> It is a bit irritating, and I rather like Konner, whose The Tangled Wing is
> really a model of thoughtful and restrained popularization of
> sociobiology--I recommend it. It's out in a new edition I haven't read.
>
> I included just
> >enough of the author's paean to Jefferson and Madison and the US
> >constitution
> >to give the flavor. How wise the great fathers were about human nature!
>
> Well, I'm more or less the house "right winger," as a liberal democrat and
> defender of constitutional democracy, but is it really out of place to say
> that the framers, and in particular Madison, really was very wise and
acute
> about politics (that is, about human nature). I actually hold less of a
> brief for Jefferson (who was not a framer), despite his being, on paper,
> somewhat more "progressive," but the Federalist Papers are a profound
> meditation on politics whose lessons anyone interested in the design of a
> new social order--which is what Madison, Hamilton, and Jay were doing--had
> better absorb thoroughly, in both its successes and failures. One needn't
> share M2Js bias towards the protection of property to appecriate their
> acuity about how politics works.
>
> How
> >marvelous that their deep and timeless insights should now be ratified by
> >modern science!
>
> Well, if their insights were not ratofied by science, they wouldn't be so
> good, eh?
Of course the Fed. Papers are, as you say, a profound meditation on politics.
I was only mocking Konner's civic piety. His sort of updated vital center liberalism, and the "consensus" version of US history that goes along with it, is Panglossian and eminently worthy of mockery.
Jacob C.