Ex Libris

A few weeks ago, I was able to sit in at work on an interview with Edward Ericson, a Calvin College professor of English (emeritus), and a longtime friend and collaborator with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (and editor of the abridged version of The Gulag Archipelago).  In anticipation of the event, I purchased a copy of Ericson’s The Solzhenitsyn Reader (which is well worth the price and contains samples of a wide range of Solzhenitsyn’s work), and also a copy of the book that occasioned the interview, the first uncensored edition of Solzhenitzyn’s In The First Circle.  The novel was first released in the West in the late 1960′s in truncated form; Ericson explains in his foreword to the new edition:

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The drama of [Solzhenitsyn's] life story took a quantum leap forward when in 1962, as a total unknown, he made his sensational entry onto the world’s stage with the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a story about life in the Soviet prison camps…

…Hoping to parlay one success into another, Solzhenitsyn decided to try to squeeze In the First Circle through the censor’s sieve.  Yet, anticipating that its themes transgressed strict Soviet limits, he tempered his hopes with realism and in 1964 put the manuscript through a process of “lightening.”  The pruned and politically toned-down result of this act of self-censorship was what he later called an “ersatz, truncated” version; the number of chapters dropped from ninety-six to eighty-seven.  In an augury that Solzhenitsyn’s  sacrificial pragmatism was doomed to fail, the KGB in 1965 broke into the apartment of a friend of his and made off with a copy of the novel, which then circulated among selected officials.  Although Novy Mir had agreed to publish the novel in its eighty-seven-chapter form, higher authorities kept withholding their approval…

…In 1968, with official harassment relentlessly constriction his options, he took the desperate step of authorizing the publication in the West of the “lightened version” of In the First Circle, a copy of which he had been able to send out.  The secretiveness required for this transmission from east to west meant that he lost control over the book and could not see it through press.

I had intended to set the book aside to be read at some later date after I had finished a number of other works I’m in the middle of at the moment, but it sat there and stared at me as I worked my way through the Reader and I couldn’t help myself.  I dove in.

Joseph Stalin in 1941

It took some work, but I finally reached the point where In the First Circle hooked me.  It happened when I reached chapter 19 – The Birthday Hero – and it gradually dawned on me that the main character introduced in this chapter was none other than Stalin himself.  Solzhenitsyn writes as if copying down a ticker-tape readout of Stalin’s mind, and in so doing creates a fascinating – but dreadfully depressing – picture.  Here we find the tyrant, awake late at night when most of his work gets done, suffering from an upset stomach:

It was not nausea, but a sort of heavy upward pressure from the stomach.  He took a feijoa from a bowl of peeled fruit.

Three days ago salvos had hailed his glorious seventieth birthday.

To the Caucasian way of thinking, a septuagenarian is still in his prime, able to tackle a mountain, a horse, or a woman.  And Stalin was still perfectly fit.  He simply had to live to ninety.  He had set his heart on it.  There was so much to be done.  True, one doctor had warned him about . . . never mind what, the man had apparently been shot later.  No, there was nothing seriously wrong with him.  He refused injections and therapy of any sort.  He knew enough about medicines to prescribe for himself.  ”Eat more fruit!” they told him.  As if a Caucasian needed to be told about fruit!

He sucked the pulp of the feijoa, screwing up his eyes.  It left a faint taste of iodine on his tongue.

Yes, he was perfectly fit, but he noticed certain changes as the years went by.  He had lost his hearty appetite.  There was nothing he savored; eating had begun to bore him.  He no longer delighted in selecting wine for each dish.  Tipsiness simply gave him a headache.  If stalin sometimes sat over a meal half the night with his minileaders, it was just to kill the long, empty hours, not because he enjoyed the food.  Women, too, were something he needed rarely and never for long, although he had indulged himself freely after Nadya’s death.  They did not thrill him but left him feeling . . . dulled.  Nor did sleep bring relief as it had when he was younger: He woke up feeling weak and muddleheaded and reluctant to rise.

Though he had decided to live to ninety, Stalin thought miserably, he personally could expect no pleasure from the years ahead: He must simply accept another twenty years of suffering for the sake of mankind at large.

World-weary Stalin, trudging on one-foot-in-front-of-the-other-style in his tyranny for the sake of humanity – the most fascinating character in the book so far.

