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Tuesday, November 21, 2006

Often wrong, but never in doubt

It's worth taking a moment to distinguish Hamilton from Yglesias Nominee Cal Thomas (I confess I don't know what a Yglesias is).

The thrust of Cal Thomas's book is not to be a doubting Thomas on the same terms as Alexander Hamilton.

Hamilton's doubt is an epistemological thing, the Owl of Minerva and all that, or else, as is closer to Hamilton's character, a political calculation, i.e. one cannot 'survive' politics if you try to be right all the time, as extremists of that sort do not outlast the test of time.

Thomas' book has to do more with the impossibility of ruling as Soloman did (or Suleiman?), for a string of reasons. Put in other terms, one might say that there is no purity in politics, as the devil has his due in those affairs. To me, this suggests an ontology, not an epistemology.

The latter, it seems to me, is a more stalwart approach to addressing fundamentalist passion. There is more to the story about why, but I'll leave it there with just a proposed distinction.



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