pill rage,” a psychological phenomenon after men discover the truth about women.

His statement may seem preposterous at first sight: “MGTOW is the only group that can love women.” He is speaking about loving the Other not as adolescents we imagined the Woman: but loving her in her radical Otherness.

Similarly, as can be ascertained on my sidebar’s images of beautiful young girls, I love women despite all the science that the blogger has thrown upon us in this series. Aryan female beauty is still the dialectical force behind this site. It would be crazy to label me a misogynist.

pre-raphaeliteIn the blogger’s own words: “Because the truth is unflattering to women, most women and especially the feminists say that any discussion of their truth is misogyny.” In another video the blogger says that most MGTOWers are completely uninterested in the big picture, ignoring again that he himself doesn’t want to see it (he has not withdrawn his silly videos “Why racism is retarded” and “MGTOW is not racist”).

In another video, “Rub their nose in it” he says something that I have already mentioned: Societies are gynocentric because women bring children to the world and they have to nurture and raise them during their first years. The nature of reproduction forces us guys to take care of all of these cute creatures.

The next entry will be perhaps the most important of this series. It will show that we males are the problem behind the feminism in the same way that the Aryan problem enabled the Jewish problem.

Categories
Alexis de Tocqueville Egalitarianism Feminism Manosphere Men Psychology Sexual "liberation" Women

War of the sexes, 16

Update: The following text is rough draft. The series has been substantially revised and abridged, and the section by the YouTube blogger Turd Flinging Monkey is available in a single PDF: here.

______ 卐 ______

 

“The desire for equality becomes more and
more insatiable as equality increases.”

—Alexis de Tocqueville

 
turd-flinging-monkeyIn his “Guide to feminism” the blogger explains that the first wave of feminism was women’s suffrage; the second wave equal pay, and the third wave hatred of patriarchy. He reminds us that, once women were “liberated” in those three waves, they never accepted responsibilities like going to war to risk their skin: they merely demanded “rights” —a Newspeak term that in Oldspeak means exactly the opposite: privileges. The blogger defines feminism as “a hypocritical ideology for mentally-retarded children with penis envy that resent their biological inferiority and would never be satisfied no matter how much legal, political, social and economic superiority is granted to them over men.”

The feminist epitomes the Orwellian sentence that everyone is equal but some are more equal than others. Affirmative action was not enough for her: like the coloreds she now wants equality of income and equality of opportunities. To boot, through the divorce courts the feminist is oppressing men, in addition to pushing for an exception of the law regarding her claims of rape: men must be presumed guilty until proven innocent.

Presently, as we are continuing to pander or going along with her desires, the West is heading toward the cliff. Imagine for a minute forcing gender quotas on a basketball team or in one of those international chess tournaments formed by four boards each nation. These hypothetical teams of males with females, whether they compete for physical or intellectual ability, would lose big time in the real world.

Let’s think about de Tocqueville’s epigraph above. My working hypothesis is that Christian ethics is the devil of the white race. Given the Christian insistence of regarding all souls as “equal in the eyes of God,” cognitive dissonance has been the axis of the escalation of both anti-racism and Western feminism. Races and genders are unequal. But because of the laws of cognitive dissonance, the liberal mindset is condemned to escalate egalitarianism as reality never stops fact-checking the liberal.

The blogger says: “Women are biologically inferior to men and they know it even when they deny it.” I would add that only by falling into an ever-amplifying downward spiral of male bashing the feminist is able, through the mental gymnastics of cognitive dissonance, to self-bamboozle herself into believing that they are just equal to us.

Categories
Alexis de Tocqueville Egalitarianism Tom Sunic

On Alexis de Tocqueville

Editor’s note: Although “it is disappointing to learn that the ‘aristocrat’ Tocqueville did not object to miscegenation,” as a commenter in The Occidental Observer thread put it, Tom Sunic’s views on the same thread are worth citing:
 

Thanks for the good summary of Tocqueville’s work. A hundred years ahead of Orwell he predicted the rise of “soft totalitarianism” (i.e. despotisme doux). We are now witnessing the finale of this egalitarian hysteria in the USA (transgenderism, miscegenation, self-hate, etc.).

