Daniel B. Klein
C.S. Lewis on Recovering the Way Forward
“The original arc of liberalism will still be the original centuries-long arc of liberalism. The founding of liberal civilization will still be the founding. The ascendancy of liberalism will always be liberalism’s historic ascendancy.” ~ Daniel B. Klein
McCloskey’s Narrative and Jurisprudence
“Deirdre McCloskey rightly tells us that ideas matter, talk matters, culture matters, moral authorization matters, moral leadership matters. That is how the world works. The evidence of ngrams bolsters her theory.” ~ Daniel B. Klein
You Are a Soul: Dedicated to the Vital Spirit of David Theroux
“Souls and persons are one-to-one, so it is natural that ‘human being’ be signified as either ‘soul’ or ‘person,’ each serving, according to my formulation, as a synecdoche for the human being.” ~ Daniel B. Klein
A Better Understanding of Justice
“Adam Smith guides us on how to talk justice beyond the commutative: formulate it as either distributive or estimative, not an admixture of the two.” ~ Daniel B. Klein
The Abolition of Man
“In four of the quotations, Lewis speaks of ‘the Tao.’ By that he means something like the universe, including its moral order, or perhaps the notion of a morally ordered universe.” ~ Daniel B. Klein
Correcting Oren Cass on Adam Smith
“It makes more sense to think that Smith, in propounding a presumption of liberty, assured readers and lawmakers that liberalizations would not lead to an exodus of capital or widespread disruptions of economic life.” ~ Daniel B. Klein
Back in the USSR
“Beach Boy Mike Love said: ‘Back in the U.S.S.R.’ was a helluva song, and it’s lasted longer than the country.’ But, joking aside, Thies’s list is worth an hour of contemplation. The set of ten songs is a noble effort against tyranny.” ~ Daniel B. Klein
Adam Smith on Self-Deceit
“Bad men sustain delusions to deny their self-deceptions. Smithian liberalism limits the evils that delusional men can wreak, and it tends to contest and correct their delusions in the first instance.” ~ Daniel B. Klein
The Recovery of Liberty
“The attack on liberty is unrelenting. To get attackers to relent, it helps to clarify what we mean by liberty. We are then in a better position to awaken them to the damage they do.” ~ Daniel B. Klein
The Semantic Revolution
“Our decisions on semantics express broader moral and political sensibilities. On my semantics, the revolutions of 1848 were not liberal. Nor, overall, was the revolution of 1789. As Edmund Burke put it in 1790: ‘Their liberty is not liberal.'” ~ Daniel B. Klein
