Referencing yesterday’s post regarding the restriction of drink specials I just couldn’t understand why I was so bothered. So I started surfing my Hannah Arendt on the bookshelf, and she got me pointed towards the old Burke and Montesquieu. Referencing The Spirit of the Laws (my version is in english), Part 3, chapter 6, “May we be left as we are, said a gentleman of a nation closely resembling the one of which we have just given an idea. Nature repairs everything. It has given us a vivacity capable of offending and one apt to make us inconsiderate; this same vivacity is corrected by the politeness it brings us, by inspiring us with a taste for the world and above all for commerce with women.
May we be left as we are. Our discretion joined to our harmlessness make unsuitable such laws as would curb our sociable humor.”
Okay, so I admit that I’m stretching Montesquieu’s point to match drink specials in a bar. However, I think the point is made that very smart people have been arguing for the freedom of our indiscretions for 300 years. I think his point is made, that there is a place for the law, and there’s a place for personal Reason, and they’re not always the same place.
Not long after Montesquieu was critiquing the French crown Edmund Burke, a famous and learned British Parliamentarian, penned “considering their speculative designs as of infinite value, and the actual arrangement of the state as of no estimation, they are at best indifferent about it. They see no merit in the good, and no fault in the vicious, management of public affairs; they rather rejoice in the latter, as more propitious to revolution.” Burke wrote this in reference to the French Terror and the ideals of the revolution. He would comment, as Arendt did in late centuries, that there is a danger in people assuming the body politic has paramount authority in determining Right behavior.
I’m not saying that banning happy hour is totalitarian in nature, but I am suggesting that it’s a bit much.
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