Kategorie: English

The Situation In February 1763 Europe was exhausted. For seven years a war had raged that Winston Churchill would much later call the first world war, and wrong as the label is, the instinct behind it is right: the Seven Years’ War was fought on four continents and across all the oceans. At its heart…

The Reflex. When something new appears in Europe, a technology, a risk, a crisis, the first question is: who will regulate it? In America the question is: who will build it? This is no accident and no whim of the moment. It is a reflex with two hundred years of history behind it, worn in…

“Mr. Ehlert, that is just wrong!” “Well, so’s taking the country away from a bunch of Indians, but aren’t you glad we did?” — The Middle, Season 1, Episode 8 (2009) The Other Side of the Order from Below — The Middle, Season 1, Episode 8 (2009) The last episode ended on a bright note. William…

Religion from below In the late summer of 1742 a thirty-two-year-old pastor stepped ashore in Philadelphia who spoke barely any English and knew almost no one. Heinrich Melchior Mühlenberg had come from Halle, sent by the Francke Foundations to look after the German Lutherans of Pennsylvania. What he found, a European churchman would have taken…

Where the Enlightenment found roots. In 1776 thirteen colonies declared their independence. In 1789 Paris stormed the Bastille. Both appealed to the Enlightenment, but to different strands: America to Locke, Montesquieu, and Hume, to liberty; France more and more to Rousseau, to equality. And they ended as differently as two revolutions can end. The American…

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…