In depicting early Americans Tocqueville was well aware where starry-eyed, Bible-prone, sentimental white Americans will take themselves to: “They have an ardent passion for equality; insatiable, eternal, invincible… They can put up with poverty, subjugation, barbarism, but they cannot stand aristocracy.” (De la Démocratie en Amérique II.I. §1)

For that matter I’d venture to say that the shrewd Southern scholar and lawyer George Fitzhugh (1806-1881) better understood the verbal acrobatics on democratism by Jefferson and his ilk, as well as the seeds of the egalitarian mystique in the Declaration of Independence—which was bound to include non-Whites, affirmative action, etc., 150 years later.

Categories
Alexis de Tocqueville Feminism Judeo-reductionism Liberalism

Anglin & feminism

Michelle Dockery

Michelle Dockery, the English rose who plays the role as
Lady Mary Crawley in ITV drama series Downton Abbey.

Andrew Anglin has penned another article explaining feminism. While I vehemently share his anti-feminism I don’t have time for a long post. I will limit myself to state that, like most white nationalists, he blames Jewish subversion for this weapon of mass Occidental destruction called feminism.

But feminism apparently has older roots in European liberalism than in the more recent Jewish subversion. Incidentally, I much prefer the old term “liberalism” than the popular “cultural Marxism” in racialist circles (see: here). No other intellectual has better described the new religion of whites, liberalism, than Alexis de Tocqueville: “The desire for equality becomes more and more insatiable as equality increases.” From this viewpoint Western feminism is just one stage of this deranged, runaway liberalism which basic axiom is the principle of non-discrimination. (Presently, in its suicidal and terminal stage non-discrimination on race, gender and sexual orientation.)

As I said, I don’t have time. Exactly in a month I’ll reveal why I have been so busy elsewhere and perhaps will be busy for years. But those who have already read Roger Devlin and want to be entertained and educated at the same time—something almost impossible in today’s media—, could watch the current season of Downton Abbey. I still have to see the Christmas episode but the whole seasons depict how English society started to empower women in the beginning of the century when we were born.

Categories
Alexis de Tocqueville Egalitarianism Enlightenment John Stuart Mill Liberalism Thomas Hobbes Voltaire Wikipedia

Liberalism, 16

Classical and modern

Enlightenment philosophers are given credit for shaping liberal ideas. Thomas Hobbes attempted to determine the purpose and the justification of governing authority in a post-civil war England. Employing the idea of a state of nature—a hypothetical war-like scenario prior to the State—he constructed the idea of a social contract which individuals enter into to guarantee their security and in so doing form the State, concluding that only an absolute sovereign would be fully able to sustain such a peace.

John Locke, while adopting Hobbes’s idea of a state of nature and social contract, nevertheless argued that when the monarch becomes a tyrant, that constituted a violation of the social contract, which bestows life, liberty, and property as a natural right. He concluded that the people have a right to overthrow a tyrant. By placing life, liberty and property as the supreme value of law and authority, Locke formulated the basis of liberalism based on social contract theory.

To these early enlightenment thinkers securing the most essential amenities of life—liberty and private property among them—required the formation of a “sovereign” authority with universal jurisdiction. In a natural state of affairs, liberals argued, humans were driven by the instincts of survival and self-preservation, and the only way to escape from such a dangerous existence was to form a common and supreme power capable of arbitrating between competing human desires. This power could be formed in the framework of a civil society that allows individuals to make a voluntary social contract with the sovereign authority, transferring their natural rights to that authority in return for the protection of life, liberty, and property.

These early liberals often disagreed about the most appropriate form of government, but they all shared the belief that liberty was natural and that its restriction needed strong justification. Liberals generally believed in limited government, although several liberal philosophers decried government outright, with Thomas Paine writing that “government even in its best state is a necessary evil”.

As part of the project to limit the powers of government, various liberal theorists such as James Madison and the Baron de Montesquieu conceived the notion of separation of powers, a system designed to equally distribute governmental authority among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. Governments had to realize, liberals maintained, that poor and improper governance gave the people authority to overthrow the ruling order through any and all possible means, even through outright violence and revolution, if needed.

Contemporary liberals, heavily influenced by social liberalism, have continued to support limited constitutional government while also advocating for state services and provisions to ensure equal rights. Modern liberals claim that formal or official guarantees of individual rights are irrelevant when individuals lack the material means to benefit from those rights and call for a greater role for government in the administration of economic affairs.