One of the most famous chapters in Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago is titled “The Ascent.”  The chapter is included in The Solzhenitsyn Reader, and I excerpt this portion for you:

Solzhenitsyn during his years as a Zek

Looking back, I saw that for my whole conscious life I had not understood either myself or my strivings.  What had seemed for so long to be beneficial now turned out in actuality to be fatal, and I had been striving to go in the opposite direction to that which was truly necessary to me.  But just as the waves of the sea knock the inexperienced swimmer off his feet and keep tossing him back onto the shore, so also was I painfully tossed back on dry land by the blows of misfortune.  And it was only because of this that I was able to travel the path which I had always really wanted to travel.

It was granted to me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good.  In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel.  In the surfeit of power I was a murderer, and an oppressor.  In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments.  And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that  I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good.  Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart – and through all human hearts.  This line shifts.  Inside us, it oscillates with the years.  And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.  And even in the best of all hearts, there remains . . . an uprooted small corner of evil.

Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being).  It is impossible to expel evil from the world it its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.

And since that time I have come to understand the falsehood of all the revolutions in history: They destroy only those carriers of evil contemporary with them (and also fail, out of haste, to discriminate the carriers of good as well).  And they then take to themselves as their heritage the actual evil itself, magnified still more.

The Nuremberg Trials have to be regarded as one of the special achievements of the twentieth century: They killed the very idea of evil, though they killed very few of the people who had been infected with it.  (Of course, Stalin deserves no credit here.  He would have preferred to explain less and shoot more.)  And if by the twenty-first century humanity has not yet blown itself up and has not suffocated itself – perhaps it is this direction that will triumph?

Yes, and if it does not triumph – then all humanity’s history will have turned out to be an empty exercise in marking time, without the tiniest mite of meaning!  Whither and to what end will we otherwise be moving?  To beat the enemy over the head with a club – even cavemen knew that.

“Know thyself!”  There is nothing that so aids and assists the awakening of omniscience within us as insistent thoughts about one’s own transgressions, errors, mistakes.  After the difficult cycles of such ponderings over many years, whenever I mentioned the heartlessness of our highest-ranking bureaucrats, the cruelty of our executioners, I remember myself in my captain’s shoulder boards and the forward march of my battery through East Prussia, enshrouded in fire, and I say: “So were we any better?”

When people express vexation, in my presence, over the West’s tendency to crumble, its political shortsightedness, its divisiveness, its confusion – I recall too: “Were we, before passing through the Archipelago, more steadfast?  Firmer in our thoughts?”

And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me: “Bless you, prison!“

Welcome to a new feature here on Ex Libris called Stupid Shit That Mao Said Which Was Taken As Gospel By Idiot Leftists Worldwide Even Though Mao Was Dumber Than A Sack Of Hammers, in which we will be presenting pearls of wisdom from Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung. “Pearls from swine,” as it were.

Chairman Mao Tse-Tung, Sayer of Stupid Shit

From Chapter 12: Political Work

The atom bomb is a paper tiger which the U.S. reactionaries use to scare people.  It looks terrible, but in fact it isn’t.  Of course, the atom bomb is a weapon of mass slaughter, but the outcome of the war is decided by the people, not by one or two new types of weapons.

“Talk with the American Cor-
respondent Anna Louise Strong”
(August 1946), Selected Works,
Vol. IV, p. 100

Now that’s some stupid shit!

There is none. Jean-François Revel, writing in Without Marx or Jesus:

Jean-François Revel

When the state becomes no more than a device for preserving the state, then it matters little what its origins were.  It is, in any case, totalitarian, and therefore reactionary.  It is a mistake to think that Stalinism is a betrayal of Leninism.  Neither Lenin, if he had lived, nor Trotsky, if he had remained in power, would have acted any differently from Stalin.  All of their writings, all of their actions, and all of their speeches between 1917 and 1924, reflect the practice and the theory of a thoroughly Stalin-style dictatorship.  They began in January 1918 by dissolving, with the help of the army, the Constituent Assembly set up by elections – elections in which the Bolsheviks had received only one quarter of the votes.  From that moment, as Rosa Luxemburg has pointed out so well in The Russian Revolution, Lenin and Trotsky began from the principle that they knew the minds of the people better than did the people themselves.  As Lenin remarked at the Tenth Party Congress, held in March 1921, the Party “alone is capable of grouping, educating, and organizing the avant-garde of the proletariat and of all the working classes – that avant-garde being the only force able to offer opposition to the inevitable oscillations of the petit-bourgeoisie.”  And Trotsky, on the same occasion, added that “the Party is compelled to maintain the dictatorship, regardless of temporary wavering, and even regardless of the transitory hesitations of the working class”

