Circa1865

A Worthy Institution for Negroes

“There is an industrial college for Negroes at Conroe, Texas, known as the Conroe-Porter Industrial College, which ought to become a great institution. The property consists of eight acres of land paid for, one four story building with twenty-three rooms, two more buildings, and enough lumber on the ground to erect another commodious building. The college currently has about 40 boarders and 100 other students.

The object of the school is to teach young Negroes three lessons: 1. The science and art of politeness; 2. how to obey the law, and respect for public sentiment; 3. how to resist temptation and be virtuous; 4. that idleness is sin and all labor is virtuous; 5. that good character is the greatest wealth; 6. that the white people of the South are the Negro’s best friend; and 7. That Christianity means love and service.

The Houston Post says: “An institution like this deserves encouragement nor only for the great good which will accrue to the Negroes who learn these important truths, but for the welfare of the white people among whom the Negroes have to live. A Negro who is polite, law-abiding, virtuous, honest and industrious will never lack for friends in the South, and if the Southern people could have their way, all the Negroes would live up to the standard of this school at Conroe.

There is no problem in which the self-respecting, honest and industrious Negroes are concerned, and there will not be. The problem comes of the presence of a constantly growing number of idle, lawless and vicious Negroes, many of whom are continually clamoring for social equality and treatment that is not even extended to white people who are similarly idle and vicious.

In commending this institution, the integrity of the management is presumed through the indorsement of the Houston Post. If this industrial school, or college, is conducted on the lines indicated, our white people should give it hearty encouragement. Let its maintenance be by our own people, entirely free from Northern missionaries. An institution properly conducted on these lines would rapidly prove a blessing to both races.”

(Worthy Institution for Negroes. Confederate Veteran Magazine, Volume XIII, No. 5, May 1905, S.A. Cunningham, pg 210.

Gen. Samuel G. French, a Southern officer born in New Jersey, wrote postwar of the extreme sacrifices Americans in the South had made in their drive for political independence. Speaking to a group regarding their memorial efforts, he said:

“I am not unmindful, ladies, of the power you possess & can exercise in preserving the true story of the war & the memory of the South’s soldiers. Tell the true story to your children. Because if you don’t, their teachers will tell them their version.”

Shaking the Instincts of Our Youth

“She arrived in Wilmington, North Carolina before dawn on December 30, 1866. Had she been superstitious, Amy Bradley might have felt that even the elements were trying to tell her that “the mission was doomed, for “the snow was falling fast, making the prospect cold and cheerless.” Undaunted by her chilly reception in town, she got to work shortly after light.

She first presented a letter of introduction to Rev. S.A. Ashley, a New Englander who represented the interests of the American Missionary Society, the Freedman’s Bureau and who was described to her as “the superintendent of Wilmington Schools.”

Their conference was followed by a tour of Dry Pond, one of the city’s poorest white neighborhoods. Amy then paid formal calls upon several local carpetbag politicians, men of substance who might be empathetic to her “mission,” because of a shared New England background or identification with Republican party politics. These gentlemen, “though courteous in their reception, frankly, told her it was impossible for her to succeed.”

Their pessimism sprang from an understanding of Wilmington’s attitudes rather than any personal distaste for Amy or disdain for her proposed school. However, they knew full well that in the emotional aftermath of defeat and devastation of Reconstruction, Wilmington’s old-line Conservatives would not be so charitable. “Do-gooders from the north were not held in high esteem. As one observer put it:

“Following the destruction of the Southern States by armies of northern radicals, swarms of the riffraff of northern cities, the dregs of northern society, poured into the South. Among them were the female “missionaries,” as they styled themselves, with a “holier than thou” attitude. “How much better it is to do it our way,” said those arrogant New England schoolmarms.”

Amy soon became a familiar Wilmington figure as she went house to house drumming up interest in her proposed school. Despite many town women pulling their skirts aside when she passed, or spat on her, she held her head high and continued the rounds. In early January 1867 one local carpetbagger capitulated to her badgering and gave her the key to the old Dry Pond schoolhouse, abandoned in 1862.  Within four days she had the school cleaned and welcomed the first three students.

After two months Amy had sixty-two members of the Benevolent Society meeting there to sew book satchels for prospective students. On March 1, 1867, she brought in teacher Miss Claribel Gerrish from New Hampshire to assist in school. Amy now had someone to talk to, walk with and share the teaching.