Early liberals also laid the groundwork for the separation of church and state. As heirs of the Enlightenment, liberals believed that any given social and political order emanated from human interactions, not from divine will. Many liberals were openly hostile to religious belief itself, but most concentrated their opposition to the union of religious and political authority, arguing that faith could prosper on its own, without official sponsorship or administration by the state.

Beyond identifying a clear role for government in modern society, liberals also have obsessed over the meaning and nature of the most important principle in liberal philosophy: liberty. From the 17th century until the 19th century, liberals—from Adam Smith to John Stuart Mill—conceptualized liberty as the absence of interference from government and from other individuals, claiming that all people should have the freedom to develop their own unique abilities and capacities without being sabotaged by others. Mill’s On Liberty (1859), one of the classic texts in liberal philosophy, proclaimed that “the only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way”. Support for laissez-faire capitalism is often associated with this principle, with Friedrich Hayek arguing in The Road to Serfdom (1944) that reliance on free markets would preclude totalitarian control by the state.

tom green

Beginning in the late 19th century, however, a new conception of liberty entered the liberal intellectual arena. This new kind of liberty became known as positive liberty to distinguish it from the prior negative version, and it was first developed by British philosopher Thomas Hill Green. Green rejected the idea that humans were driven solely by self-interest, emphasizing instead the complex circumstances that are involved in the evolution of our moral character. In a very profound step for the future of modern liberalism, he also tasked society and political institutions with the enhancement of individual freedom and identity and the development of moral character, will and reason and the state to create the conditions that allow for the above, giving the opportunity for genuine choice. Foreshadowing the new liberty as the freedom to act rather than to avoid suffering from the acts of others, Green wrote the following:

If it were ever reasonable to wish that the usage of words had been other than it has been… one might be inclined to wish that the term “freedom” had been confined to the… power to do what one wills.

Rather than previous liberal conceptions viewing society as populated by selfish individuals, Green viewed society as an organic whole in which all individuals have a duty to promote the common good. His ideas spread rapidly and were developed by other thinkers such as L.T. Hobhouse and John Hobson.

In a few years, this New Liberalism had become the essential social and political program of the Liberal Party in Britain, and it would encircle much of the world in the 20th century. In addition to examining negative and positive liberty, liberals have tried to understand the proper relationship between liberty and democracy. As they struggled to expand suffrage rights, liberals increasingly understood that people left out of the democratic decision-making process were liable to the tyranny of the majority, a concept explained in Mill’s On Liberty and in Democracy in America (1835) by Alexis de Tocqueville. As a response, liberals began demanding proper safeguards to thwart majorities in their attempts at suppressing the rights of minorities.

Besides liberty, liberals have developed several other principles important to the construction of their philosophical structure, such as equality, pluralism, and toleration. Highlighting the confusion over the first principle, Voltaire commented that “equality is at once the most natural and at times the most chimeral of things”. All forms of liberalism assume, in some basic sense, that individuals are equal.

In maintaining that people are naturally equal, liberals assume that they all possess the same right to liberty. In other words, no one is inherently entitled to enjoy the benefits of liberal society more than anyone else, and all people are equal subjects before the law.

Beyond this basic conception, liberal theorists diverge on their understanding of equality. American philosopher John Rawls emphasized the need to ensure not only equality under the law, but also the equal distribution of material resources that individuals required to develop their aspirations in life. Libertarian thinker Robert Nozick disagreed with Rawls, championing the former version of Lockean equality instead.

To contribute to the development of liberty, liberals also have promoted concepts like pluralism and toleration. By pluralism, liberals refer to the proliferation of opinions and beliefs that characterize a stable social order. Unlike many of their competitors and predecessors, liberals do not seek conformity and homogeneity in the way that people think; in fact, their efforts have been geared towards establishing a governing framework that harmonizes and minimizes conflicting views, but still allows those views to exist and flourish.

For liberal philosophy, pluralism leads easily to toleration. Since individuals will hold diverging viewpoints, liberals argue, they ought to uphold and respect the right of one another to disagree. From the liberal perspective, toleration was initially connected to religious toleration, with Spinoza condemning “the stupidity of religious persecution and ideological wars”. Toleration also played a central role in the ideas of Kant and John Stuart Mill. Both thinkers believed that society will contain different conceptions of a good ethical life and that people should be allowed to make their own choices without interference from the state or other individuals.