Friday 23 February 2018

Roger Scruton

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"Hayek sees that the zero-sum vision is fired by an implacable negative energy. It is not the concrete vision of some real alternative that animates the socialist critic of the capitalist order. It is hostility toward the actual, and in particular toward those who enjoy advantages within it. Hence the belief in equality remains vague and undefined, except negatively. For it is essentially a weapon against the existing order – a way of undermining
its claims to legitimacy, by discovering a victim for every form of success. The striving for equality is, in other words, based in ressentiment in Nietzsche’s sense, the state of mind
that Max Scheler identified as the principal motive behind the socialist orthodoxy of his day. It is one of the major problems of modern politics, which no classical liberal could possibly solve, how to govern a society in which resentment has acquired the kind of privileged social, intellectual, and political position that we witness today."
Roger Scruton,"Hayek and conservatism", in "The Cambridge Companion to Hayek".


"The true enemy of natural law, I argue, is not the judge, but the politician, and the greatest threat to just dealings between people is the attempt to remake society from above, in conformity with a conception of 'social justice.'" 

Roger Scruton, "The Meaning of Conservatism".

3 comments:

  1. ...when Taleb is asked for advice from young people about how to help mankind, he doesn’t recommend working for charities, many of which have good intentions, but rarely have their practical impact rigorously tested. Instead, he offers the following three-point plan: “1. Never engage in virtue signalling. 2. Never engage in rent-seeking. 3. You MUST start a business. Put yourself on the line.”

    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/review-skin-in-the-game-by-nassim-nicholas-taleb-down-with-the-intellectual-idiots-f2hp5gvd3

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    Replies
    1. The article is behind a paywall but it looks very wise.

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    2. Rather friendly... FT was snarky. Go ahead and sign in: you'll get two articles per week. Keep one for Liddle on Sunday...

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