Samuel D Carpenter

Tag: democracy

  • Thomas Carlyle on … Democracy

    The enigmatic Victorian writer, Thomas Carlyle, who was inspired by German Romanticism, wrote some pretty fascinating lines on ‘democracy’ and ‘government’ in his Past and Present (1843): Democracy, which means despair of finding any Heroes to govern you, and contented putting-up with the want of them, alas, thou too, mein Lieber [German: my dear], seest well…

  • Only E P Thompson could say it like this

    From ‘In Defence of the Jury’, in E P Thompson, Making History: Writings on History and Culture (New York: New Press, 1994): … Two basic propositions of democracy are so bizarre to their [UK government bureaucrats’] atrophied faculties that they really cannot comprehend them. The first is that there could be occasions when laws are judged…