To make it clear that Bradley and company were unwelcome, the Wilmington Dispatch ran a front-page article:

“Equally obnoxious and pernicious is to have Yankee teachers in our midst, forming the minds and shaking the instincts of our youth – alienating them, in fact, from the principles of their fathers and sowing the seeds of their pernicious doctrine upon the un-furrowed soil. The South has heretofore been free from the puritanical schisms and isms New England, and we regret to see the any indication of the establishment here of a foothold by their societies professing the doctrines of Free Love-ism, Communism, Universalism, Unitarianism and all the multiplicity of evil teachings that corrupt society and overthrow religion.”

Although Amy considered herself a woman of the world, she was probably too naïve to realize why her school merited such an attack. Her background as an active member of the Unitarian-Universalist establishment probably made it impossible for her to understand how a religion so well-accepted in Boston was such an anathema to Wilmington. The editorialist’s more accurate charge that she was teaching a doctrine offensive to her pupils’ forefathers did have merit, for Amy never missed an opportunity to promote her political philosophy.”

(Headstrong: The Biography of Amy Morris Bradley. DC Cashman, Broadfoot Publishing, 1990, pp. 159-176).

Like the Russian Bolsheviks before them, the African National Congress regime in New South Africa renamed established cities and roadways for heroes of its communist revolution. In post-revolution Russia, the Society of Marxist Historians “demanded a review of all existing historical literature,” with students at the Institute of Red Professors formed into brigades preparing assessments of large portions of existing literature for publication in the press. The same process of assessment moves forward in New South Africa, as it does in the United States.

Deconstructing Historical Memory

“It may be a trifling issue to deracinated sophisticates, but landmarks in the country’s founding history are slowly being erased, as demonstrated by the ANC’s decision to give an African name to Potchefstroom, a town founded in 1838 by the Vortrekkers.  Pretoria is now called Tshwane.  Nelspruit, founded by the Nel family (they were not Xhosa), and once the seat of the South African Republic’s government during the first Boer War, has been renamed Mbombela. Polokwane was formerly Pietersburg.  Durban’s Moore Road (after Sir John Moore, the hero of the Battle of Corunna, fought in 1808 during the Napoleonic Wars) is Che Guevarra Road; Kensington Drive, [now] Fidel Castro Drive.

Perhaps the ultimate in tastelessly hip nomenclature is Yasser Arafat Highway, down which the motorist can careen on the way to the Durban airport.

The Afrikaans tongue, in particular, has come under the ANC’s attack, as the government attempts to compel Afrikaans schools to adopt English. Afrikaans-speaking universities have been labeled as “racist” in the New South Africa, and have been forced to merge with “third-rate black institutions so that campuses may be swamped by blacks demanding instruction in English.”

On the supplanting of the Afrikaans language, Dan Roodt relates: “Not so long ago, and Indian employee at my local branch of the Absa Bank demanded to know if I was a legal resident in South Africa upon hearing me speak a foreign language, Afrikaans.”

The ANC’s attempt to tame and claim South African history mimics the effort by American elites to deconstruct American history and memory, documented by Samuel Huntington in “Who Are We?”  Wishing to purge America of her “sinful European inheritance,” bureaucrats, mediacrats, educrats, assorted policy wonks and intellectuals trashed the concept of America as melting pot.

In its place, they insisted on ensconcing multiculturalism, inherent in which is a denunciation of America’s Western foundation and a glorification of non-Western cultures.  This mindset does not permit pedagogues to reject faux Afrocentric faux history outright.  They dare not – not if the goal of education is to be achieved, and that goal is an increase in self-esteem among young Africans, in particular.

Other self-styled victim groups, notably natives and women, have had their suppurating historical wounds similarly tended with curricular concessions. Thus, of the 670 stories and articles in “twenty-two readers for grades three and six published in the 1970s and early 1980s . . . none had anything to do with American history since 1780.” The trend, documented by Huntington, accelerated well into the year 2000, when Congress, alarmed by the nation’s historical Alzheimer’s, made an anemic effort to correct decades of deconstruction. It allocated more funds to the Department of Education, which is a lot like letting the proverbial fox guard the historical henhouse.”