Without Marx or Jesus by Jean-François Revel

In light of the fact that Jean-François Revel’s Last Exit to Utopia turned out to be the most fantastic political book I’ve read in a very long time, and the first book that I read cover-to-cover without interruption from another book since forever, I decided to see if I could pick up one of Revel’s earlier works to explore his thought a bit more.  Thanks to Amazon Marketplace, I now have a copy of  1970′s Without Marx or Jesus: The New American Revolution has Begun, in which Revel argued – very much against the current of the times – that the only nation in which true revolution could occur anymore was the United States.  I’m still waiting to figure out what he means by the title, but I do see that the anti-totalitarianism that marked Utopia is very much present in this earlier book.  A sample:

For the past fifty years, every road seems to have led to increased socialism.  Every road, that is, except the socialist road.  And the reason is obvious.  The purpose of the second world revolution is to create real equality among men, and to give men the political means to decide for themselves on the great matters affecting their destiny.  Therefore, the concentration of all power – political, economic, military, technological, judicial, constitutional, cultural, and informational – in the hands of an oligarchy, or even, in certain cases (Stalin, Tito, Castro), of an autocracy must be the method least likely to lead to such a revolution.  And, in fact, what happens under these oligarchies and autocracies is that the oligarchs and the autocrats become more and more entrenched in their positions of power, and the solutions that society expects from them are more and more rarely forthcoming.  For, unfortunately, the qualities necessary to acquire power (even heroically) and to exercise power (even ineffectively) are not the same as the qualities necessary to resolve the problems of modern society.  The result is that, as authority increases, competence decreases. And since no amount of criticism seems able to halt either the increase of the former or the decrease of the latter, society is becoming more and more dominated and less and less governed.  In such a predicament, the question of whether one social system is better or worse than another becomes a matter of purely academic interest.

It strikes me as I type that paragraph that the bolded section could be a commentary on the problems in the American political system in the 21st century.  We have politicians who are fantastic campaigners, skilled in the art of “retail politics,” but who lack the principles and the experience and the restraint that would allow them to become actual effective leaders.  Not to mention that the people often fail to recognize this fact, at least until it is far too late.  Hence – Barack Obama.

Jean-François Revel’s Last Exit to Utopia is a fantastic book, and I have found it difficult to pull a representative quote that would demonstrate why I love it so much for the simple reason that there are so many points in the book that are worth quoting.  There’s actually one in particular that involves responding to an accident by driving an ambulance directly into a crowd of bystanders that completely cracked me up when I read it, but for some reason I can’t find it (even after a few runs through the multiple post-it flags that are now populating the pages).

Jean-François Revel

In light of current events, however, I think it might be worthwhile to include an extended quote from Revel from Chapter 8 – “Truncated Memory” – on the Katyn Massacre in Poland, the 70th anniversary of which recently passed:

I have often noticed that the place name “Katyn” means nothing to most young people, for the reason that their teachers and the media are careful not to mention it.  So here is a brief summary of the facts: in September 1939, after the defeat of Poland – which had been invaded simultaneously by the Nazis from the west and by the Red armies from the east – an occupation zone of 200,000 square kilometers was tossed by Hitler as a bone to his Soviet friends, along with other territories in the Baltic region, to reward them for their invaluable help.  Stalin immediately set out to purge the Polish office corps of undesirable elements, and on his express written orders, many thousands of prisoners were murdered, including over four thousand at Katyn, a village near Smolensk and the location of the best-known mass grave, and about twenty-one thousand at various other places.  To these must be added some fifteen thousand enlisted troops who were probably drowned in the White Sea.  Carried out over a few days according to a pre-established plan, these mass murders of defeated Poles, exterminated for the sole reason that they were Poles, indisputably were crimes against humanity and not simply war crimes, since the war was over as far as Poland was concerned.  According to the Geneva Conventions, to execute prisoners from a regular army who have fought in uniform constitutes a crime against humanity, especially if the conflict in question has been terminated.  The orders from Moscow were to eliminate all Polish elites in the Soviet-occupied zone: students, judges, landowners, state officials, engineers, professors, lawyers, and of course military officers.

