Leadership

Chapter VI : The Ground of Hope Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can be maintained without religion.   - George Washington The basic ideas of the free society all turn out, upon analysis, to be moral ideas. The free society is, in essence, the responsible society, for responsibility is the one valid alternative to both slavery and license. But responsibility is meaningless unless there is a moral order. It is utterly pointless to try to discover what it is that we ought to do, unless there is an objective standard, by which both our moral failures and our moral successes can be judged. It is idle to talk about missing the mark unless a target really exists. The upholders of the free society, insofar as they understand their own position, are necessarily committed to a philosophy of objective moral value, and, in this regard, there is bound to be a fundamental cleavage between the two conceptions of life now c...

Chapter V :   The Dignity of the Individual The ideal is very powerful.   - Alan Paton The recognition that individuals are different is as intrinsic to the free society as is the recognition that all men are created equal, and the two conceptions are in no sense incompatible. Both ideas are challenged at once by the communist system. In the entire area in which the thinking of Marx and his disciples now reigns there is a powerful appeal inherent in the notion of a great monolithic society in which the individual loses his identity, because he becomes the mass man and glories in doing so. The only way in which this can be countered with success is by presenting a far more alluring alternative, the idea of a society in which individuality is respected, protected and developed. The philosophy of freedom at this point rests upon a careful effort to face honestly what man is. Man differs from all other creatures, not merely in his capacity to ex...

Chapter IV: The Idea of Equality Dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.   - Abraham Lincoln   The two great ideas of liberty and equality are often mentioned together, but the right relationship between them is far from simple. Though we may be sure that both are needed in a genuinely free society, there are many ways in which their relationship is marked by tension rather than by harmony. It is relatively easy to have liberty, at least of a certain kind, if we are not concerned with equality, because then we merely allow nature to take its course. We give the strong members of the community liberty to dominate others as they like, to acquire wealth as they like and to keep as they like. Such a system is bound to be so ruthless that equality, in any meaningful sense, is impossible. On the other hand, it is relatively easy to maintain equality if we are not concerned with personal liberty. We might make all wages everywhere ...