I intend to write an article a day in August. The articles are about the history of political philosophy; So, I am publishing the articles on Proof of Brain.
The main feature of this publicaion is a collection of articles I've titled "The Two Sides of the Coin." These articles show that the left and right come fromt the same source.
This is an important topic as it shows why both Progressive and Conservative Administrations lead to centralization.
The first articles aimed to show the distinction between the Machiavellian World View and the Classical Liberal World View. The ruling class tends to be be Machiavellian, while the merchant class tends to favor the classical liberal view.
The Act of Settlement of 1701
The best place to lauch a study of the Left/Right split is with a strange piece of legislation called "The Act of Settlement of 1701."
England had experienced centuries of brutal civil wars. The Civil Wars usually centered on control of the throne. However, the wars tended to include a religious component with Protestants and Catholics pitted against each other.
Most of the members of the English Parliament of 1701 were Protestant. Their greatest fear was that a future King would convert to Catholicism.
The fear did not end with the proclaimed religion of King. The fear was that the liberal arts schools attended by the House of Stuart taught a curriculum favorable to the Catholic view.
When Quenn Anne passed away in 1714, the crown passed over the heads of her close relatives and landed on the head of Georg Ludwig (1660 – 1727) who was prince-elector of Hanover.
Hanover is in Germany. King George I was German. Legend tells that King George spoke broken English at best.
As mentioned earlier, the Act of Settlement was not simply about the religion of the king. It was about the education of the king. The Hanoverian Kings of England established a network of universities that were set on developing a new pedagogy.
The premiere school was Georgia Augusta University in the town of Göttingen in the German province of Hanover. Satellite schools include King's College London and King's College New York (aka Columbia).
The appointment of an German King over England had interesting implications in England.
The primary factions in the English Parliament were the Whigs and the Tories. The Whigs favored a strong parliament. The Tories favored a strong monarch. Many Tories supported the ideal of the Divine Right of Kings.
During the reign of King George I and II, the Whigs grew in power. A Whiggish parliamentarian dubbed Sir Robert Walpole became the leading minister of parliament. Walpole's consolidation of power created the position that we now call The Prime Minister.
George III (1738 - 1820) was raised in England and spoke English. After being crowned in 1760, King George saught to re-established the authority of the monarchy.
To stem the influence of the Whigs, King George appointed the Tory Statesman Frederick North to the position of Prime Minister.
England had depleted its treasury during the Seven Year War. This was was known in the colonies as the French and Indian War. King George III sought to tighten his control of the colonies with new regulations and taxes so that the colonies would pay for their fair share of the war.
The US Founding Fathers had a liberal arts education. They had studied Aristotelian logic along with the writings of Roman statesmen such as Cato and Cicero.
The founder were largely whigs and indepedents. Many descended from religious dissenters who left Europe to avoid religious persecution.
When faced with an increasing number of demands from King George III, the founders chose to respond by issuing a Declaration of Independence in 1776 and a Revolutionary War.
It is interesting to note that the first troops to rally to the King's cause came from Germany. Historians tend to label the Hessian soldiers who fought for England as mercenaries.
I find the claim absurd. The Hanoverian Kings of England came from Germany. King George was the titular ruler of a large section of Germany.
The German soldiers who fought for King George III would have seen King George as their king.
During the Revolutionary War, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson travelled to France to build support for the revolutionary cause. A successful alliance between the US and France brought an end to the Revolutionary War.
After the American Revolution, King George III was still the head of England and of the universities founded by the Hanoverian Kings. So, King George tasked the universities with creating a counter-revolution that would lead to the restoration of the King.
King George held a doctrine called the Divine Right of Kings. The Divine Right of Kings held that monarch's held divine authority over the king's dominion.
Just as German soldiers rushed to the aide of the German King of England in the Revolutionary War, an army of German professors rushed to the aide of of the primary financier of the German Unversity and began drafting ideologies that would create a counter revolution to restore the monarchy.
These German thinkers drafted a slew of modern philosophies that bear names such as socialism and progressivism. Tomorrow we will examine the philosophies of Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer and other early modern philosophers.
For the picture I present a public domain image drawn from Wikicommons of the true father of progressivism as he funded the research to create a counter-revolution that would restore the monarchy.
The king is dead. Long live the king!
Many, many more people would benefit greatly from understanding the content of this post. In history are the seeds from which our present fruits, and what will pass to our posterity.