Excavation of mass graves in Katyn forest - 1943

When the mass graves were discovered, the Kremlin blamed the killings on the Nazis.  The Western left, naturally, rushed to obey its master’s voice.  Here I am not alleging that all the non-communist left was servile, but those who did have doubts remained very discreet – plaintively perplexed rather than categorically accusing.  For forty-five years, to say out loud that Soviet guilt was highly likely, if only for the simple reason that the crimes were committed in the Soviet-controlled zone and not the German-controlled area, was to get yourself instantly classified as one of those obsessive “viscerals” of  ”simplistic” anticommunist prejudice.Then lo and behold, thanks to Gorbachev and glasnost, the Kremlin in 1990 acknowledged, in a formal TASS communiqué and without attenuating evasions, that “Katyn was a grave crime of the Stalinist era.”  And in 1992, after a preliminary inventory of Moscow’s archives, a secret 1959 report made for the KGB chief Alexander Shelepin was released for international inspection.  It recorded “21,857 Poles of the privileged classes, shot in 1939 on Stalin’s orders.”

The matter thus resolved by the Soviets themselves, one might have hoped that Western revisionists – who for decades had been wheeling out the “fascist” epithet for anyone who believed in the Soviets’ culpability – would now make honorable amends.  But that is not to know them.  Likewise, it would have been nice if the French prime minister had made a small “touristic” gesture of remembrance by visiting the Katyn graves, to show that leftists had recovered their memories and had finally stopped being moral and  intellectual self-amputees.

This persistent discrimination stems from the no less tenacious aberration that holds fascism to be the antithesis of Communism, and hence the victims of the latter, in their tens of millions, to be somehow less victimized than those of the former.  One would like to challenge the deniers and demand of them, “On what grounds do you remain silent?”  It isn’t fascism that is Communism’s foe; it is democracy, that eternal enemy of freedom’s assassins.

A voluntarily truncated memory is not equitable; it is really not memory at all.  Memory will continue to be absent as long as the left and the right alike continue to apply a double standard, treating the conquering criminals differently from the vanquished criminals.

Ravel here and elsewhere demolishes the argument that there is any fundamental difference between the crimes of Naziism and Communism.  Both ideologies are evil; only one is acknowledged as such by left-leaning intelligentsia, to their eternal shame.

U·to·pi·a [yoo-toh-pee-uh]- noun - an imagined place or state of things in which everything is perfect. The word was first used in the book Utopia (1516) by Sir Thomas More. The opposite of dystopia.
ORIGIN based on Greek ou not + tóp(os) a place

Last Exit to Utopia by Jean-François Revel

Note, dear reader, the origin of the term “utopia”: the Greek root indicates that utopia is, literally, nowhere.  It is not a place.  It does not exist.  Sir Thomas More, who first used the term, certainly never considered such a place to be realistically possible.  And the truth of the matter is that anyone remotely acquainted with the reality of human nature and history must admit that we do not live in a perfect world, and that such a place is impossible to create.

Anyone, that is, besides leftist intellectuals and politicians, who continue to insist – against the overwhelming evidence of history – that socialism can work, that indeed it must work!  They argue, in spite of all the plain evidence against them, that socialist solutions are more efficient and equitable than market solutions, and that the classical liberal system that has created the most vibrant societies and powerful economies in world history should be at least reined in and subjected to strict scrutiny, and at most outright replaced by a “more humane” socialist system.

Jean-François Revel was a French intellectual, a member of the Académie française, and one of the greatest French political philosophers of the 20th century, at least in the seemingly small branch of 20th century French political philosophy that wasn’t completely enamored of totalitarian schemes.  Prior to his death in 2006, he penned a book called Le Grande Parade, which has now been translated into English and re-titled Last Exit to Utopia, in which he exposes the intellectual and moral failure of leftist intellectuals who have served as apologists for the brutal communist regimes that brought misery and death to millions in the last century, and examines the project that was undertaken by the left after the fall of communism to rehabilitate Marxist and socialist ideas.

