An old Joseph Sobran essay from his National Review days:

A political and legal system has to be based on the moral habits of its citizens, if it is concerned with anything more than power. To say that “that government is best which governs least” is not to yearn for anarchy: it is to say that those laws are best that don’t require a huge apparatus of surveillance and enforcement. The foolishness of Prohibition was that it pitted the law against deep-rooted ways of life. Socialism makes the same mistake on an even larger scale. As Burke puts it, “I cannot conceive how any man can have brought himself to that pitch of presumption, to consider his country as nothing but carte blanche, upon which he may scribble whatever he pleases.”

An interesting lecture by Duke University philosophy professor Rick Roderick. Page contains videos, accompanied by transcripts…

Scattered villages find common cause when a foreign conquest oppresses them. They overthrow the ruling king then create a republic and a mutual cause against further incursions. The republic expands into an empire, both overextends its commitments beyond and consumes itself from within only to fall to dust and ruin thereafter.

The Geert Wilders trial in the Netherlands reminds us how much the Western elites, those who currently control the society and wish to use their authority to alter and reconstitute the established order, have parted company with longstanding Western traditions. The mutation of classical liberalism into contemporary politically correct totalitarianism is not surprising, however, since liberalism began as the cautious younger sibling of the revolutionary spirit that found its emblem in the destruction of the Bourbons and the declaration of equality, fraternity, and liberty as the new mandatory themes of human order. Quite apart from the fact of their vain abstraction, those slogans implied from the beginning implacable hostility to custom and habit. The new republican-type nation-states that followed the model of France arose, as had the French Republic, through the violent disestablishment of the smaller, ethnic polities that characterized the long period of feudalism.

A critical account of the “Chernyshevsky of individualism”:

The Russian tradition to which Rand belongs is not that of Gogol, Turgenev, and Chekhov but that of Dobrolyubov, Pisarev, and Chernyshevsky: that is to say, of angry literary and social critics, pamphleteers and ideologues. She was neither fully a philosopher, nor fully a novelist, but something in between the two—the characters in her novels are not creatures of flesh and blood but opinions on legs, and her expository prose has the quality of speechifying. This is not to say that a woman of her intelligence and life experience had nothing interesting to say or no insights to convey. She did, on occasion, put things very well. She was often shrewd, seeing the dangers of statism very clearly, when few others did.

Ayn Rand has been dead for 27 years, but the influence of the iconoclastic novelist and philosopher shows no sign of flagging. The libertarian Cato Institute’s online symposium on the legacy of Ayn Rand.

For those who strongly adhere to their values, life can be truly frightening. Such people are subject to scrutiny from all directions, as their refusal to compromise their standards for the sake of tolerance is a threat to the peace of mind of their fellow citizens.

Albert Camus’ L’Homme revolté [Man in Revolt] or The Rebel (1951) is a milestone of postwar philosophical writing, widely admired for its diagnosis of a combat-shattered, God-deprived, ideologically disgruntled world…

Nevertheless Le Bon’s sharp-eyed meditations prefigure Camus’ “Absurdist” critique of society and culture, but from a non-disgruntled and distinctly rightwing point of view. Le Bon’s World in Revolt: A Psychological Study of our Times (1920) even anticipated Camus’ title.