Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 289 of the original edition of Walter Lippmann’s sometimes deeply flawed but profoundly insightful and still-important 1937 book, The Good Society:

[I]n a liberal democracy, the law must seek primarily to regulate human affairs by a system of individual rights and duties rather than by administrative commands from the ruling officialdom…. I have called this the reciprocal method of social control as distinguished from the overhead method of regulating human relations. In broad terms we may then say that liberalism seeks to govern primarily by applying and perfecting reciprocal obligations, whereas authoritarianism governs primarily by the handing down of decrees. The liberal system seeks to define what one man may expect from all other men, including the officials of the state, and to guarantee that expectation. The authoritarian system permits the official to declare what he wishes other men to do and to enforce his will.