John Gay's The Beggar's Opera took London by storm in 1728, when it was staged 62 times in succession. It remains a classic for many reasons, starting with its humor. In the first act, Mrs. Peachum, upon hearing that her daughter has married the dashing highwayman "Captain" Macheath, exclaims, "Away, hussy! Hang your husband, and be dutiful."
A Gallop poll shows a worrisome decline in patriotism among younger Americans. A mere half of Americans 35 and younger report being proud of their country. A generational shift is occurring that will have far-reaching consequences for the future of America if young Americans aren’t sure that their country has worth and esteem. How can America have a future if young Americans aren’t proud?
When the wife, mother or sister of a famous man is invoked, the first inclination is to wonder how that woman might have influenced her celebrated male counterpart. It is a reasonable question. The next question is whether that woman is worth remembering on her own, without her prominent male counterpart. That, too, can be a substantive exploration. So, when Alexander Hamilton’s wife, Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton is recalled, we might pause and wonder, “Is the most significant feature of her life that she was married to Alexander Hamilton?” “Is that what we should remember about her?” “Would we remember her without Alexander?”
In previous columns I’ve discussed some reasons why there are insightful contributions from Plato that contemporary audiences might benefit from thinking about. Here’s another: his feminism. For the most part we don’t think of the world of 2500 years ago as especially demonstrative of gender parity. And for good reason: in most cultures of that time, certainly in the Greek world, women lacked most of the prerogatives of men, and were regarded by many as not even being capable of complex thought, let alone running a business or holding political office. This seems to suggest some cognitive dissonance: in the pantheon of Greek gods, the goddesses were as capable as their male counterparts at scheming and maneuvering. Athena was in fact the goddess of wisdom – why would the divine embodiment of wisdom be a woman if actual women were irrational and incapable of becoming wise? Leaving the divine realm aside, the idea of real-world women wielding power was also not unknown. Queen Artemesia, for instance, was known as an effective and intelligent leader and naval commander. One suspects that although there were commonly-known examples of women displaying the qualities they were purported not to have, their subordinate status was nevertheless the rule regardless of the absence of good reasons.
Why should we care about Mercy Otis Warren’s political writings today? Just because she’s a woman? No, but then again, maybe yes.
Even if we keep sex and gender out of it, Warren was impressive in her own right. At an early age, she studied the classics—history, literature, political theory, and philosophy—with her brother, James Otis. During the War of Independence and the debates over the Constitution, she drew upon this rich education while writing political poems, plays, and tracts for general consumption. Perhaps most impressively, in her three-volume History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution, she imparts the wisdom she gained through study and experience by commenting on human nature in general and the character of the American people in particular.
June’s birthday is the British liberal social theorist, writer, and political activist Harriet Martineau (born June 12, 1802). Often described as the first female sociologist, Martineau wrote on a wide variety of subjects such as religion, economics, and travel. She also wrote novels and was a translator of Auguste Comte. Unusually for a woman of her time, she was able to support herself solely through her writing.
As Thomas Jefferson neared his death—which came on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence—he composed some of the most famous and optimistic lines ever to emerge from his pen. He had been invited to attend celebrations of the Golden Jubilee far and wide, but at age eighty-three he was far too frail to do so. He instead sat down on June 24 to write a self-consciously eloquent message about the significance of the anniversary to Roger Weightman, the mayor of Washington, DC, who was overseeing the festivities in the nation’s capital.
When Mozart wanted to make his name known to Vienna’s opera-going public, he made a daring choice. He had Lorenzo Da Ponte write a libretto based on a controversial play by Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais. Like the play, the opera was called The Marriage of Figaro.
To continue the Beatles analogy, if James Madison was the George Harrison of his day, certainly Alexander Hamilton was a lead vocalist of the caliber of John Lennon, and there are very good reasons why he resonates so well today that he is the subject of an all-time leading musical!
Madison may well be one of the most important writers of our “constitutional notes,” but it is to Hamilton that we owe the most creative and even original expressions of those passages into legislative and political “music.”
Attempts to reach a liberal utopia are likely to fail. I claim this not as a Burkean conservative but as a classical liberal and ardent defender of individualism. People should be free to live and interact by their own conscience and reasons as long as in so doing they don’t impose on others. However, a society that permits freedom of conscience will almost certainly contain individuals and groups who are manifestly not liberal in their everyday lives. They may respect others’ basic rights but also value solidarity over personal autonomy, hierarchy over role equality, tradition over experimentation. So long as nobody is locked into these ways of living who wishes to exit them, an open society should tolerate, and in some cases even welcome, their presence.
