Lord Acton
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Mere Liberalism
A response to a common caricature of liberal beliefs Continue reading
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The Detestable Attestation
Thoughts on the federal government’s attempt to make religious groups capitulate to its views on abortion Continue reading
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Dark Vision
A critique of a “vision” of the courts as moral authorities. Continue reading
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State v. Conscience
Freedom of conscience, state authority, and the case of the citizenship oath As I had already mentioned, last week I spoke at a discussion on freedom of conscience that the Runnymede Society organized at McGill on Tuesday. It was a lot of fun, and as always at McGill there were some great questions from the Continue reading
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How Power Corrupts III
I have already touched on the issue of the meaning of Lord Acton’s dictum, that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” I have invoked J.R.R. Tolkien’s treatment of the pernicious influence of power on those who once wield it even once they relinquish it, and discussed Mikhail Bulgakov’s claim that “all power is violence done to people.” Boris Continue reading
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How Power Corrupts II
In my last post, I used The Lord of the Rings to explore the meaning of Lord Acton’s dictum ― “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” There is another novel, similar in many ways, though perhaps not superficially, to The Lord of the Rings, from which we might also learn something about Continue reading
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How Power Corrupts
Over at Bleeding Heart Libertarians, Bas van der Vossen has a post asking what is it exactly that we mean when we say, with Lord Acton, that “[p]ower corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” As he shows, the meaning of Lord Acton’s dictum is not quite clear. Prof. van der Vossen suggests three possibilities ― Continue reading
Double Aspect 