Acton Institute Powerblog Archives

Post Tagged 'French Revolution'

April 16, 2019

As Notre Dame burns, France called to re-set world ablaze

Like most big stories, the world discovered last night’s fire devouring Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral at breakneck speed on social media. Images and video reached billions within a few minutes, nearly as fast as the dramatic flames took to completely engulf the ancient roof and send its tallest spire hurdling into a billowing smoky abyss. Continue Reading...
March 15, 2017

‘Instruction by which we may profit’: A guide to reading Tocqueville’s ‘Democracy in America’ (Part 1)

When Alexis de Tocqueville authored Democracy in America, a two-volume treatment of America, he wrote it “to find there instruction by which we ourselves may profit.” By “we,” Tocqueville was referring to his fellow Frenchmen, but although he may have written those words in 1835, we as Americans of the 21st century also have plenty to profit from Tocqueville’s wisdom, if we’ll but receive it. Continue Reading...
November 16, 2015

Bourgeois Equality: The Modern World Can’t Be Explained By Material Causes

Economist Deirdre McCloskey is set to release the long-anticipated conclusion of the Bourgeois Era trilogy sometime next spring. The book, Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World, will build on her thesis that our newfound prosperity is not primarily due to systems, tools, or materials, but the ideas and rhetoric behind them. Continue Reading...
February 14, 2014

Toward a Civilization of Love

In the spirit of Valentine’s Day, I offer this wonderful bit from Jennifer Roback Morse’s transformational book, Love and Economics, in which she observes a particular vacancy in modern discourse and policymaking: Economics has been a successful social science because it focuses on things that are true: human beings are self-interested and have the capacity for reason. Continue Reading...
January 10, 2014

Kuyper on Revolution

From CLP‘s newly released Guidance for Christian Engagement in Government, the first-ever English translation of Abraham Kuyper’s Our Program: What we oppose is “the Revolution,” by which we mean the political and social system embodied in the French Revolution… What we combat, on principle and without compromise, is the attempt to totally change how a person thinks and how he lives, to change his head and his heart, his home and his country—to create a state of affairs the very opposite of what has always been believed, cherished, and confessed, and so to lead us to a complete emancipation from the sovereign claims of Almighty God. Continue Reading...