Bill of Rights 1688/9 out of date excepting when it suits government

Aardvark · 15-04-2008, 05:30 PM

aarable,

Stop posting hoaxes or unresearched material. Alexander Tyler was not a Professor of History at Edinburgh.

The Mythical Alexander Tyler and His Theory of*Democracy by Gary North

Quote:

The Mythical Alexander Tyler and His Theory of Democracy
by Gary North
by Gary North

DIGG THIS

You have probably received a letter in your email box sent by some well-meaning defender of liberty. It goes something like this.

At about the time our original 13 states adopted their new constitution, in the year 1787, Alexander Tyler (a Scottish history professor at The University of Edinborough) had this to say about "The Fall of The Athenian Republic" some 2,000 years prior:
A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.

The average age of the worlds greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence:

From bondage to spiritual faith;
From spiritual faith to great courage;
From courage to liberty;
From liberty to abundance;
From abundance to complacency;
From complacency to apathy;
From apathy to dependence;
From dependence back into bondage.
Educated people have a fondness for stage theories of social development. The Communist Left embraced Marx's theory for over a century: primitive communism, barbarism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, socialism, and stateless communism (somewhere, over the rainbow.) The Right has produced a number of stage theories, but none of them nearly so popular as Marx's, nor so inaccurate.

When I first read the extract from Tyler's work, I thought it sounded strangely contemporary. He had listed the stages in a tightly written format, rather like a direct-mail advertisement. All that was missing was a bold-faced bullet at the beginning of each line. It just did not "smell" right to me. But I ignored the scent. At the same time, I did not forward a copy to anyone on my various mailing lists.

A few months later, I received another variation. Yet this time, the quotation was attributed to Alexander Tytler. Was this extra t a typographical error?

At some point, I decided to do a quick Google research job on Tyler-Tytler and his book on Athens, which I had never heard of in my graduate school days or subsequently.

A Google-based search for me begins with a name, a phrase, and the key word: "hoax." The juicier the quotation, the sooner I run the search. Usually, the item is a hoax.

Second, I look for a link to an article on Snopes: Urban Legends Reference Pages. This site specializes in email hoaxes. Sure enough, I found a version of Tyler's stage theory of democracy. I have reprinted it above.

Yes, there was a Scottish historian named Alexander Fraser Tytler. He wrote several books in the early nineteenth century, but none with the title, The Fall of the Athenian Republic. In none of his books does this stage theory passage appear.

Another site traces this quotation and finds numerous variations. It concludes that no one has identified the source.

A detailed response from the library of the University of Edinburgh reveals that no such quotation appears in the library's holdings of books by Tytler.

Edinburgh University Library occasionally receives enquiries, particularly from North America, about this particular work. However, this title is not in our Library holdings, nor does it appear in the stocks of the other major research libraries in the UK (according to the 'union' catalogue COPAC)...
Locally, the chapters of Tytler's General history ... (which we DO have) has been checked on the off-chance that The decline and fall might have been a chapter title... but it is not...

The librarian, being a librarian, covers his backside when he writes this:

Often in the enquiries we receive we are provided with a 'quote' (see below) from Tytler referring to the steps that a democracy can go thro' prior to its fall but this is not in the General history... either.
We have scanned our holdings pretty thoroughly on different occasions, going back a few years now, but we have not found the quotation or anything similar to it, but we cannot absolutely rule out the possibility that we have missed it.

He goes on to say that the U.S. Library of Congress has found no such quotation in its collection of books by Tytler.

METAPHORS FROM BIOLOGY

Robert Nisbet analyzed the use of stage theories in his 1969 book, Social Change and History: Aspects of the Western Theory of Development. The concept of self-originated (endogenous) evolutionary development began – predictably – with the Greeks.

The biological metaphor of growth and decay was popular with classical Greek thinkers, and it has remained popular. Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West was the most widely respected book written by a high school teacher in the twentieth century. While no one actually reads it these days, the fat book remains in print.

Arnold Toynbee's multi-volume history of civilization is basically a stage theory enterprise: challenge and response. Harvard's sociologist Pitirim Sorokin was just about the only scholar to match Toynbee's breadth of historical knowledge, and he also adopted a stage theory of cultural development: ideational (religious), sensate (materialistic), and idealistic (a mixture of the first two).

Nisbet argues that we need classification schemes to make sense of the world around us. We also want to be able to see what is likely to occur in the future. Developmental theories seem to offer us insight into the forces of history or processes of history.

The problem, he says, is that these processes are always being overcome or delayed by the facts of history. So, the stages are what would take place if the unpredictable events of history did not intervene. But they always do.

In a profound yet clever article published in Commentary (June 1968), "The Year 2000 and All That," Nisbet concluded his critique of prediction-by-computer-model with this observation. The biologist can predict future changes in some environmentally controlled population, but

It is very different with studies of change in human society. Here the Random Event, the Maniac, the Prophet, and the Genius have to be reckoned with. We have absolutely no way of escaping them. The future-predictors don't suggest that we can avoid or escape them – or ever be able to predict or forecast them. What the future-predictors, the change-analysts, and trend-tenders say in effect is that with the aid of institute resources, computers, linear programming, etc. they will deal with the kinds of change that are not the consequence of the Random Event, the Genius, the Maniac, and the Prophet. To which I can only say: there really aren't any; not any worth looking at anyhow.
CONCLUSION

I can do no better than to close with a citation from Chapter 18 of Ludwig von Mises's book, Socialism (1922).

