jonatanforsberg.net: Empire

Saturday, April 19, 2008

Empire

- How Britain Made The Modern World
by Niall Ferguson

The British Empire has been subject to fierce castigation, and whilst much of it has been from a thorough and solid perspective, not all of it has. In this well written and accessible book Niall Ferguson puts the Empire into perspective and the sometimes very progressive moral fabric of the Empire discerns. Ferguson does not try to argue a black and white case, not at all, but he rather gives fresh wood to a debate which is far from over. The debate is vital not only for Anglophiles with a taste for history, but for anyone interested in contemporary international politics, and for the role of western politics and analytical morality today.

"If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants"
(Sir Isaac Newton)

"you chose to act as if you had never been molded into civil society and had everything to begin anew. You began ill, because you began by despising everything that belonged to you."
(Edmund Burke in Reflections on the Revolution in France)

"Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve"
(Sir Karl Popper)

Liberty is, of course, a loftier goal. But only those who have never known disorder fail to grasp that [order] is the necessary precondition for liberty."
(Niall Ferguson in Colossus)

"When every benefit received is a right, there is no place for good manners, let alone for gratitude."
(Theodore Dalrymple in What is Poverty?)

"If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. // We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant."
(Sir Karl Popper on the paradox of freedom in The Open Society and Its Enemies)

"Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good. // The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them."
(Thomas Sowell in Is Reality Optional?)

"Government has become ungovernable; that is, it cannot leave off governing. Law has become lawless; that is, it cannot see where laws should stop."

(G.K. Chesterton in Eugenics and Other Evils: An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State)

"to take part in a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress."
(The aim of The Economist)

"This is the lesson: Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never - in nothing, great or small, large or petty - never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy."
(Sir Winston Churchill, October 29th 1941, Harrow School , London)

Saturday, April 19, 2008

Empire

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