moralistes

Updated: May 26, 2025

It was always so, and this, no doubt, is why popular democracy, from Plato's to our own times, has never been defended by the great thinkers. This fact has greatly struck Emile Faguet. ``Almost all the thinkers of the nineteenth century, he says, ``were not democrats. When I was writing my Politiques et moralistes du XIXe siecle this was my despair.

Gustave Le Bon - The Psychology of Revolution

Hamilton and the constitutional liberals asserted that the state should interfere exclusively on behalf of individual liberty; but Hamilton was no democrat and was not outlining the policy of a democratic state. In point of fact democracies have never been satisfied with a definition of democratic policy in terms of liberty. Not only have the particular friends of liberty usually been hostile to democracy, but democracies both in idea and behavior have frequently been hostile to liberty; and they have been justified in distrusting a political régime organized wholly or even chiefly for its benefit. "La Liberté," says Mr. Emile Faguet, in the preface to his "Politiques et Moralistes du Dix-Neuvième Siècle" "La Liberté s'oppose

Herbert David Croly - The Promise of American Life

Amid tumultuous applause, she gave as encore something that contained a fragment of Feydeau, and its closing words woke up my drowsy soul, like a clap of thunder: 'Ce que les poetes appellent l'amour, et les moralistes l'adultere! Leo, there is a moral somnambulism more frightful than that which leads to midnight promenades on the combs of roofs, and the borders of Goat Island; so I wiped my tears away, and after that day, began to read the billet doux and wear the flowers of my 'consolation prize'."

Augusta J. (Augusta Jane) Evans - At the Mercy of Tiberius

As M. Faguet says in the introduction to his "Politiques et Moralistes du Dix-Neuvième Siècle," from which I have already quoted: "Liberté et Égalité sont donc contradictoires et exclusives l'une et l'autre; mais la Fraternité les concilierait. La Fraternité non seulement concilierait la Liberté et l'Égalité, mais elle les ferait gêneratrices l'une et l'autre."

Herbert David Croly - The Promise of American Life