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Quotation of the Day…

… is from page 169 of Robert Nisbet’s June 1975 Commentary article, “The New Despotism,” as it is revised and reprinted as Essay Five in the 1979 Liberty Fund collection The Politicization of Society (Kenneth S. Templeton, Jr., ed.):

When the modern political community was being shaped at the end of the eighteenth century, its founders thought that the consequences of republican or representative institutions in government would be the reduction of political power in individual lives.

Nothing seems to have mattered more to such minds as Montesquieu, Turgot, and Burke in Europe and to Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin in the United States than the expansion of freedom in the day-to-day existence of human beings, irrespective of class, occupation, or belief.  Hence the elaborate, carefully contrived provisions of constitution or law whereby formal government would be checked, limited, and given root in the smallest possible assemblies of the people.  The kind of arbitrary power Burke so detested and referred to almost constantly in his attacks upon the British government in its relation to the American colonists and the people of India and Ireland, and upon the French government during the revolution, was foremost in the minds of all the architects of the political community, and they thought it could be eliminated, or reduced to insignificance, by ample use of legislative and judicial machinery.

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