Joseph de Maistre Quotes
All power, all subordination to authority rests on the executioner …. Remove this incomprehensible agent from the world and at that very moment order gives way to chaos, thrones topple and society disappears.
Joseph de Maistre, 1753-1821, French Philosopher & Statesman, Les Soirees de Saint Petersberg, 1821
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In 1877 Wasburn was dropped from the List of Ministers by the Unitarian Church. He had become quite atheistic.
those engaging in civil disobedience This was written in Scotland before Witherspoon emigrated to America. A major issue of political and religious debate at the time in Scotland was civil disobedience. “Reform” religious advocates argued for the moral propriety of civil disobedience where the protester’s conscience felt that the laws were immoral and unjust. The were referred to as “Moderates.” Witherspoon, early in his career, was one of the conservatives who argued then, against the Moderates, that civil disobedience should be punished very severely. The conservative rhetoric at the time sarcastically referred to protestors as having “tender consciences.” The issue was contentious then, later in America, and is so even today.
It is hard for us today to understand why intelligent, thoughtful, people would seriously consider and even advocate anarchy. Yet there were many intelligent people who preached anarchy. The key to understanding this is that it is also hard for us to realize how terrible and actually dangerous was typical life under the Russian Government of the Czars. It was not only that most people were serfs--virtually slaves, but the government officials, the military and civilian both, could and did, abuse people in every way imaginable. In America today, if any of us were unfortunate to be the victim of violence, the odds are high that it would be at the hands of another citizen. In Russia (and other countries) at the time, the odds were that the perpetrator of the violence was a government official or government sanctioned person—police, military, aristocrats, civil officers. As but one example. Cossacks would frequently get drunk, pillage and rape a community and kill any who resisted—all with impunity. This quotation from Tolstoy is the classic argument of the anarchist at the time. It was impossible that the absence of government could be as bad as the government then was.
Joseph-Marie, comte de Maistre was a Savoyard philosopher, writer, lawyer and diplomat who advocated social hierarchy and monarchy in the period immediately following the French Revolution. Despite his close personal and intellectual ties with France, Maistre was throughout his life a subject of the Kingdom of Sardinia, which he served as a member of the Savoy Senate (1787–1792), ambassador to Russia (1803–1817) and minister of state to the court in Turin (1817–1821).
