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Bolingbroke’s Natural Society

Bolingbroke has no attachment to the social outlook that underlies liberal ideology.  Natural society was a political society, he suggests, and had no unbridled freedom to be lost in some later establishment of government.  Men, dispersed in families, formed numerous distinct political societies under paternal government.  Fathers were the chief magistrates and kept peace and […]

Bolingbroke has no attachment to the social outlook that underlies liberal ideology.  Natural society was a political society, he suggests, and had no unbridled freedom to be lost in some later establishment of government.  Men, dispersed in families, formed numerous distinct political societies under paternal government.  Fathers were the chief magistrates and kept peace and order in their relatively small and homogeneous society by their natural authority….Inherent in natural society is “authority, subordination, order and union necessary to well-being.”  The liberal notion that consent is the only legitimate basis for political obligation is rejected completely. ~Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke & His Circle

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