We hurl around the names and snippets of these giants of conservative thought and sadly, allow commentators of today's political media to invoke them as well, all without knowing the depth and breadth of their very thought.
So the next time that someone tells you about the famed "libertarian" F. A Hayek's condemnation of "statism", his belief in pure ideology and contempt for tradition, his reliance upon Mill's simple principle and such other simplistic stuff meant to reinforce his position, link them to this thread.
Likewise, when condenming those who stridently talk of non-coercion, mention libertarian principles with a fond tone or who fail to say the word "conservative" with the right tone of reverence, you might want to observe that often classified among them is a great friend to "custom, convention" and all that.
Hey, I didn't know that Thomas Sowell (one of my heros), equally condenming of ideology, the Unconstrained and rationality in A Conflict of Visions descibes himself to interviewers as a "libertarian"
Names then, aren't all that important; princples are.
Though I have much to learn about conservative principles and the history of conservative thought, reading these threads made me wonder how this "spontaneous and irresistible development of certain obvious principles" can possibly take hold in a country such as Iraq, which has not had such "evolution" of free institutions and ideas.
It seems that George Will has recently written on this subject in a manner related to the material of this thread:
Bump