I really enjoyed reading your FR Profile with its many quotations about conservatism and the task of preservng a vibrant Republic such as ours.
I read several great quotes there from people such as Edmund Burke, John Adams, T.S. Eliot, President Taft to name a few.
One quote I particularly liked which I find very appropriate for our times: it's from Frederick Douglas in 1857:
If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.
This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.
Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both.
The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
And you also added a fine passage of your own as follows:
When you have time, it would be great if you could clarify what you meant by the terms "Prescriptive" Property Rights and Ordered Liberty because I am not familiar with those terms.
Am I right that these are special Judicial terms?
Many thanks.
Great find pundit.
Those two terms come largely from the writings of Russell Kirk. He was one of the main intellectual anchors of conservative thought from 1950 until his death in the late 90s.
I ill dig up something for it’s explanation.
Here from a late summary of his Ten Principle of Conservatism is his summary:
conservatives believe in what may be called the principle of prescription. Conservatives sense that modern people are dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, able to see farther than their ancestors only because of the great stature of those who have preceded us in time. Therefore conservatives very often emphasize the importance of prescription—that is, of things established by immemorial usage, so that the mind of man runneth not to the contrary. There exist rights of which the chief sanction is their antiquity—including rights to property, often. Similarly, our morals are prescriptive in great part. Conservatives argue that we are unlikely, we moderns, to make any brave new discoveries in morals or politics or taste. It is perilous to weigh every passing issue on the basis of private judgment and private rationality. The individual is foolish, but the species is wise, Burke declared. In politics we do well to abide by precedent and precept and even prejudice, for the great mysterious incorporation of the human race has acquired a prescriptive wisdom far greater than any man’s petty private rationality.
go: https://kirkcenter.org/conservatism/ten-conservative-principles/
For a much more detailed analysis on prescription in political thought go to this link:
https://isi.org/intercollegiate-review/the-politics-of-prescription-kirks-fifth-canon-of-conservative-thought/
Ordered Liberty for me harkens back to Edmund Burkes Reflections on the Revolutions in France and I will post some links below.
I probably first saw the term Ordered Liberty in Russell Kirk’s book, Roots of American Order. But a good usage is given here:
https://kirkcenter.org/reviews/the-sinai-revolution-and-american-ordered-liberty/
Kirk gives a good talk on Lord Acton’s views on Liberty which leads one to understand how the “wild gas of freedom” (Reflections...) is best captured for real use as ordered liberty: