Civilization Revisited

Campus Report ^ | September 29, 2009 | John Hendershot

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Civilization Revisited

by: John Hendershot, September 29, 2009

The distance between Left and Right in America seems greater now than at any time during the past forty years, and we are waging a fierce debate over the size, scope, and role of government in our lives. Governments of all stripes fall due to corruption of both principles and people, and if ever there was a moment when we needed insight into the oracles of our Founding Fathers, it is now. Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (1689-1755), was a prolific author. He wrote a couple of fictional books, but the majority of his work is philosophical; even his highly successful satire, Persian Letters, deals heavily with philosophy. As “[t]here is no work on Roman history of comparable length, written before its author’s time or since, that is as penetrating,” his Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline (1734) might alone have secured him a place in memory, but it is his The Spirit of Laws, a mighty masterpiece spanning twenty years and six hundred and five chapters within thirty-one books and six parts, which earned him a place among the giants. Upon its first publication, in 1748, “it sold like hotcakes. By the end of the century, it had been published in one hundred twenty-eight editions, and it had been translated into” at least eight languages. The list of those whose thinking it influenced reads like a Who’s Who of men who helped to frame the world we live in. Among them we find Alexis de Tocqueville, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Edmund Burke, Edward Gibbon, Adam Smith, both the Framers of the Constitution and the Anti-Federalists, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel....

[Jacquerie]

Our Founders and Framers sought the wisdom of the ages and devised the best government possible among imperfect men.

Weep for what we have done to their gift.

[Savage Beast]

Don’t expect the nutcases of the psychotic Left to come to their senses. If they were capable of clarity and rational thinking, they wouldn’t be psychotic nutcases in the first place.