Welcome to the fourth digital issue of Horizons – a monthly digest from the Foundations of Western Civilisation Program. To see previous issues, visit the website here.

The British broadcaster Melvyn Bragg has been in Australia as a guest of the Sydney Institute. Here’s his interview with ABC’s Lateline defending the King James Bible, and here’s what The Australian had to say about that interview last week. (The Australian mentions this unforgettable headline in The Hobart Mercury in 1950.)

Bragg’s BBC program In Our Time is the smartest program on the radio. In each episode, Bragg interviews three scholars on culture, history, philosophy, religion and science for 45 minutes. At the BBC website you can listen to every episode aired since 2004. It’s a great way to get on top of ideas and historical events. Here’s a few we enjoyed recently: Roman Britain, Aristotle’s Politics, and the Magna Carta. Here’s the iTunes page where you can subscribe to the podcast. [click to continue…]

Welcome to the third digital issue of Horizons – a monthly digest from the Foundations of Western Civilisation Program. To see previous issues, visit the website here.

In his Institute of Public Affairs tour of Australia last week the UK MEP Dan Hannan made a bold claim – the Anglosphere matters. He’s back in the UK now, but you can read his latest blog post on the shared values of the Anglosphere here, and another on his favourite Anglosphere politician.

The Anglosphere is the idea of a community of nations united by a common language and political institutions. The name was coined by the great historian of the Soviet Union, Robert Conquest. The United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand may be spread across the globe but they share a close political and cultural bond.

James Bennett – author of The Anglosphere Challenge – visited the IPA in 2010. We interviewed him on video here.

Here’s Roger Kimball’s review of the idea of the Anglosphere in the New Criterion,  and here’s the late Christopher Hitchens’ more sceptical take in City Journal.

The basic truth of the Anglosphere is that institutions are important. The English-speaking countries are all descendants of the English common law and the principle that government is subordinate to the citizen. And they all harbour a deep appreciation for individual liberty and limited government, an appreciation drawn from that heritage.

Yet as Hannan pointed out to IPA audiences, in recent decades Britain has downgraded its relationship with Australia to integrate with Europe.

By doing so, not only did the Britain tie its fate to a continent in decline, but it neglected its closer relations across the Anglosphere.

Video of Dan Hannan’s speeches will be available on the IPA website shortly. Want some Hannan now? This radio interview with ABC Melbourne’s Jon Faine and Amanda Vanstone is very good – skip forward past the leadership speculation to 12 minutes and 30 seconds. This one with ABC Brisbane’s Steve Austin is also very good.

Who are the best historians of the last sixty years? History Today asked a panel of historians – here is how they responded.  Michael Burleigh – one of our favourite historians – expanded on his response in this recent Standpoint essay.

Here is a video lecture by the economist Russ Roberts on “the deepest thing we know” – how spontaneous order creates civilisation.

Something out of left-field – we enjoyed this short history of Madame Tussaud’s waxworks museum in Prospect Magazine. Her first figure? The proto-totalitarian Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

And here is an interesting review of Tim Blanning’s new book The Romantic Revolution in the Washington Times.  I reviewed his excellent book The Pursuit of Glory in the IPA Review in 2008.

Welcome to the second digital issue of Horizons – a monthly digest from the Foundations of Western Civilisation Program. To see the first issue, visit the website here.

Two important pieces were published over the Christmas break on Western Civilisation that we highly recommend you read. This piece by the Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom Jonathan Sacks on Alexis de Tocqueville and the limits of secularism appears in the January edition of Standpoint magazine.

And just before Christmas the ABC’s religion and ethics website published this speech by John Howard – “Western Civilisation Must be Defended”.

Europe’s debt problems are an old story

Like so many European leaders since, the tyrant Dionysius of Syracuse (who ruled between 405-367 BC) was addicted to spending. To fund his wars, he borrowed heavily from the inhabitants of Syracuse.

Eventually, he was unable to service the debt. Dionysius’ solution was simple. He confiscated all the coins in the city, under pain of death. Then he restamped the coins. One drachma instantly became two drachmas.

He returned the citizens’ money according to their original value, and pocketed the difference. It was now easy for him to pay off his debt. But doing so would have come at enormous cost. We don’t have price data for Ancient Syracuse, but Economics 101 teaches us that the inflation would have crippled the city’s economy.

Governments throughout history have had to figure out clever ways to avoid the consequences of their profligacy.

When they can’t, they default. Western history is littered with sovereign debt crises. Spain defaulted seven times in the nineteenth century. That was a record for Spain, but not much of one: the country had defaulted six times in the preceding three centuries. France defaulted eight times between 1558 and the French Revolution.

