Winston Churchill on the Legend of King Arthur

"It is all true, or it ought to be; and more and better besides. And wherever men are fighting against barbarism, tyranny, and massacre, for freedom, law, and honor, let them remember that the fame of their deeds, even though they themselves be exterminated, may perhaps be celebrated as long as the world rolls round. Let us then declare that King Arthur and his noble Knights, guarding the Sacred Flame of Christianity and the theme of a world order, sustained by valor, physical strength, and good horses and armor, slaughtered innumerable hosts of foul barbarians and set decent folk an example for all time.

[The Birth of Britain]

M. Stanton Evans, Toward a New Intellectual History

[T]he unnatural separation of traditionalist and libertarian emphases occurs because of the way we have been taught our intellectual history. In the usual construction, it is assumed that the distinctive elements of modern Western society -- scientific progress, democratic government, individual liberty, etc. -- have been achieved by throwing off the religious traditions of the Christian Middle Ages, which are usually depicted as a time of intellectual somnolence, stagnation of commerce and political repression.

That the facts of the case are rather different is something we are beginning to discovery as a number of scholars have set about to reconstruct our intellectual genealogy. I think it can be shown that individual liberty, limited government, representative institutions and the scientific attainments of the West are the products of Biblical theism generally, and of the Christian Middle Ages in particular. To appreciate this perspective, it is necessary to reverse the usual tenets of economic and technological determinism, which hold that material forces somehow dictate political relations, ethical values and religious sentiments. What I am suggesting instead is a theological determinism; which is to say that theology determines metaphysics, which determines political philosophy and institutions, which in turn determine the economic and technological organization of society.

[in "Freedom and Virtue"(George W. Carey ed. 1998) at 91-92.]

F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom

[F]ormal equality before the law is in conflict, and in fact incompatible, with any activity of the government deliberately aiming at material or substantive equality of different people, and . . . any policy aiming directly at a substantive ideal of distributive justice must lead to the destruction of the Rule of Law. To produce the same result for different people, it is necessary to treat them differently. To give different people the same objective opportunities is not to give them the same subjective chance. It cannot be denied that the Rule of Law produces economic inequality -- all that can be claimed for it is that this inequality is not designed to affect particular people in a particular way.

Jaroslav Pelikan, The Vindication of Tradition

A "leap of progress" is not a standing broad jump, which begins at the line of where we are now; it is a running broad jump through where we have been to where we go next. The growth of insight -- in science, in the arts, in philosophy and theology -- has not come through progressively sloughing off more and more of tradition, as though insight would be purest and deepest when it has finally freed itself of the dead past. It simply has not worked that way in the history of the tradition, and it does not work that way now. By including the dead in the circle of discourse, we enrich the quality of the conversation. Of course we do not listen only to the dead, nor are we a tape recording of the tradition. That really would be the dead faith of the living, not the living faith of the dead. But we do acquire the "insight" for which Emerson was pleading when we learn to interact creatively with the "tradition" which he was denouncing.

[in Part Four, "Tradition as Heritage: A Vindication"]

Jaroslav Pelikan, The Vindication of Tradition

Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. And, I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives tradition such a bad name.

[in Part Four, "Tradition as Heritage: A Vindication"]

Walter Berns, "The Need for Public Authority"

This country was officially founded on the principle of self-interest. "To secure these rights," says the Declaration of Independence, and these rights are private rights, "governments are instituted among men." Men institute government for selfish reasons. That was, and is, the principle on which we built. But, of course, the "we" who build on this principle were not simply self-interested men, not simply Hobbesian or Lockean men. We were, to an overwhelming extent, civilized Englishmen or British-men. We were not essentially private men: we were united in families, in churches, in towns and a host of other institutions. We were men whose habits had been acquired from a civilized past, whose character had been formed under the laws of an older and civilized politics. Moreover, while the national government did nothing in this area, the states, through their laws, continued to support the private institutions -- the churches, the families -- whose job it was to generate good moral habits. The states also provided a public education that was designed in large part to provide sound moral training. The states did not hesitate to act as censor.

I think what I have said above is sufficient to illustrate my point: we were founded on liberal principles, but we used the public authority in nonliberal ways.

[reprinted in "Freedom and Virtue: The Conservative/Libertarian Debate" (George W. Carey ed. 1998)]

F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom

The question whether the state should or should not "act" or "interfere" poses an altogether false alternative, and the term "laissez faire" is a highly ambiguous and misleading description of the principles on which a liberal policy is base. Of course, every state must act and every action of the state interferes with something or other. But that is not the point. The important question is whether the individual can foresee the action of the state and make use of this knowledge as a datum in forming his own plans, with the result that the state cannot control the use made of its machinery and that the individual knows precisely how far he will be protected against interference from others, or whether the state is in a position to frustrate individual efforts. The state controlling weights and measures (or preventing fraud and deception in any other way) is certainly acting, while the state permitting the use of violence, for example, by strike pickets, is inactive. Yet it is in the first case that the state observes liberal principles and in the second that it does not.

[Chapter Six: Planning and the Rule of Law]