p. 16 Lincoln “GK Chesterton perfectly captured the delicacy of his operation: “He loved to repeat that slavery was intolery while he tolerated it; and to prove that something ought to be done while it was impossible to do it… But, for all that, this inconsistency beat the politicians at their own game … and this abstracted logic proved most practical after all. For, when the chance did come to do something, there was no doubt about the thing to be done. The thunderbolt fell from the clear heights of heaven.”
p. 90 “Armies of the ancient regime were precious items in themselves. An able officer corp of nobles was literally irreplaceable; it could not be expended recklessly. The officers were professionals with expensive training, and they led expensive mercenaries. The aim of such an army was not only to protect valuable territory but to protect its valuable self… All this was changed by the Revoltion. The new force was the People in Arms, raised by conscription for mass resistance to encirclement by the combined regents of Europe. The aim was no longer to maneuver for position but to destroy attacking armies, at whatever cost to one’s own troops. This is the “political fanaticism” Calusewitz attributes to the French of the period. Their officers were not the scions of noble houses, but talented men from the bourgeoiuse or the intelligentsia. Carnot himself was a poet-engineer, born of a notary. Armies were thrown into war with a new recklessness, once it was clear that officers’ positions could be rapidly filled again.”
p. 96 “After Napoleon became first consul for life – and then emperor – he merged the highest military and political authority in himself, and his military talent and appetite outran their real usefulness to the French nation. … Napoleon could not, in his civil capacity, control war because war controlled him. He was imprisoned by his own skills, a slave to them.”
p. 160 The young David Hume withdrew from society while he worked out his lasting contribution to philosophical method, the Treatise of Human Nature (1739). After he published that work, Hume did want followers, but he found none – the book’s influence would be exerted only over a long time and at some distance (initially in Germany). Hume then changed his whole mode of life and did become an intellectually leader – through his enormously popular History of England and his moral and political essays. He exemplified in his own life the two tendencies of intellectual excellence: (a) towards a more severe and lonely quest for the truth and (b) towards a less exacting but more accessible truth, one more to be disseminated than discovered. The best intellectual route is done by the first route, but leadership is made possibly only by the second.”
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