Tuesday
... the state incurs those well-known debts for politics, wars, and other higher causes and “progress,” thus mortgaging future production with the claim that it was in part providing for it. The assumption is that the future will honor this relationship in perpetuity. The state has learned from the merchants and industrialists how to exploit credit; it defies the nation ever to let it go into bankruptcy.
Alongside all swindlers the state now stands there as swindler-in-chief.
- Jacob Burckhardt, from lectures on the history of the the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries given at the University of Basel between 1865 and 1885, later included in Judgments on History and Historians.
The link here to Liberty Fund can be a valuable resource to those who peruse Samizdata.
Check out the additional links shown in the margin of the link provided.
A survey of the cataloque of Liberty Fund publications (all classics - some quite venerable) is worth a few inches of one's time - just to know what's out there. It is totally non-profit - endowed.
There one can find many items that have been out-of -print in the trade books press for years; lots of stuff from the Scottish Enlightenment, etc.
OR - if you forget, just Google up Liberty Fund, the site has some excellent current writing.
Disclosure: Just an afficionado
Posted by RRS at February 3, 2009 04:57 PM
Burkhardt speaks from a society which had only recently rescued itself from Muslim domination. You'd think he'd have had a better perspective.
Posted by Kim du Toit at February 4, 2009 09:29 PM
Burkhardt speaks from a society which had only recently rescued itself from Muslim domination. You'd think he'd have had a better perspective.
?
Posted by Gabriel at February 4, 2009 10:23 PM
I too am confused by Mr du Toit's comment. Burckhardt was Swiss. He wrote unflatteringly about Islam, but I do not see how either nineteenth century Switzerland or the surrounding countries could be described as having recently rescued themselves from Muslim domination.
Posted by Natalie Solent at February 5, 2009 03:54 PM
