"Thus the state, which in its historical reality is a fabric of law, is reduced to a business concern by an ‘economic interpretation of history’ which destroys the concreteness of legal fact and replaces it by the abstractions of utilitarian ethics; and we get socialism or the substitution of economics for justice, with its natural corollary, the destruction of that internal ‘king’s peace’ which the political spirit has guarded through centuries as the very flame of its domestic altar, and the declaration of a class war which is the explicit negation of the state."

Read Along: https://www.nationalreformation.org/post/duty-or-concrete-ethics

Written by Robin Collingwood

Narrated by Joshua Noyer

Pp 227-231 Collingwood, R. G. Speculum Mentis. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924.

It is again not in the interests of a community to sanction contracts for labour which is carried on under conditions which imperil the life and safety of those engaged in the labour, for that is subordinating the person to the contract instead of the contract to the person.

Read Along: https://www.nationalreformation.org/post/the-moral-and-legal-aspects-of-labor

Written by James Black Baillie

Narrated by Joshua Noyer

Baillie, J. B. “The Moral and Legal Aspects of Labour.” The Philosophical Review 20, no. 3 (1911): 249. https://doi.org/10.2307/2177849

It is by some such logic that I declare, without hesitation, for the sovereignty of the State, the spiritual State. For upon what is sovereignty based if not upon authority? And how, amidst the clash of the social forces, can authority survive, unless it be the final court of appeal in the sphere of reason?

Written by Samuel Hobson

Narrated by Joshua Noyer

Read Along: https://www.nationalreformation.org/post/national-guilds-and-the-state

Hobson, S. (1920). What I Believe. In National Guilds and the State (pp. 348-359). London: G. Bell and Sons.

"In the liberty (originality) of poetic thought, the race disappears, and along with many other conditions it is transformed into truth. Everyone claims to have given convictions because they are just or true or well founded, not because, for instance, an ancestor of his was a Teuton or a Latin. The past is the wealth and more than the wealth of thought, but it would be useless to look to the past for the principle of universality."

Read Along: https://www.nationalreformation.org/post/the-dearth-of-racial-thought

Written by Leone Vivante

Narrated by Joshua Noyer

“Pp 34-37.” Notes on the Originality of Thought: the Concept of Internal Necessity: Poetic Thought and Constructive Thought, by Leone Vivante, S.n.}, 1927.

With the acknowledgement that as human beings we have both material and spiritual needs.  An economy is needed which would be tailored to fulfill those needs. Occupational Organicity; the idea that society is constructed along the lines of the human body, containing a plethora of individuals with different talents, skills, and occupations, all having separate tasks but working together for a common purpose and goal within the same State structure. This will address the material aspects of our existence through its shared decision making structure and management of competition; with the aim of avoiding the cutthroat nature of modern business along with the desire to maximize profits through the reduction of wages and benefits.  While Capitalism commodifies the individual through reducing the worker to nothing more than a part within the production process. Occupational Organicity recognizes the skills possessed by each individual as being an inherently valuable part of society; guaranteeing through reliable employment the ability to improve upon that skill while securely supporting a family. Through the Guilds the individual becomes conscious of the link that exists the State, Nation, and Individual.

Participants: Joshua Noyer, Brandon Lenig, Eliot Girardi, Ian, John Maniglia, and John Savage. 

We can imagine humanity without a number of important attributes; but humanity without government is simply unthinkable, for it would then be humanity without reason.

Read Along: https://www.nationalreformation.org/post/the-family-state

Written by Heinrich Von Treitschke

Narrated by Joshua Noyer

More about the State: https://www.nationalreformation.org/chronicles/categories/the-state

Treitschke, Heinrich von. “The State Idea.” In Politics, 4–5. New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963.

"Yet Realism, if indeed strictly sane, as sanity goes amongst us men, is a view as falsely abstract as it is convenient. This sundering of external and internal meaning is precisely what our later study will show to be impossible."

Written by Josiah Royce

Narrated by Joshua Noyer

Read Along: https://www.nationalreformation.org/post/the-doom-of-realism

Royce, Josiah. In The World and the Individual. Gifford Lectures, 72–77. New York: Macmillan, 1900.

In short, we get back to the conditions which foredoomed democracy to failure in the ancient Greek and medieval republics, where party lines were horizontal and class warred against class, each in consequence necessarily substituting devotion to the interest of a class for devotion to the interest of the state and to the elementary ideas of morality.

Written by Theodore Roosevelt

Narrated by Joshua Noyer

Read Along: https://www.nationalreformation.org/post/fellow-feeling-as-a-political-factor

Published in the “CENTURY,” January, 1900

"Faith and logic become synonymous through their mutual dependence on each other, just as do the existence of love, anger, passion, and contentment. The ties that bind may at first glance appear to be the cause of division, but in the end, they are what make us."

Written and Narrated by Joshua Noyer

Read Along: https://www.nationalreformation.org/post/maintaining-perspective

More from Noyer: https://www.nationalreformation.org/post/maintaining-perspective

"We make a great mistake in thinking of the force exercised by the State as limited to the restraint of disorderly persons by the police and the punishment of intentional lawbreakers. The State is the fly-wheel of our life."

Written by Bernard Bosanquet

Narrated by Joshua Noyer

Read Along: https://www.nationalreformation.org/post/the-state-as-the-will-of-the-nation

Pp 150-154 Bosanquet, B. (1899). The philosophical theory of the state. London: Macmillan.