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Quote by PN Haksar

“However, it is too much to expect that our politicians as a class possess either a feeling for history or a sense of history. They do not even ask the basic question of historiography, namely, how and why things have happened as they did.”

Quote by PN Haksar

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PN Haksar

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“Progressives did not like the antiquated thinking that saw the Constitution as a barrier to government expansion. The "living Constitution" was born. That benign-sounding phrase (coined later) was conjured up to justify changing the Constitution, without formal amendment, from a limit on power to a blank check. What was impermissible to the federal government by an earlier interpretation became permissible once the Constitution was construed as a evolving document. But by that philosophy, the Constitution is no limit on government power at all. A constitutional government that defines its own powers is a contradiction in terms.”

ConstitutionProgressivismConstitutional LawOriginalismLiving Document
Book:Your Money or Your Life: Why We Must Abolish the Income Tax
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“How could those who wrote the Constitution possibly understand its meaning better than those who had the experience of observing and participating in its operation? It is one thing to rail against the evils of politically unaccountable judges enlarging constitutional rights beyond the ideas and purposes of their adopters; another to explain why morally sustainable claims of equality be held captive to the extraordinary obstacles of Article V or subject to the partial and incomplete understandings of 1789 or 1868.”

U S ConstitutionOriginalismOriginal Meaning
Book:Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution
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“It is in no way remarkable, and in no way a vindication of textual evolutionism, that taking power from the people and placing it instead with a judicial aristocracy can produce some creditable results that democracy might not achieve. The same can be said of monarchy and totalitarianism. But once a nation has decided that democracy, with all its warts, is the best system of government, the crucial question becomes which theory of textual interpretation is compatible with democracy. Originalism unquestionably is. Nonoriginalism, by contrast, imposes on society statutory prescriptions that were never democratically adopted.”

Originalism
Book:Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts
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“The Court’s insistence that judges and lawyers rely nearly exclusively on history to interpret the Second Amendment thus raises a host of troubling questions. Consider, for example, the following. Do lower courts have the research resources necessary to conduct exhaustive historical analyses in every Second Amendment case? What historical regulations and decisions qualify as representative analogues to modern laws? How will judges determine which historians have the better view of close historical questions? Will the meaning of the Second Amendment change if or when new historical evidence becomes available? And, most importantly, will the Court’s approach permit judges to reach the outcomes they prefer and then cloak those outcomes in the language of history?”

Supreme Court2022Originalism
Book:New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen
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“The key to understanding the course of history is to divide history into two parts. One part follows a predetermined direction and the other part is random and unpredictable. The part that follows a predetermined direction is the part that results from ever increasing human knowledge of the world we live in. The world we live in is structured and understandable and is explained by the laws of physics, chemistry and biology and the known properties of the particles, elements and compounds that make up our world. Our ever increasing knowledge of these laws and properties of matter comes to us in a predetermined and rational order from the easiest discoveries being made first to the more difficult discoveries being made later.”

Karl MarxTechnological ChangeCultural ChangeHistoricismBig HistoryMacro SociologyMacro HistoryMeta History
Author:Rochelle Forrester
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“The order of discovery concerning the materials in the human environment and of the technology that resulted from such discoveries was not haphazard or accidental. The order of discovery followed a logical order and an order that it had to follow. The easier discoveries were made before the harder discoveries; discoveries that were dependent upon prior discoveries being made, were only made after those discoveries; and inventions that were not economic or did not meet human needs were not made until they made economic sense or until a need arose. The course of human social and cultural history is written into the structure of the universe.”

Technological ProgressKarl MarxCultural ChangeHistoricismHistorical ChangeMacrohistoryMetahistoryMacro Sociology
Book:How Change Happens: A Theory of Philosophy of History, Social Change and Cultural Evolution
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