Fools

EDMUND BURKE

Edmund Burke -- the great eighteenth century British statesman -- was both a liberal and a conservative. For a relatively concise but complete profile of Burke, and an explanation of why by today's standards Burke may be considered either a liberal or a traditional conservative -- but emphatically not a libertarian, neoconservative, or social conservative -- read Professor Bogus' article Rescuing Burke, 72 Missouri Law Review 387 (2007).

Here are some quotes from Edmund Burke:

"We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature, and the means perhaps of its conservation."

"Society become a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are dead, and those who are to be born."

"The individual is foolish; the multitude, for the moment is foolish, when they act without deliberation; but the species is wise, and, when time is given to it, as a species it always acts right."

"Whatever each man can separately do, without trespassing upon others, he has a right to do for himself; and he a right to all which society, with all its combinations and skill and force, can do in his favor. In this partnership all men have equal rights; but not to equal things."

EDMUND is a blog by Professor Carl T. Bogus.

As it happened, last week I was reading Robert Harris' historical novel Imperium, and couldn't help but be struck by this passage:

You can always spot a fool, for he is the man who will tell you he knows who is going to win an election. But an election is a living thing – you might almost say, the most vigorously alive thing there is – with thousands upon thousands of brains and limbs and eyes and thoughts and desires, and it will wriggle and turn and run off in directions no one ever predicted, sometimes just for the joy of proving the wiseacres wrong.

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