Top Highlights

• Michael Oakeshott, “The Masses in Representative Democracy,” 1961
• With every minute you do change a mind, And call him noble that was now your hate, Him vile that was your garland.
• My subject here is individuality, not in the silly and negative adolescent sense of “individualism” grossly construed—not “the moral and legal conception of the individual as that which is isolated, [but] a more concrete conception which takes him to be that which is complete,” as the English philosopher Michael Oakeshott puts it in “The Authority ...
• Reinhold Niebur’s maxim: “The society in which each man lives is at once the basis for, and the nemesis of, that fulness of life which each man seeks.”1
• Erich Fromm tells the story in his Escape from Freedom, the emergence of a primitive form of capitalism at the end of the medieval period upset not only the economic order of the societies it was beginning to transform but also the social order, which was under stress as traditional sources of status and meaning were, to use the word of our moment,...