(Into the Cannibal’s Pot, Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa, Ilana Mercer, Stairway Press, 2011, pp. 80-81)

During the war, Northern magazines such as “The Student and Schoolmate” targeted juveniles with words and picture games, and songs highlighting Northern political principles. Illustrations were accompanied by phrases: “cannoneers delight in shooting into enemy lines,” and “We propose to make our flag shelter the oppressed wherever it waves.” Ultimately, the magazines “sought to instill an 1860s version of “political correctness” by defining Union war aims, establishing the centrality of slavery in causing the war, and recognizing the humanity of the former slaves.” In short, the children were taught that intolerant “Southern slaveowners had grown arrogant, conceited, overbearing . . . determined to destroy the government they could not control.”

Rebel Perfidy and Juvenile Press Propaganda

“The juvenile press went far beyond providing minutiae about the War. Although it would be too much to argue that children’s writers in the North actually encouraged underage boys to join the army, many stories portrayed the extent to which a few children displayed their loyalty to the Union.

Several threw their protagonists – often twelve years old or less – into battles or other dangerous situations and ranged in length from a paragraph about a fourteen-year-old hero on the USS Cumberland to full-blown short stories and serials.

In the “Little Prisoner,” young James is finally allowed by his widowed mother to become a drummer boy of an Ohio regiment. He proves his mettle at the Battle of the Wilderness, where he is also bayoneted – not seriously – by a Rebel intent on robbing the body of a friend of his father’s. A kindly black woman takes him to an abandoned plantation nearby where she nurses him back to health, reads the Bible with him, and tells her about her long-lost son, who had been “sold-South” years before but miraculously appears just as James is captured by John Mosby’s raiders. The author describes the famous partisan as “manly” but cautions that the “stormy, unbridled passions, and . . . cruel, inflexible disposition” ingrained in this slaveholder made him an oppressive commander and an unworthy enemy.

Eventually, Mosby releases James, who returns home to his mother, revealing how “God dealt with a little boy who trusted in and prayed to Him.”

A similar tale – purportedly a true story – has another twelve-year-old Yankee drummer boy, Robert, captured at the Battle of Chancellorsville, at which he cares for both wounded Union and Confederate soldiers. He encounters Robert E. Lee, who had “none of the smaller vices,” but all of the larger ones; for he deliberately, basely and under the circumstances of unparalleled meanness, betrayed his country, and long after hope of success was lost, carried on a murderous war against his own race and kindred.”

Marse Robert treats the hero patronizingly and responds angrily when Robert declares, “I came out here sir, to help fight the wicked men who are trying to destroy their country.” Robert ends up in Libby Prison, where he survives a nasty fever, studies his lessons with a “good Colonel,” and rediscovers one of the patients he had nursed during the battle, a seventeen-year-old Confederate who kindly helps him escape. This reversal of the magazine’s usual presentation of Rebel perfidy is nevertheless true to form. Young, poor whites are not to blame for the carnage, at least in the war-stricken South presented in the juvenile press; “after all . . . it is true that the same humanity beats under a gray coat that beats under a blue one.”

(Northern Children’s Magazines and the Civil War, James Marten, Civil War History, A Journal of the Middle Period, Volume 41, No. 1, March 1995, (pp. 63-64; 68)

The study of history since the 1960s is replete with programs of “social science,” a term referring to areas of social and human interactions. This is where the fixation on race, gender and culture originates, and the Marxist reduction of all history to class and socio-economic warfare.

Most history of the past 60 years relies less on facts and then-contemporary writings, and more on modern social science theories and class distinctions. Newspapers have been the worst offenders and regularly publish hearsay, inaccurate accounts of history which do more to increase class warfare than to educate its readers.

The Myth of Social Science

Sociology and the related fields of study are not sciences. They are pseudo-sciences. They lack the essential ingredient of science, which is the desire for verifiable truth.

There have been a few times when these fields approached being scientific, but these have been far and few between. For the most part, they have been so swamped by the emotional tides of the times and by the personalities of the scientists involved they have made negligible progress. Is this because scientific progress in sociology is difficult and facts are so few? Partially, but it is more due to the difficulty of thinking rationally in these emotion-laden areas.

To investigate an area when the results may offend one’s contemporaries, or even oneself, requires a rare type of man. The tragedy is that these fields of study attract the man who is least capable of this type of thinking. A man imbued with the ideals of his time, desiring to do good, desiring social approval, is the last man for the job. These men try to benefit society in accordance with their humanistic beliefs, but they do not seek the truth.

