The Irresponsibility of Rights

[Extract from The Servile Mind published by Encounter Books. See Keith Windschuttle’s “Introduction to Kenneth Minogue” here…]

Overthrowing Anciens Régimes

European thinkers have often indulged in a flirtation with classical republicanism. It was a doctrine particularly vibrant in the so-called Radical Enlightenment. Modern European states are essentially monarchies, and largely remain so even though their kings and queens may not survive in institutional form. The reason these states are monarchical is that they derive from feudal conditions, and feudal monarchies have generated, through complicated chains of development, an individualist version of the rule of law. Being Christian states, they construed human beings as fallen creatures of limited rationality. Recognising such fallibility, they created tolerant commercial societies based on what Gibbon called “science and taste”. And they inherited, of course, the Christian distinction between God and Caesar, public and…