“… the political fantasies of Jean-Jacques Rousseau have a great deal to answer for. For two centuries, his sentimentalizing utopian rhetoric has provided despots of all description with a means of pursuing conformity while praising freedom. It is a neat trick. Words like “freedom” and “virtue” were ever on Rousseau’s lips. But freedom for him… Read More Jean-Jacques Rosseau and the Antinomian Principle
“Separation of church and state? I can think of a couple of other things I’d like to see separated from the state, or connected with the state in only a slender and indirect fashion. One of them is the school. The other is the home… Americans have largely taken for granted a monstrous bit of… Read More Anthony Esolen on Separation of Home and State
Excerpts from Roger Scruton’s 1998 New Criterion essay, Rousseau on the Origins of Liberalism “Rousseau’s attack on society in the name of ‘nature’ exemplifies what to me is the root error of liberalism in all its forms, namely, the inability to accept, or even to perceive, the inherited forms of social knowledge. By social knowledge,… Read More Rousseau on the Origins of Liberalism. Roger Scruton.
Catholic Critique 