Kategorie: English

Philosophy for the citizen, not for the guild. In 1739 a twenty-eight-year-old Scot published a book that set out to place the whole of philosophy on a new foundation: A Treatise of Human Nature, three volumes. Today it counts as one of the most important philosophical works in history. At the time, almost no one…

The Channel was never a wall. In this part I must add a fact that for seven parts we have all but kept quiet. All this time we talk of two worlds, the island and the Continent, as if more than thirty kilometres of water divided them. And then this: for a hundred and twenty-three…

The Enlightenment from below. In April 1764, Voltaire was annoyed with Scotland. In the Gazette littéraire de l’Europe, a paper he supported and wrote for, an anonymous barb appeared that is easy to credit to him. The occasion was a book by the Scottish judge Lord Kames, who had dared to dismiss the French classics…

Who tames power? Audioversion Substack > In the last part I left Magdeburg lying as a field of ash. In 1631 Tilly’s troops had wiped out the richest city of the German interior, twenty-five thousand dead, the town burned down to the cathedral. Out of that ash something grew. It still decides why a German…

The King under the Law. Ask a German and an American lawyer the same question, and you get two reflexes. The German asks: where is it written? The American asks: what did the courts decide before? The one looks in the statute book, the other in the precedent. To this day the world’s legal systems…

Blood and Faith. The second part left a question open. When the Anglo-Saxons came to Britain in the fifth century — did they drive out the British Celts, or mix with them? If they settled a swept-clean land, then the shared Germanic-Celtic law the second part spoke of is a fine construction with no people…

What Lay Beneath the Empire. When Rome gave up its province of Britain, an older law surfaced beneath the crumbling administration — assemblies, elected kings, compensation in place of punishment. The map above shows the “before”: a lattice of dead-straight Roman roads and Latin town-names — Londinium, Eboracum, Camulodunum — laid over a land that…

Why Europe Still Can’t Handle Elon Musk — and How Germany Killed Its Own Liberty 500 Years Ago