Why I Am Not a Liberal

emerges an ideology that encourages the bourgeois to band together to create the conditions of that fair playing ground and drive the wasteful decadent aristocrats from their thrones, the peasantry from their common lands, and the blacks to the fields. Many of liberalisms’ best theorists like Locke, Kant, and Mill spent their time refining the theoretical elements of this herronvolk meritocracy (View Highlight)

but it is famously argued that Calvinism encouraged habits of saving and reinvestment over consumption that made liberal capitalist societies able to successfully replicate themselves and expand (View Highlight)

So we are left with a worldview and practice that attempts to allocate some powers and responsibilities to individuals, or at least heads of propertied families, conceived of as rights-bearing rational and thrifty subjects pursuing their own vision of salvation and proper social order. Meanwhile the state is conceived of as a way of protecting those rights and the ability of those persons to engage in the kind of market activities that would allow them to thrive and get the resources they need to pursue those projects, with each standing equally (View Highlight)

before the law to ensure the outcome of their competitive acquisition reflects their mercantile virtues rather than the phoney notions of privilege by which the Aristocracy swindled the world out of their bread. (View Highlight)