Sunday, August 11, 2013

Property-Owning Democracy: A Short History

An interesting article by Ben Jackson of Oxford University here. A quote:
The earliest versions of this form of argument, articulated for example by such pre-commercial renovators of classical republicanism as James Harrington and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, were agrarian and austerely critical of commerce and luxury. ...
This is important because whereas I don't see, after much research, Rousseau as being influential on America's Founders (perhaps he influenced them by osmosis), Harrington was.

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