Word: lockean
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...slight, sardonic smile, "That's an invitation to be pompous or obscure. If you say Irving Kristol and Aristotle, you're probably both." But he admits to being a conservative, with some qualification. "That's a somewhat richer and more complicated tradition than some conservatives. I'm not a Lockean. I'm more a Burkean," he says, distinguishing himself from other more libertarian conservatives like Barry Goldwater and Milton Friedman. Of the former, he observes, "He's a philosophic radical. He is, as Hayek is, a classic Whig or liberal. Goldwater is the most optimistic American. He believes that...
Thus, people have a right to what they acquire through voluntary, free trade no matter how much inequality may result. The only requirements is that both sides have a right to what they trade in the first place. Nozick advances a theory of original rights to goods, using many Lockean concepts of property, to get things started...
...consistent within the film, and more hopeful for Peckinpah's future that the director does not allow the traditional American "back to the garden" virtues which he celebrated in Cable Hogue to be successful. The modern world is not the Old West (which in itself was not precisely the Lockean state of nature that Peckinpah has sometimes made it out to be). There's got to be a new ideal, which Peckinpah has not yet found...
WALZER'S political universe is existential and consensual. He takes the Lockean consent-of-the-governed (if not quite the social contract) as a real and serious matter. This seriousness focuses the essays on a procedural rather than substantive ethics. As a tool of analysis, consensual theory can say little about those whose consent is tacit. A silent majority is negative data. Walzer necessarily concentrates on those whose moral initiatives are obvious and visible, as with the radical or dissenting intellectual. Inevitably, and perhaps for the best, he describes a political world as confronted by people like himself...
...even national characteristics in deciding the future of societies. The concepts that people have of national characteristics, of course, are often mere caricatures, but they generally contain some truth, of a subtler variety than meets the eye. The American devotion to individualism and freedom can be exaggerated; yet the Lockean principles of individual liberty and ordered freedom that underlie the U.S. Constitution and indeed U.S. society are related to the American character and the American ideal. The line leading from the czars to Stalin to the Kremlin's present rulers is by no means straight. Still...