The present state of sociology derives directly from this mixing of science and humanism. A man cannot be a humanist while he is a scientist. This is not to say that he cannot be both a humanist and a scientist. But to be a humanist while a scientist is to carry morality and ethics into an area where they have no relevance. The result is a pseudo-science because, in such a mixture, the ethical and moral considerations far outweigh the scientific.

It would be better to abandon the pretense that a combination of science and humanism is anything but a means of advancing humanism.

Is this conflict inevitable? Yes, so long as humanism takes its present form. Humanism as a philosophy is not dynamic today. It is frozen into certainty. Only the implementation of the philosophy is still a dynamic process. To humanism, as to religion, science is a potential danger. Science means change and change is a threat to any established system, particularly one that seeks to fix man’s relationship to both physical and spiritual worlds.

Today humanism and religion tolerate the physical sciences but neither is comfortable with any real investigation into the nature of man. The existence of any science is an admission that all is not known. The existence of a true social science would be an admission that there are things about man which are not known or understood – which both today’s religion and humanism deny.

Some will object that scientists seek the truth and that truth and morality are synonymous. Others will say that the truth will make us free. But this truth is not the scientist’s truth. The scientist seeks facts which can be verified by experiment. These facts may be useful, useless, or even harmful. Such facts, like science, are amoral. They exist, they have no moral significance.

One, it is true, might assess the effect of science on society as being both good and evil if one had standards by which to judge. But who shall be the judge and what will be the criteria?

(The New Fanatics, William A. Massey, National Putnam Letters Committee, 1964, pp 26-27)

Richard M. Weaver wrote: “Where education is under the control of collectivist fanatics, not only is the individual’s loyalty to truth despised, but the objective findings of science may be thus perverted to serve the ends of a political ideology.” And, he adds: “There are those in America today who apparently get academic freedom mixed up with students’ rights in general” – “and it goes without saying that academic freedom is not a tool for the “democratizing” of universities by turning them over to students.”

History versus Social Studies

“History has always been a sobering discipline because it presents the story not only of man’s achievements but also of his failures. History contains many vivid lessons of what can happen to man if he lets go his grip upon reality and becomes self-indulgent; it is a record of the race, which can be laid aside alongside the dreams of visionaries, with many profitable lessons.

Yet the modern tendency is to drop the old-fashioned history course and to substitute something called “social science” or “social studies,” which one student has aptly dubbed “social stew.” What this often turns out to be is a large amount of speculation based on a small amount of history, and the speculation is more or less subtly slanted to show that we should move in the direction of socialism or some other collectivism.

Often this kind of study is frivolous; the student is invited to give his thought to the “dating patterns” of teenagers instead of to those facts which explain the rise and fall of nations. There is more to be learned about the nature of man as an individual and as a member of society from a firm grounding in ancient and modern history than from all the “social studies” ever put together by dreamy “progressive” educators.”

(In Defense of Tradition: Collected Shorter Writings of Richard M. Weaver, 1929-1963, Ted J. Smith, III, editor, Liberty Fund 2000, excerpt pp. 191; 201-202)

Richard Weaver wrote of the modern position of egotism, which seems to permeate all we see, read and hear today.  This develops, he reasoned, “when man has reached a point at which he will no longer admit the right of existence of things not of his own contriving.”  He presents the paradox of man’s continual warring upon nature as “not a sign of superiority to her; it is proof of preoccupation with nature, of a sort of imprisonment by her.”

The Essence of Piety

“[Man’s] immersion in the task of reconstructing nature is an adolescent infatuation. The youth is an intellectual merely, a believer in ideas, who thinks that ideas can overcome the world. The mature man passes beyond intellectuality to wisdom; he believes in ideas too, but life has taught him to be content to see them embodied, which is to see them under a sort of limitation. In other words, he has found that substance is part of life, a part which is ineluctable.

The humbler view of man’s powers is the essence of piety; and it is, in the long run, more rewarding, for nature seems best dealt with when we respect her without allowing ourselves to want too fiercely to possess her.

The second form of piety accepts the substance of other beings. It is a matter of everyday observation that people of cultivation and intellectual perceptiveness are quickest to admit a law of rightness in ways of living differently from their own; they have mastered the principle that being has a right qua being.