If we think about the most prominent of the American Founding Fathers as the Beatles, then Jefferson, Washington and Hamilton have gotten most of the attention from folks, much like Paul McCartney, John Lennon and Ringo Starr. They were the fan favorites and most prominent. But what about James Madison? I think he is much like George Harrison. Moreover, putting aside Harrison’s prodigious song writing abilities with the Beatles and afterwards, it is his sublime guitar work and his ability to fit musically with the other three that mirror the role Madison should play in our understanding of the American political system today.
Readers across the political spectrum love George Orwell's 1984His concepts of the "Ministry of Truth" and "Newspeak" permeate discussions about political rhetoric, while "the Hate" is a ritual that viewers of news programs might feel tempted to replicate. Who has not felt the urge to yell, if not hurl books, at the bleating heads on our screens?
Millions of Americans today are concerned about social justice. Issues ranging from abortion to environmental devastation to racial disparities in income, education, convictions, and imprisonment roil our nation. Similarly, more than 250 years ago, many American colonists were deeply troubled by perceived social injustices. In the 1760s and early 1770s, they protested that the British were denying them fundamental political, economic, social, and religious freedoms.
Beethoven’s opera Fidelio, which dates from 1805, addresses issues which are just as important today. Its plot concerns a whistleblower whom a corrupt prison governor has “disappeared.” His wife, Leonore, disguises herself as a young man named Fidelio and gets a job in the prison to find out if he is still alive.
Is a desire to reduce inequality largely motivated by envy? In his pioneering work Envy, sociologist Helmut Schoeck explores the ramifications of what he claims is our indelible human tendency to compare ourselves with others. He makes several distinctions. Malicious envy is the most pernicious form - a desire not to raise oneself but see others brought down. By contrast, emulation is the desire to raise oneself without bringing others down. Finally, indignation is the desire to punish those who have (are perceived to have) done wilful injustice to oneself or others.
May’s featured OLL Birthday is the Journalist, classical economist, historian, and political activist Karl Marx. Marx’s many contributions in these areas are so profound that it is scarcely possible to understand the history of the modern world without reference to his ideas and work.
When it comes to Enlightenment-era monarchs, we generally think the worst of one in particular, especially when it comes to progress – King George III of England. Too often, we think of him as the king who lost the American Revolutionary War or the king with periodic bouts of “madness.” Most recently, Jonathan Goff’s portrayal of George III in Hamilton has cemented the image of him as a tyrant and a fool.
Robert Eggers’s newest film, The Northman, is a phenomenal movie…provided you know what you are in for. The film’s advertising, apparently, did not, selling it as another gritty and gray ‘realistic’ medieval movie. The film’s depiction of Norse religious worship, rites, weapons, locations, and armor are certainly as realistic as scholars can say. But on the other hand, the film features its protagonist battling a zombie in a burial mound in order to claim a magic sword that can only be drawn at night, all at the behest of his deceased father whose spirit manifests itself as a raven. What then, is the reality which this film seeks to portray?
The 20th of May marks the birthday of John Stuart Mill who was born in 1806, 216 years ago. He was a prolific economist, philosopher and politician who advocated for equal rights for women and individual freedom. His books like On Liberty, The Subjection of Women, Principles of Political Economy and Utilitarianism are still read to this day and have made an impact on modern society.
Are employees free when they are at work? The new science-fiction TV show Severanceexplores themes about workplace culture and political oppression. Severance can also be very funny, in the tradition of Dilbert and Office Space.
In “God, Grotius, and Moral Truth: Part I,” I presented Grotius’s view that, if there are sound basic moral/political principles, their truth and their obligatory force do not depend upon God’s willing or commanding those principles. I turn here to Jean Barbeyrac’s critique of Grotius’s shocking contention as this critique appears within Barbeyrac’s notes to his edition of Grotius’s The Rights of War and Peace. I conclude with a few critical reflections upon Barbeyrac’s stance.
My previous contributions to the Reading Room describe some striking, proto-liberal strands in Hugo Grotius’s early essay, The Free Sea (1609). This two-part entry begins a series of discussions of remarkable contentions about the nature of rights and justice that are advanced in Grotius’s enormously influential masterwork, The Rights of War and Peace (1625, henceforth RWP. See xxiv-xxvii of Richard Tucker’s Introduction to RWP for a discussion of how Grotius’s Rationalism in the now canonical text is somewhat muted compared the original 1625 edition.). However, rather than beginning with Grotius’s substantive claims within political philosophy, I devote this two-part entry to a higher order contention by Grotius about the nature of sound political principles.