Guest Post by Simon Elmer
“If the mainspring of popular government in peacetime is virtue, the mainspring of popular government during a revolution is both virtue and terror; virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing but swift, severe, inflexible justice; it is therefore an emanation of virtue. It is less a principle in itself than a consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to our nation’s most pressing needs.”
Maximilien Robespierre, On the Principles of Political Morality, 1794
The past three years have exposed the structural flaw in Western democracy with more disastrous consequences for its populations than at any time in recent history.
It’s generally known that democracy, from the Ancient Greek dēmokratia, means ‘rule by the people’; but it is perhaps less widely known that the fifth-century city-state of Athens on which the West modelled its democracy was a slave-owning society in which only adult males and hereditary citizens comprising maybe 10-15 per cent of the population had the right to vote.
Continue reading “Virtue and Terror: How the New Normal was Created”