Knowledge disciplines egotism so that one credits the reality of other selves. The virtue of the splendid tradition of chivalry was that it took formal recognition of the right to existence not only of inferiors but also of enemies.

The modern formula of unconditional surrender – used first against nature and then against peoples – impiously puts man in the place of God by usurping unlimited rights to dispose of the rights of others. Chivalry was a most practical expression of the basic brotherhood of man. But to have enough imagination to see into other lives and enough piety to realize that their existence is a part of beneficent creation is the very foundation of human community.

There appear to be two types to whom this kind of charity are unthinkable: the barbarian, who would destroy what is different because it is different, and the neurotic, who always reaches out for control of others, probably because his own integration has been lost.”

(Ideas Have Consequences, Richard M. Weaver, University of Chicago Press, 1948, excerpts pg. 173-175)  

The Little Rock episode of government force used in the integration of Arkansas schools caused little damage to Governor Orval Faubus as he easily secured reelection in 1958, and served three more terms.

Hollywood used Little Rock to advance their stereotypes of the Southern citizenry, with “A Face in the Crowd” described below, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and “The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit.”

The latter two paint a damning picture of poor Southern white people with the Ewell family depicted as untrustworthy “poor white trash”; Gregory Peck provided “a pale imitation of the primal Cajun doing his dance to drumbeats.” “Redneck” and “white trash” were often used interchangeably; “hillbilly” was waiting in the wings if the other two did not suffice.

Stereotypes and White Trash in Little Rock

“Little Rock was the most important domestic news story of 1957. It transformed the Central High neighborhood into a newsroom, attracting reporters from the major newspapers, magazines and television networks. By the end of September, the number of press people had grown from a handful to 225 highly visible journalists and cameramen. The standoff between the courts and the governor – the “crisis” environment swirling around the school grounds – grabbed the world’s attention.

The media easily slipped into Southern stereotypes, depicting “many in overalls,” “tobacco-chewing white men,” or as one New York Times article highlighted, a “scrawny redneck man” yelling insults at the soldiers. Local Arkansas journalists similarly dismissed the demonstrators as “a lot of rednecks.” Unruly women who stood by became “slattern housewives” and “harpies.” One Southern reporter said it outright: “Hell, look at them. They’re just poor white trash, mostly.”

In Nashville, mob violence erupted that same month after the integration of an elementary school. There, a Time [magazine] reporter had a field day trashing the women in the crowd: “vacant-faced women in curlers and loose-hanging blouses,” not to mention a rock-throwing waitress with a tattooed arm.

These were all predictable motifs, serving to distance rabble-rousers from the “normal” good people of Arkansas and Tennessee. By 1959, the Times Literary Supplement acknowledged that it was the “ugly faces” of “rednecks, crackers, tar-heels and other poor white trash” that would be forever remembered from Central High.

In the same year that Little Rock consumed the news media, Hollywood produced a feature-length film that capitalized on the redneck image. Starring Andy Griffith and directed by Elia Kazan, A Face in the Crowd was . . . “a dark drama that followed “Lonesome Rhodes,” a down-and-out man discovered playing guitar in an Arkansas jail, and traced his rapid rise into the national limelight as a powerful and ruthless TV star.

For reviewers, Griffith’s performance was a cross between Huey Long and Elvis Presley – a hollering, singing “redneck gone berserk with power.”

(White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, Nancy Isenberg, Viking Press, 2016, excerpts pp. 251-252)

The American Founders foresaw the problem of abuse of power and the rise of a president who would cut the shackles of the Constitution, though they more feared sectionalism and an evil combination of the branches of government.

The abuse of power arose with a president who fomented war upon a State, which is treason under the Constitution, raised an army without the consent of Congress, and threatened to arrest and imprison all who defied him. With the formerly federal government afterward under absolute executive and congressional control, the schools educating young citizens on their fealty to national power.

James Louis Petrigu (1789-1863) was a South Carolina Unionist and served as that State’s attorney-general. His stated faith in education as the bulwark of a republic was unfortunately upset by government control of the schools.

“Who Shall Restrain the Will of the People?”

“As Petigru understood it, the United States Constitution confirmed what the Revolution had aimed to achieve. Reversing the Confederation’s dispersal of power was but a minor part of its accomplishment, for it had by its division of legitimate governmental power between the individual States and the federal union ensured the Revolution’s goals of restricting centralized public authority in the interests of individual liberty.

