Auberon Herbert's fixed ideal complicates the procession of skeptics
Karl Marx, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Cunninghame Grahame, Bernard Shaw and Auberon Herbert
Herbert provides a useful test of what the closing tableau can establish. In The Principles of Voluntaryism and Free Life (1897), he derives political rules from individual self-ownership: peaceful people must control their own persons and property, and may not be compelled to contribute to purposes they reject. He also explicitly supports a government limited to protecting rights and rejects the anarchist ideal of having no fixed machinery for repressing crime. The witness inspected here is Panarchy's modern electronic transcription, particularly the sections on self-ownership, consent, and limited government.
This is a definite moral standard, not an absence of conviction. Herbert therefore sharpens a distinction within Chesterton's argument: one reader's continual movement among incompatible ideals could obstruct sustained action, but the existence of several competing thinkers does not show that each thinker continually changed his own ideal. The image of intellectual rebels supporting Canterbury works as a paradox about their alleged combined effect. Herbert's declaration alone cannot establish that effect, and Chesterton supplies no institutional evidence here that his voluntaryism actually preserved ecclesiastical establishment.
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