… is from page 243 of David Schmidtz’s wisdom-packed 2023 book, Living Together [original emphasis]:
The highest political standards are not the ones we personally find most appealing. Rather, truly having reason to embrace anything as a political ideal starts by observing that conflict resolution is an exercise in the art of compromise. A politically ideal community is habitable partly because no one’s moral ideal ever sweeps the field.
DBx: Yes.
To accompany this quotation I chose a photograph of my late Nobel-laureate colleague, James Buchanan, because – contrary to much uninformed commentary about Buchanan – what Dave Schmidtz writes here captures nicely a principle that was always core to Buchanan’s political philosophy, and one that he expressed quite directly on countless occasions.
