Inevitability politicians teach that the specifics of the past are irrelevant, since anything that happens is just grist for the mill of progress. Eternity politicians leap from one moment to another, over decades or centuries, to build a myth of innocence and danger.

#TimothySnyder
#Unfreedom

Hume makes the outcomes of intelligence – our expectations, predictions, and inductions – look like nothing more than sophisticated conditioned habits, which is surprisingly anticlimactic.

Wherever the repetition of any particular act or operation produces a propensity to renew the same act or operation, without being impelled by any reasoning or process of the understanding; we always say, that this propensity is the effect of #Custom.

#DavidHume
#AnEnquiry

and as necessary, as something that is not optional for the kinds of agents they are. When a set of such reasons and the accounts given of them undermine themselves, they of course lose that appearance of necessity and they lose their link to truth for those agents.

#Hegel
#TerryPinkard

Scott remarks that despite the modern property law’s complexity and its capacity to employ legions of legal experts, local land-tenure practices remain nearly impossible to codify.

when we recognize others as having the right to make certain kinds of moves within their speech-community; or when we give a reason to another person to explain or to justify what we are doing; or when we give an account of what we are doing to others that we think affirms our reasons for doing it.

We locate ourselves in #SocialSpace" when we reason in various ways; or when we assume various roles; or when we demand a certain type of treatment because of who we think we are; or when we see some forms of behavior as appropriate to the type of person we think ourselves to be;

After fifty years of the #AgeOfEnlightenment, old superstitions had lost their force – a fact of importance in producing the #FrenchRevolution.

This same day, September 5, was the first day of the #ReignOfTerror.

#R.R.Palmer
#TwelveWhoRuled