Burke believes that the French revolutionaries deliberately and explicitly wanted to weaken these bonds of obligation—to weaken the family, to begin with, and so to weaken the deepest source of resistance to the revolutionary ethic. In his Letter to a Member of the National Assembly, written in 1791, Burke argues that the revolutionaries, following Rousseau, seek to reject the duties of the family “as not founded in the social compact, and not binding according to the rights of men; because the relation is not, of course, the result of free election—never on the side of the children, not always on the part of the parents.” The family is the primary obstacle to an ethic of choice, and so a primary target of genuinely radical liberal revolutionaries. -Yuval Levin H/T Joseph Sunde
Posted on: Sat, 29 Mar 2014 14:47:47 +0000
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