So there is nothing new about Europe’s troubles. Government over-spending is one of the great constants in the history of Western Civilisation. Like their compatriot Dionysius 2500 years earlier, today’s leaders of Greece thought they’d figured it out – that there was no reason for them to stop spending money they didn’t have.

But debts have to be paid off eventually. If the European debt crisis ends in the destruction of a currency, well, it won’t be the first time.

Reading, listening, watching

If you only read one book on the history of financial crises read this one published in 2009: This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly. It’s excerpted in Foreign Policy here.

And if you read only one book on how governments cause financial crises and taxes cause revolutions, read For Good and Evil: The Impact of Taxes on the Course of Civilization. Here’s a video of the IPA’s Tim Wilson speaking about that book.

Take the time to look at this article from 1994 by the Cato Institute on how excessive government killed Ancient Rome. (And maybe see Pompeii in person while you can – this article in the Art Newspaper is a disturbing look at the slow destruction of the ruins of that Roman city.)

How hard was it to actually put the King James Bible together? It took fifty people seven years, according to this fascinating article from December in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

You’ve probably read a lot about Christopher Hitchens since he died in December. But here’s one last thing that’s definitely worth it – a podcast by the free market economist Russ Roberts talking to Hitchens about the legacy of George Orwell.

We’ve had wonderful feedback about Wolfgang Kasper’s The Merits of Western Civilisation: An Introduction, which we sent to all IPA members and every member of parliament. If you’re not a member and you would like a copy, please contact Rachel Leigh at the Institute of Public Affairs on 03 9600 4744 or at rleigh@ipa.org.au.

Welcome to the first digital issue of Horizons – a monthly digest from the Foundations of Western Civilisation Program.

The Foundations of Western Civilisation Program is a joint project of the Institute of Public Affairs and Mannkal Economic Education Foundation. It seeks to reinvigorate an understanding of why our inheritance of liberty, representative democracy, religious toleration and free inquiry needs to be defended today.

Many supporters have asked us if they could be kept informed of intellectual debate surrounding Western Civilisation.

So at the start of each month, Horizons will introduce you to a carefully chosen selection of the best writing, podcasts, and videos on Western Civilisation, history and philosophy from around the world.

We hope you enjoy it and find something stimulating in each issue.

Freedom of speech in Western Civilisation

A US Supreme Court Judge described freedom of speech as “the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom.” Free expression – along with the freedom of the press and freedom of conscience – is one of the most important inheritances of Western Civilisation.

It has been an enduring obsession of political thinkers since the trial of Socrates. Tacitus described freedom of speech as “when you are allowed to think what you please and to say what you think” – it was a central, fundamental attribute of the free Roman citizen.

The history of freedom of speech is the history of religious toleration and the growth of individual liberty.

So nothing has demonstrated the need for the IPA’s Foundations of Western Civilisation Program in recent times more than the attacks on freedom of speech we have seen in Australia over the last year.

From the Andrew Bolt case to the government’s media inquiry, we’ve discovered that Australian public intellectuals are more interested in talking about how freedom of speech should be limited than how it should be defended.

This just demonstrates their utter lack of historical awareness.

For thousands of years the giants of Western Civilisation sought to carve out a free space where individuals could express themselves. Those who would acquiesce to – even encourage – threats to freedom of speech are throwing one of our most central liberties away.

Reading, listening, watching

You can’t talk about freedom of speech without reading John Stuart Mill’s classic defence of free expression. It’s in Chapter II of his On Liberty – online here: “Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion”. Here’s all the things IPA researchers have been sayingabout freedom of speech this year.

“Natural law” is one of the most important concepts in the development of the Western mind. But not many Australians understand what it means. These two podcasts from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute in June are excellent introductions: the first by Professor J. Budziszewski, “An Introduction to Classical Natural Law”, and the second by Professor Robert P. George on “Natural Law, God, and Human Dignity”.

This video from the Acton Institute is excellent too. Lawrence Reed talks about the importance of character in a free society. And here’s Jonathan Sacks in Standpoint on why social cohesion is so important to Western Civilisation.

Here’s another good piece in Standpoint on the religious roots of liberal societies.

The philosopher Kenneth Minogue reviewed Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience in the Wall Street Journal.

And we enjoyed this interview at New Books in History (one of our favourite podcasts) on the way Tacitus’ Germania had been interpreted, used, and misused throughout history.

This year we held our first Foundations of Western Civilisation symposium, with fantastic speeches from a wide variety of high-profile thinkers and commentators, including historian Andrew Roberts. Click here to see videos of all presentations from the symposium.