Saturday 28 October 2017

A Tory of the old school, the school of Shakespeare and Dr. Johnson

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Ruskin said he was a Tory of the old school, the school of Homer and Sir Walter Scott. Homer I agree on. I don't care much for the overrated Scott and I am a romantic Jacobite anyway. I'd say I am a Tory of the school of Shakespeare and Dr. Johnson. But I admire some liberals very much, including Chesterton (GK not AK) and Hilaire Belloc. 


Sir William Harcourt too, who said 
"Liberty does not consist in making others do what you think right. The difference between a free Government and a Government which is not free is principally this—that a Government which is not free interferes with everything it can, and a free Government interferes with nothing except what it must."
I thought five years ago that I was not far off being a classical liberal, but the last five years have shown that classical liberals are in quite a few ways as dangerous as the various varieties of progressive (pseudo-) liberals. By classical liberals I have in mind Edward Lucas, Anne Applebaum, The Economist and Financial Times, worried by Russia but not by Sunni Islam, very keen on Europe taking refugees, keen on even more internationalism and devoted to the European Union.

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