Anthony Daniels – AKA Theodore Dalrymple – contributes a fantastic preface to the English edition of the work.  An excerpt:

As Jean-François Revel establishes very clearly in this book, the left-leaning intelligentsia’s long infatuation with the Soviet Union and other Communist countries was not merely an intellectual error but, if not quite a criem itself, at the very least complicity with crime; and moreover crime on a scale virtually unparalleled in human history before the Nazis came on the scene.  With very few honorable exceptions, the whole of the left-leaning intelligentsia devoted a great deal of its formidable powers of sophistry to denying or exculpating the crimes of Communism, thus siding with the mass executioners rather than with the victims in the mass graves.

When the moral, economic, social and philosophical failure of Communism was admitted in the land of its birth, the Western left-leaning intelligentsia found itself with a serious and embarrassing problem.  It stood revealed for all to see as having, for many years, been morally not very different from, and not any better than, M. Le Pen of the French National Front, who once famously (or infamously) declared that the Holocaust was nothing but a detail of history.  While it is relatively easy, especially as one grows older, to admit to having been in error, even in gross error, it is very difficult to admit to having been a willing accomplice to evil, and evil of the most obvious and evident kind.  As M. Ravel convincingly explains, this accounts for the difference in the reception in France of two magisterial books about Communism by French scholars, François Furet’s Le passé d’une illusion, and Stephane Courtois’s Le Livre noir du communisme.

The first deals with what might be called the fashion for Communism as an intellectual error.  Anyone can be mistaken in his philosophy, and few people never change their philosophy in the light of experience and further reflection.  (An unchanging person would be suffering from what a medical friend of mine once called “a hardening of the concepts.”)  Therefore, however preposterous Marxism-Leninism might be as an intellectual system – “a farrago of nonsense,” as Professor Acton once called it – those who adhered to it do not stand convicted of wickedness or defect of character.  Hence Furet’s book, whose exposure of the errors of Communist doctrine could hardly be denied, was received respectfully and even with acclimation.

It was quite otherwise with Livre noir.  This book showed implacably that evil was implicit in both the theory and the practice of Communism, and that everywhere and anywhere it was tried, it resulted in the same appalling conduct of affairs, differing only as to scale.  Evil was in Communism’s DNA, as it were; and the crimes of Communist polities were not the result of a perversion of noble ideals, but were caused by the adoption of evil ideals.

Thus, those who espoused or sympathized with Communist ideals were convicted of harboring evil within themselves; and this is not an easy thing for people, especially those without a belief in original sin, to accept.  Courtois’s book was roundly condemned, therefore, by France’s left-leaning intelligentsia; and since it could not actually point to any serious factual errors contained in this massive work of scholarship, it resorted to defamation and the raising of smokescreens, such as that the book would bring relief and confort to the Front National.

Revel’s perspective seems to me a necessary antidote to the statist surge currently underway here in the United States.  Goodness knows this book is (unfortunately) on very few shelves among the current cadre of Washington “leaders.”  One can only hope the an electoral corrective is on the way, and that those who assume positions of power after the coming vote will take Ravel’s message to heart.

I was made aware of this book via a book review in the Wall Street Journal.  You can read it here.

James Madison, writing in The Federalist #14, answering the objection that the new form of government proposed by the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia is likely to fail due to the unprecedented nature of stitching together so large a republic:

James Madison (1751-1836)

