Wednesday, April 4, 2012

"extends its embrace.........."

    "Freedom, as Tocqueville sees it in the United States, is not enough to avoid tyranny.  While earlier writers show tyranny extending from a fault in the rulers, Tocqueville shows how modern tyranny - what we might call totalitarianism - results, in part, from a fault in the ruled.  He envisions a world in which men are 'circling around in pursuit of the petty and banal pleasures' while their government 'extends its embrace to include the whole of society.'  The irony here is that freedom is the driving force behind revolutions, as well as the numbing factor leading to tyranny.  Orwell shows this to be the case in Animal Farm, in which, after revolting against the humans, most of the animals forget why the revolution ever took place, this leaving themselves open for oppression by the pigs."
-Mortimer J. Adler, excerpted from his essay, Liberty, from 
his book, Great Ideas:  A Lexicon of Western Thought

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