Thanks!
Thank you for the compliment. I designed the outline for a Youtube channel. I want to show that Conservatism and Progressivism came from the same place. Both ideologies use conflict to gain power and both ideologies end up creating highly centralized societies.
This observation that the Act of Settlement of 1701 was non only about politics but was about education explains one of the most puzzling aspects of the modern world.
German philosophers of the modern era mysteriously began creating reactionary ideologies that inevitably lead to centralization.
The mystery makes sense the moment one realizes that the Hanoverian Kings of England were German and that they were funding the Germany University System. The university system was simply doing what it was hired to to.
The problem I face with the articles if figuring out where to begin. The best place to begin is with a discussion of the ancient world. The problem with this outline is that I would have to produce about 20 essays with a biased view of history before getting to the juicy pieces of modern history.
I chose to start with Machiavelli as I thought it might be a quick way to introduce the conflicts that were raging in Europe during the Enlightenment.
I think the next essays will be interesting. I will look at the creation of the public education system, the French Revolution, the dawn of Conservatism and the roots of Capitalism.
I probably should include an essay on the American Revolution.
Thomas Paine meeting Ben Franklin was pretty influential. The American Revolution was at least less productive of national chaos in the years following it than the French. I think we were lucky in that. A little quirk of personality spared us our own Napolean.
I look forward to your essays. This is a fascinating topic to me, and few realize our present exigency presses now because of the compromises that were forced on our forebears.
Thanks!
I don't think it was a personality quirk that kept the US Founders from establishing a new monarchy. It was about education and ideas.
I probably should mention that my parents spent years researching the books that were owned and cited by the US founders. They were reading Cicero, Addison, Arnauld and a large number of writers who were developing the classical liberal theme.
The leading figures of the French Revolution were studying Voltaire, Rousseau. Napoleon studied Machiavelli.
The classical liberal education teaches people to think for themselves.
Modern education, by design, teaches people to conform to groups.
People on both the left and right are starting to favor strong men who can push through an agenda. Trump is the perfect example of a strong man. However, if you look closely, you will see that Pelosi and Biden are skilled at pushing partisan agendas.
So, we had one president who ruled by executive order followed by a second. It is very scary.
I have found Locke and Paine to be instructive in my own political development. I commend your folks on their rational self education, and see it has borne good fruit in your own.
I am beyond being scared by American government. Given the global extent and breadth of the censorship, propaganda, and tyrannical violence ongoing today, I am confident America is just one facet of a far more deadly and sinister polity being imposed.
Thanks!
You are right to be scared of the American government.
The members of the American Foreign service studied in elitist universities and they seem to have developed some destructive ideas about the nature of governance.
Politics inside the United States has become scary. I think the best way to explain it is with the idea of capture. The US has a two party system. It appears that the Democratic Party has been captured by the Radical Left from Europe. The Republican Party has been captured by the Reactionary Right from Europe.
This means that the United States is being ripped apart by the very division that lay at the heart of WW II.
The divisions keep getting louder and more intense and it is negatively effecting the world.
For example, you can ask: Who is Joe Biden's enemy? Joe Biden and the core of the DNC see the Republican Party as their enemy.
Conservatives see "liberalism" as their enemy.
Conservatives in the United States don't even know what "liberal" means. They are simply trained to hate the word.
Locke and Paine are liberals. One cannot talk about Locke to a Conservative because Conservatives have convinced themselves that all liberals are communists.
It is absolutely absurd.
John Locke (1632-1704) was English. He witnessed the Glorious Revolution which resulted in genocide. His writings were highly influential in the American Revolution.
It is sad when such mere connotations so overshadow a words actual etymology and definition that Conservatism, which originally referred to conserving the rights and liberties free societies acknowledge, now is considered to be nothing more than Fascism. Likewise Liberalism, which originally referred to the civil rights of free people and the necessity to tolerate the decisions free people themselves make of how to mutually conduct their personal lives.
I have long considered my self to be a Classical Liberal intent on conserving the rights and liberty free societies protect.
I am neither a Conservative nor a Liberal by the modern understanding of those terms.
I read Locke when still a child. It was formative for me, as one of the first philosophical works I was acquainted with I found both understandable in the main, and just as agreeable. Later, my read of Paine bore that same patina of agreeable rationality.