Liberty, Equality, Fraternity

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H. Holt, 1873 - 350 páginas
"Stephen's book is the finest exposition of conservative thought in the latter half of the nineteenth century."--Sir Ernest Barker, "Political Thought in England--1848 to 1941"Students of political theory will welcome the return to print of this brilliant defense of ordered liberty. Impugning John Stuart Mill's famous treatise, "On Liberty," Stephen criticized Mill for turning abstract doctrines of the French Revolution into "the creed of a religion."Only the constraints of morality and law make liberty possible, warned Stephen, and attempts to impose unlimited freedom, material equality, and an indiscriminate love of humanity will lead inevitably to coercion and tyranny. Liberty must be restrained by custom and tradition if it is to endure; equality must be limited to equality before the law if it is to be just; and fraternity must include actual men, not the amorphous mass of mankind, if it is to be real and genuine.Stuart D. Warner is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Roosevelt University.

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Página 6 - That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection.
Página 6 - These are good reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or persuading him, or entreating him, but not for compelling him, or visiting him with any evil in case he do otherwise.
Página 25 - Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion.
Página 225 - ... the movement of. the progressive societies has hitherto been a movement from Status to Contract.
Página 34 - And not only this, but, fourthly, the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost. or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct : the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground, and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason or personal experience...
Página 42 - The spirit of improvement is not always a spirit of liberty, for it may aim at forcing improvements on an unwilling people; and the spirit of liberty, in so far as it resists such attempts, may ally itself locally and temporarily with the opponents of improvement; but the only unfailing and permanent source of improvement is liberty, since by it there are as many possible independent centres of improvement as there are individuals.
Página 49 - The object of this essay is to assert one very simple principle, as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control, whether the means used be physical force in the form of legal penalties or the moral coercion of public opinion.
Página 130 - But the strongest of all the arguments against the interference of the public with purely personal conduct is that when it does interfere the odds are that it interferes wrongly and in the wrong place.
Página 22 - Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end.
Página 6 - The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.

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