Political Philosophy Questions

· in consequence, any portion of mankind are better adapted [to representative gov't - KM] in proportion to their general degree of improvement.

· For a people who have reached the Anglo-Americans' social state [democracy], it is hard to see any middle course between the sovereignty of all and the absolute power of one man

· The meaning of representative government is, that the whole people, or some numerous portion of them, exercise through deputies periodically elected by themselves, the ultimate controlling power, which, in every constitution, must reside somewhere. This ultimate power they must possess in all its completeness.

· A race who have been trained in energy and courage by struggles withNature and their neighbours, but who have not yet settled down into permanent obedience to any common superior, would be little likely to acquire this habit under the collective government of their own body

· But it is equally true, though only of late and slowly beginning to be acknowledged, that a numerous assembly is as little fitted for the direct business of legislation as for that of administration.

· Obedience to a distant monarch is liberty itself, compared with the dominion of the lord of the neighboring castle... In this manner a central power, despotic in principle though generally much restricted in practice, was mainly instrumental in carrying the people through a necessary stage of improvement, which representative government, if real, would most likely have prevented them from entering upon.

· .if the conduct of human beings was determined by no other interested considerations than those which constitute their 'real' interest, neither monarchy nor oligarchy would be such bad governments as they are...

· "As they range lower and lower in development, that form of government will be, generally speaking, less suitable to them; though this is not true universally: for the adaption of a people to a representative government does not depend so much upon the place they occupy in the general scale of humanity, as upon the degree in which they possess certain special requisites; requisites, however so closely connected with their degree of general advancement, that any variation between the two is rather the exception than the rule."

· The social state is "the prime cause of most of the laws, customs, and ideas which control [a] nation's behavior

· The social state of America is a very strange phenomenon. Men there are nearer equality in wealth and mental endowments, or, in other words, more nearly equally powerful, than in any other country of the world or in any other age of recorded history.

· Description of aristocratic society: "On the one side were wealth, strength, and leisure combined with farfetched luxuries, refinements of taste, the pleasures of the mind, and the cultivation of the arts; on the other [i.e. among ordinary people] work, coarseness, and ignorance

· It is negatively defective if it does not concentrate in the hands of the authorities, power sufficient to fulfill the necessary offices of a government; or if it does not sufficiently develop by exercise the active capacities and social feelings of individual citizens"

· "The Crusades and the English wars decimated the nobles and divided up their lands... the [mail] brought enlightenment to hovel and palace alike... Protestantism maintained that all men are equally able to find the path to heaven"

· The proper duty of a representative assembly in regard to matters of administration, is not to decide them by its own vote, but to take care that the persons who have to decide them shall be the proper persons

· In democracy, "distinctions of rank... get confused, and the barriers separating men get lower"

· "There is hardly an important event in the last seven hundred years which has not turned out to be advantageous for equality

When it comes to politics, secularists subscribe to what?

But what is liberty without ________ and __________?

Distributive justice is a question of law, but it impacts _________ ___________

Government is necessary but only possible with what?