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"In the prevailing civil cult of European politics today, the final public good, which is the measure of all the others, is the self-determination of the subject (individual or collective), who, acting in an arena of increasingly open-ended choice, regards human and non-human nature as the mere stuff of technological manipulation."
Joan Lockwood O'Donovan, "Subsidiarity and political authority in theological perspective," in Oliver O'Donovan and Joan Lockwood O'Donovan, Bonds of
imperfection: Christian politics, past and present (Grand Rapids, MI:
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2004), 244 (225-245). The context in which this sits, and from the application of the historical analysis to the "evaluation in view of European integration" beginning on p. 239 especially, is rich.
Sansón Carrasco's epitaph for Don Quixote, in Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote II.lxxiv (trans. Edith Grossman
(New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 2003), 939).
"there is no true power among men except in the free union of their will; and patriotism [(patriotisme)] and religion [(religion)] are the only true motives in the world that can long urge all the people towards the same end.
"Laws cannot rekindle an extinguished faith [(les croyances)], but men may be interested by the laws in the fate of their country. It depends upon the laws to awaken and direct the vague impulse of patriotism [(la patrie)], which never abandons the human heart; and if it be connected with the thoughts, the passions, and the daily habits of life, it may be consolidated into a durable and rational sentiment. Let it not be said that it is too late to make the experiment; for nations do not grow old as men do, and every fresh generation is a new people ready for the care of the legislator."
Alexis de Tocqueville,
Democracy in America I (1835).I.V.13 ("Political effects of decentralized
administration in the United States"), trans. Henry Reeve, with revisions by
Francis Bowen and Phillips Bradley ((New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), vol.
1, p. 93-94); Œuvres, ed. André Jardin (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade), II (De la démocratie en Amérique), ed. Jean-Claude Lamberti and James T. Schleifer (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1992), 105.
"patriotism and religion are the only true motives in the world that can long urge all the people towards the same end", but only patriotism can be inculcated by legislation?
The context is a discussion of the benefits of decentralization, the careless usufruction unworthy of free men, liberty, and absolutism ("religion, and not fear, has been ever been the cause of the long-lived prosperity of an absolute government").
"religion, and not fear, has been ever been the cause of the long-lived prosperity of an absolute government": this contra Montesquieu (De l'esprit des lois I.iii.1-11), according to the Pléiade edition (p. 968).
"It profits me but little . . . that a vigilant authority always protects the tranquillity of my pleasures and constantly averts all dangers from my path, without my care or concern, if this same authority is the absolute master of my liberty and my life, and if it so monopolizes movement and life that when it languishes, everything languishes around it, that when it sleeps everything must sleep, and that when it dies the state itself must perish.
"There are countries in Europe where the native considers himself as a kind of settler [(colon)], indifferent to the fate of the spot which he inhabits. The greatest changes are effected there without his concurrence, and (unless chance may have apprised him of the event) without his knowledge; nay, more, the condition of his village, the police of his street, the repairs of the church or the parsonage, do not concern him; for he looks upon all these things as unconnected with himself and as the property of a powerful stranger whom he calls the government. He has only a life interest in these possessions, without the spirit of ownership or any ideas of improvement [(Pour lui, il jouit de ces biens comme un usufruitier, sans esprit de propriété et sans idées de amélioration quelconque)]. This want of interest goes so far that if his own safety or that of his children is at last endangered, instead of trying to avert the peril, he will fold his arms and wait till the whole nation comes to his aid."
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America I (1835).I.V.13
("Political effects of
decentralized administration in the United States"), trans. Henry Reeve, with
revisions by Francis Bowen and Phillips Bradley ((New York, NY: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1997), vol. 1, p. 92); Œuvres,
ed. André Jardin (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade), II (De la démocratie en
Amérique), ed. Jean-Claude Lamberti and James T. Schleifer (Paris: Éditions
Gallimard, 1992), 103-104. Tocqueville continues as follows:
"This man who has so completely sacrificed his own free will does not, more than any other person, love obedience; he cowers, it is true, before the pettiest officer, but he braves the law with the spirit of a conquered foe as soon as its superior force is withdrawn; he perpetually oscillates between servitude and license.
"When a nation has arrived at this state, it must either change its customs and laws, or perish; for the source of public virtue is dried up; and though it may contain subjects, it has no citizens. Such communities are a natural prey to foreign conquests" (92-93). . . .
"I cannot conceive that a nation can live and prosper without a powerful centralization of government [(centralisation gouvernementale)]. But I am of the opinion that a centralized administration [(centralisation administrative)] is fit only to enervate the nations in which it exists, by incessantly diminishing their local spirit."
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America V.ii.3 ("Political effects of decentralized administration in the United States"), trans. Henry Reeve, with revisions by Francis Bowen and Phillips Bradley ((New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), vol. 1, p. 87).
"to one God, with one and the same formula, let prayers and praise be addressed".
Brevarium Romanum (1568), 3, as translated by Nathan D. Mitchell, who calls this "Counter-Reformation Catholicism's liturgical motto". Nathan D. Mitchell, "8. Reforms, Protestant and Catholic," The Oxford history of Christian worship, ed. Geoffrey Wainwright and Karen B. Westerfield Tucker (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006), 339, 350 (307-350).
Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall: a novel (New York: Henry Holt and Company, A John Macrae Book, 2009), 213.
"In the prevailing civil cult of European politics today, the final public good, which is the measure of all the others, is the self-determination of the subject (individual or collective), who, acting in an arena of increasingly open-ended choice, regards human and non-human nature as the mere stuff of technological manipulation."