But individual freedom, as Petigru said in his 1844 Fourth of July oration, required positive government as well as restraints on legitimate power. This too the Constitution had accomplished with its system of checks and balances. Without both the powers allotted and the restraints imposed, “there would be no barrier between a dominant majority and the object they mean to effect.”

Thus, by creating a constitutional union that divided sovereignty between State and nation and checked the evil of concentrated power in any one branch of government, the American people had fulfilled the promise of their revolution.

But the problem of abuse of power was not obviated by the broadly democratic underpinning of the American experiment. Nowhere did Petigru more clearly address that dilemma than in the question he asked that Independence Day audience: “For who shall control where all are equal, or how shall the people restrain the will of the people?”

The best means to control the popular passions implied in his question was education. If a republic was to survive, he thought, its government must provide the schools necessary to cultivate in all its citizens the intellectual independence that was “the bright side of Democracy.”

Without access to knowledge, citizens would lack the ability to challenge their government, and individuals the means to protect their freedom . . . [and] withstand the force of majority opinion. And given Petigru’s opinion that “the Majority are wicked is a truth that passed long ago into a proverb,” republican government could not long survive unless it sponsored that learning, for “what hope is there for the human race when there is no minority?”

(James Louis Petigru: Southern Conservative, Southern Dissenter, William & Jane Pease, University of Georgia Press, 1995, excerpts pp. 149-150)

The 1861-1865 war was essentially one of the defense of traditional, decentralized American communities, as established after the Revolution, against a centralizing liberalism which sought to establish hegemony in Washington. The latter was victorious.

Morality and Community

“Morality, as traditionally conceived, supposes, first of all, a metaphysical vision of the nature of man and the sort of life that is good for man. Virtues are cultivated dispositions of character that enable the soul to live out the life that is good for man. A virtuous soul, with much training over a long period of time, may come to love those things that are truly good as opposed to those that merely appear as such.

Second, morality presupposes community. A man cannot know what good is independent of a concrete way of life, lived in community with others, in which the good is exemplified. A man becomes good through emulation and by apprenticing himself to a master craftsman in the art of human excellence.

The marks of a genuine community are the temple, the graveyard, and the wedding celebration. The favorable connotations that attach to this essential structure of human life are inappropriately applied to associations that are not communities at all – for instance, the “business community,” the “entertainment community,” “gated communities,” or the “homosexual community.” IBM does not have a burial ground; homosexuals do not marry and beget children; and “gated communities” are often places where affluent strangers move to escape the aftermath of social disintegration. These associations have value, but they are not communities.

This is how Greeks, Romans, Hebrews, Christians and Muslims traditionally understood morality. These traditions had different understandings of what the human good is, what the virtues are, and how they should be ranked, but they never questioned the metaphysical postulate that there is such a thing as the human good and that morality is the adventure of critically exploring it on a concrete form of life.

Liberalism rejects this fundamental assumption, arguing that a metaphysical vision of the human good is not something human beings can agree on. Since compromise over questions of the ultimate good is not possible, liberals argue that constant and implacable conflict is inevitable.

Liberalism gradually began to shape American public policy after the Civil War and kicked into high gear after World War II. The Bill of Rights, designed to protect the States – distinct political societies capable of pursuing radically different forms of social life – from the central government, was turned upside down to protect the autonomy of the individual from the States.

The regulation of morals, law enforcement, and religion, which gave legal protection to distinct ways of life, was transferred by judicial social engineers to the central government. The education of children, which had been the province of local schools financed by real estate taxes, was now regulated by the federal courts.

By the 1980s, the earlier philosophical rejection of the Western conception of morality was cashed out in the colleges of many of the institutions necessary to sustain it. The United States was becoming a spiritual desert, and the signs of moral decay were ubiquitous: a spectacular increase in crime, divorce, falling educational standards, promiscuous abortion, illegitimacy, anomie, and a society with little desire to reproduce itself. If we wish to make the world safe for substantial moral communities, we must consider serious political alternatives to the master creation of liberalism, namely, the large-scale centralized state.”

If we wish to make the world safe for substantial moral communities, we must consider serious political alternatives to the master creation of liberalism, namely, the large-scale centralized state.”

(Communitarians, Liberals, and Other Enemies of Community and Liberty: Scaling Back the Enlightenment, Donald W. Livingston, Chronicles, July 2002, excerpts pp. 23-25)