Saturday, January 9, 2010

Specific Order

The great flaw in conservatism is a deep fissure down which talk of freedom falls, to be dashed to death on the rocks of authoritarianism. Conservatives worry that the state has too much power over people. But it was conservatives who gave the state that power. It was conservatives, very similar to today's conservatives, who ceded to the state the power to produce not simply order in the community but a certain kind of order. [original emphasis]
Karl Hess (1969, The Death of Politics: originally published in Playboy)

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