[Jason Jewell]

Macaulay was a great writer and tells a great story. His main weakness is his adherence to the Whig theory of history. His view is that all of history was culminating in 19th-century British political and social institutions. I like Macaulay’s writing, particularly some of his essays, but just make sure you read Herbert Butterfield or someone similar as an antidote to the Whiggishness.

[Jason Jewell]

If you are asking, “Is there an Establishment?” then the answer is yes. There’s no need to try to uncover super-secretive organizations or cabals. The evidence is all there in the boring journal articles in Foreign Affairs and similar publications. Powerful interests manipulate public affairs in their own interest, and for the most part they do it out in the open.

Maybe this is not answering your question. If not, could you be a little more specific?

I don’t know much about most of the things you mention in the last paragraph.

[Jason Jewell]

Re: Europe’s birth rate, we could point to many individual factors, but the overall reason, I think, is a rising time preference in European society. Having and rearing children is, of course, a long-term project requiring many sacrifices of utility in the present, and Europeans increasingly are no longer willing to make those sacrifices.

I do think the welfare state is a big part of the equation here. It both makes it more difficult to pay for the rearing of children in the present because of higher taxes and makes the prospect of a childless old age seem more palatable. I also think the secularization of the society plays a role, as the incentives to childbearing found in Christian teaching ebb.

As for the opening of Europe to immigration, I think decolonization and guilt over the colonial past played a big role. The offer of immigrant status and eventual citizenship for residents of the former colonies was seen as a form of reparations. I don’t know that any proponents of the policy had really calculated the magnitude of the impact of those decisions in the 1960s, although I could be wrong.

[Jason Jewell]

Also on Hume and Rousseau, I don’t really know anything beyond what you’d find in the “Rousseau’s Dog” book. Given Rousseau’s hyper-egotism and sorry track record of managing friendships, I’m inclined to side with Hume in their dispute.

[Jason Jewell]

Hume’s criticism of the “parties of principle” is very similar to Edmund Burke’s. In other words, these parties attempt to impose abstractions on society without regard to the actual lived experiences, traditions, culture, and beliefs of the people who make up that society. Such attempts are almost certainly bound to end badly.

In general, I agree with Hume, Burke, and Livingston. Abstract reason alone fails to take into account certain essential aspects of what it means to be a human being.

Perhaps unlike Livingston, I don’t think that this insight conflicts with libertarianism if libertarianism is correctly understood as being only a political theory and not a comprehensive social theory. As Gerard Casey says, libertarian thought doesn’t try to answer all the questions of life; it merely establishes minimal preconditions for justice as we try to sort out the answers.

[Jason Jewell]

I think the Edmonds quote is probably a fair assessment. Anyone familiar with Hume’s philosophy could hardly consider him a strident Tory.

Americans of Jefferson’s era tended to look at the 17th-century conflicts in England from a strongly pro-Whig perspective. As we know, this view has its own problems, such as an uncritical acceptance of the democratic principle. Hume makes a decent attempt to strike a balance.

[Jason Jewell]

You might want to take a look at some of the lectures and writings of Michael Faraday, the most important pioneer in electromagnetism in the early 19th century. There’s a biography of Faraday here: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1225/1225-h/1225-h.htm#2HCH0001

William Gilbert’s treatise on magnetism and electricity (ca. 1600) is often considered the first really scientific treatment of the subject. It’s called “On the Loadstone”: http://archive.org/details/ontheloadstonean030331mbp

[Jason Jewell]

The damage the Mongols did to Asia was, on the whole, superficial. The number of Mongols was very small relative to the populations they conquered, and they were content to skim wealth off the top in most cases. Certainly some local areas were “made an example of,” and in those particular places it might have taken generations to come back.

In most cases the devastated civilization winds up getting replaced by something else, and the survivors assimilate themselves into the new order. Many observers see this on the horizon in Europe today as more immigrants and their descendants change the culture and system. I don’t think we can chalk all of that up to the world wars, but certainly they contributed to the process in the longer term.

Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a civilization that bounced back in essentially the same form after a really severe trauma like that. What comes next is always substantially different. There are degrees of continuity depending how much the trauma is internal and how much is external, though.

I hope this helps.

[Jason Jewell]

I read Kissinger’s book many years ago when I was still a run-of-the-mill conservative and liked it. I’m sure I’d evaluate it differently today.

Unfortunately, most of the foreign policy specialists out there who write books are Council-on-Foreign-Relations types. I’m not aware of a decent survey of modern diplomacy from a libertarian perspective. Pat Buchanan’s books (e.g. A Republic, Not an Empire) have a lot of good anti-imperial stuff in them. Also search the archives of publications like Left and Right or the daily articles on mises.org for info on specific events you might be interested in.

[Jason Jewell]

Matt, if I recall correctly, you will receive an email notification around two weeks before your card is billed for the renewal. If you don’t wish to renew, that’s your prompt to cancel.

[Jason Jewell]

Here’s a link: http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/grimm/bl-grimm-mouse.htm

I’ll get it put up on the lecture page as well.

[Jason Jewell]

Liberty Fund has put out editions of many works from the Scottish Enlightenment, and the introductions to those will be by modern scholars who are usually pretty reliable. You can find most of that online at their site, I suspect.

Arthur Herman has written a book on a popular level titled “How the Scots Invented the Modern World” that may be worth a look.

[Jason Jewell]

Siabaa, congratulations on acing your classes!

I’d recommend anything by William Anthony Hay for the 18th or 19th century. He contributes to the American Conservative pretty regularly and is solid.

[Jason Jewell]

I’ve never seen this quote before.

[Jason Jewell]

Sons, I apologize for the slow reply. I’ve been traveling quite a bit the last month with spotty internet access. However, I’m back home for the remainder of the summer and will be posting much more regularly.

I deal with these questions to some extent in the lectures on the Industrial Revolution, and there are one or two other threads in this forum that address the topic as well. The short answer is that some people’s living standards dropped when enclosure forced them off the land where they had been living, but this is something separate from the Industrial Revolution. For nearly everyone else, they were already poor when the Industrial Revolution began (because there was little capital accumulated in the society) and gradually saw their conditions improve as the revolution proceeded.

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