Hearken not to the unnatural voice, which tells you that the people of America, knit together as they are by so many chords of affection, can no longer live together as members of the same family; can no longer continue the mutual guardians of their mutual happiness; can no longer be fellow citizens of one great, respectable, and flourishing empire. Hearken not to the voice, which petulantly tells you, that the form of government recommended for your adoption, is a novelty in the political world; that it has never yet had a place in the theories of the wildest projectors; that it rashly attempts what it is impossible to accomplish. No, my countrymen, shut your ears against this unhallowed language. Shut your hearts against the poison which it conveys. The kindred blood which flows in the veins of American citizens, the mingled blood which they have shed in defence of their sacred rights, consecrate their union, and excite horror at the idea of their becoming aliens, rivals, enemies. And if novelties are to be shunned, believe me, the most alarming of all novelties, the most wild of all projects, the most rash of all attempts, is that of rending us in pieces, in order to preserve our liberties, and promote our happiness. But why is the experiment of an extended republic to be rejected, merely because it may comprise what is new? Is it not the glory of the people of America, that whilst they have paid a decent regard to the opinions of former times and other nations, they have not suffered a blind veneration for antiquity, for custom, or for names, to over-rule the suggestions of their own good sense, the knowledge of their own situation, and the lessons of their own experience? To this manly spirit, posterity will be indebted for the possession, and the world for the example, of the numerous innovations displayed on the American theatre, in favour of private rights and public happiness. Had no important step been taken by the leaders of the revolution, for which a precedent could not be discovered; no government established of which an exact model did not present itself, the people of the United States might, at this moment, have been numbered among the melancholy victims of misguided councils; must at best have been labouring under the weight of some of those forms which have crushed the liberties of the rest of mankind. Happily for America, happily we trust for the whole human race, they pursued a new and more noble course. They accomplished a revolution which has no parallel in the annals of human society. They reared the fabrics of governments which have no model on the face of the globe. They formed the design of a great confederacy, which it is incumbent on their successors to improve and perpetuate. If their works betray imperfections, we wonder at the fewness of them. If they erred most in the structure of the union, this was the work most difficult to be executed; this is the work which has been new modelled by the act of your convention, and it is that act on which you are now to deliberate and to decide.

I submit that it is incumbent upon our generation to see that representative, limited government and real federalism are restored.  Our founders bequeathed unto us a system designed to protect the rights of individuals and the prerogatives of the several states.  For too long, we have lived under the illusion that the national government can solve all of our problems and ease all of our difficulties.  We have ceded too much of our liberty to the political class; it is high time that we stand and say “no more.”

Last week, I purchased my copy of The Federalist, one of those books that I considered essential for my library, and did so in honor of the people of Massachusetts, who, in electing Scott Brown to replace Ted Kennedy in the United States Senate, may have managed to save the Republic from the horrors of socialized health care.  (I should note that the entire Gideon Edition of The Federalist is available for download here if you’re interested.)  I’ve plowed through most of the introductory material, but tonight I decided that it was time to commence reading the actual work of Hamilton, Jay, and Madison.

Alexander Hamilton, 1755-1804

The Federalist No. 1 was penned by Alexander Hamilton, a Founding Father, Aide-de-camp to General George Washington during the Revolutionary War, and the man who would go on to serve as the first Secretary of the Treasury in Washington’s presidential administration.  I was struck by this passage, which describes the nature of at least some of the debate common at the time over the adoption of the then-proposed US Constitution:

To judge from the conduct of the opposite parties, we shall be led to conclude, that they will mutually hope to evince the justness of their opinions, and to increase the number of their converts, by the loudness of their declamations, and by the bitterness of their invectives. An enlightened zeal for the energy and efficiency of government, will be stigmatized as the offspring of a temper fond of power, and hostile to the principles of liberty. An over scrupulous jealousy of danger to the rights of the people, which is more commonly the fault of the head than of the heart, will be represented as mere pretence and artifice . . . the stale bait for popularity at the expense of public good. It will be forgotten, on the one hand, that jealousy is the usual concomitant of violent love, and that the noble enthusiasm of liberty is too apt to be infected with a spirit of narrow and illiberal distrust. On the other hand, it will be equally forgotten, that the vigour of government is essential to the security of liberty; that, in the contemplation of a sound and well informed judgment, their interests can never be separated; and that a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people, than under the forbidding appearances of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government. History will teach us, that the former has been found a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism, than the latter, and that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career, by paying an obsequious court to the people . . . commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.

It strikes me that the situation is reversed today.  Whereas Hamilton had to fight to overcome the suspicions of a population very concerned about the potential creation of an intrusive and too-powerful federal government, we must now fight against the desire of many to cede their liberty to a federal government that is all too willing to pretend that it can provide everything for everyone.  One wonders what the Founders would think were they able to see what has become of the Republic they worked so hard to build and the citizens whose liberty they strove so mightily to protect.

The Road to Serfdom, page 174:

…wherever liberty as we understand it has been destroyed, this has almost always been done in the name of some new freedom promised to the people.