The barren dispute over the economic life of the nations of antiquity shows how easily such classifying may lead to our mistaking the shadow of scholastic word-splitting for the substance of historical reality. For sociological study the stage theories are useless. They mislead us in regard to one of the most important problems of history – that of deciding how far historical evolution is continuous. The solution of this problem usually takes the form either of an assumption, that social evolution – which it should be remembered is the development of the division of labor – has moved in an uninterrupted line, or by the assumption that each nation has progressed step-by-step over the same ground. Both assumptions are beside the point. It is absurd to say that evolution is uninterrupted when we can clearly discern periods of decay in history, periods when the division of labor has retrogressed. On the other hand, the progress achieved by individual nations by reaching a higher stage of the division of labor is never completely lost. It spreads to other nations and hastens their evolution.
It is true that democracy undermines freedom when voters believe they can live off of others' productivity, when they modify the commandment: "Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote." The politics of plunder is no doubt destructive of both morality and the division of labor. But there is no law of historical decline that says that people cannot change their minds.

Changing minds is what education is all about. So is evangelism. Neither progress nor decline is guaranteed by some internal logic of society. Logic is what people use to interpret and then change society. There is no such thing as social logic.

October 21, 2006

Aardvark · 15-04-2008, 05:39 PM

A detailed analysis of the 'origins' of the quote is at the following link:

The Truth About Tytler

It is an excellent analysis and rather disproves the nebulous assertion that Tyler/Tytler made the quote in a book that he didn't write.

aarable,

If you were my researcher I'd fire you for incompetence. You actually have no idea of how to carry out research or how to check the veracity of your statements. The Internet is an excellent tool for research as it saves me a lot of time going into the Bodleian Library, but you must not take everything you read at face value.

Aardvark · 15-04-2008, 05:43 PM

..and another one:

Urban Legends Reference Pages: The Fall of the Athenian Republic

..or two:

Alexander Fraser Tytler - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Aardvark · 15-04-2008, 05:47 PM

BD, If you've a few hundred quid to spare you'd be interested in Tytler's books at:

Amazon.co.uk: Tytler
I think he would have been disappointed to have been misquoted in the way that aarable has misquoted him.

aarable · 15-04-2008, 05:55 PM

I talked to Alex this morning. He said that He did not say it but that he wished he did.

chikrodah · 15-04-2008, 06:00 PM

Gosh, darn it, Aardvark, you beat me to it

My source was a different one, though: The Truth About Tytler

Quote:

Who, then, is the author of these quotes? Even after all of my research, I am afraid I still cannot say for certain. But perhaps some conclusions may be drawn.

Each quote can be traced back at least as far as the 1950s, but only with anonymous attribution. Specific attributions, such as those to Tytler, only came later. And, of course, the quotes cannot be found to have appeared together until the 1970s. Each quote has been the subject of authorship inquiries in The New York Times and American Notes & Queries, both of which are notoriously good at verifying authorship of works, but neither of which could provide an author for these quotes.

Some readers may wonder why I chose to quote variations so frequently, and to go into such detail when a shorter examination would do. I had three reasons for this. First, I did a lot of research, and I didn't want to cut too much of my work. Second, I wanted to put any doubts about my thoroughness to rest. And third, through my quoting and detailing, I hoped to illustrate exactly how fluid these quotations have been over the past half century. New words are added, old ones disappear, and attributions and contexts change. That's not typical of a quote that has a definitive and reliable source; it's much more common with proverbs.

These facts lead me to suspect that these quotes were probably coined by separate individuals in the first half of the twentieth century. The authors were most likely not famous persons or respected scholars, but rather just private political thinkers who got their words in print, and whose words then happened to strike a chord in others. The passage of time merely encouraged quoters to attach an author's name that strengthened the authority behind the words.

And that is where the vice of misattribution lies. Perhaps the words speak the truth of democratic governments; or perhaps they do not. But either way, attributing the words to a scholar who never spoke them is to lend to them an authority and reliability that they do not deserve.

Anonymous quotes, which these almost certainly are, should not be given fictitious attributions merely to lend credence to the messages they impart. To do so is to favor persuasiveness over accuracy, and to sacrifice truth for the sake of image.

But that's presumably the point of aarable posting his collection of favourite quotes. He still hasn't realised, IMHO, that the members of this forum are too intelligent not to do their own background research.

He's also too dense, again IMHO, to realise that the more he uses large fonts to emphasise his message, the less credibility he has.

(Yes, for those who want to point out my excessive use of the bold font in the quote above, on this occasion I've emulated aarable's posting style. You'll just have to work out whether I'm being ironic or not.

)

Aardvark · 15-04-2008, 06:09 PM

aarable,

You can now talk to the dead??????

Alexander Fraser Tyler is alleged to have said those words in 1787!!!!!!!!!!

You did not talk to 'Alex' this morning unless you were holding a seance or had communicated by way of a Ouija board.

I know you want to win an argument at any cost and without reference to the truth, but you are stretching the bounds of credibility when you claim to have had a chat to someone who is almost certainly very dead.

You really must try harder than that.

Geoffrey Collier · 15-04-2008, 06:42 PM

Chikrodah: At least you know I exist. Please spare me all this speculation.
Yes, it was possible to speak to me this morning, as half the 'double-glazing' salesman in the Kingdom will confirm.

chikrodah · 16-04-2008, 08:54 AM

Sorry, Geoffrey, I never meant to suggest that your existence was suspect.

After all, it's far easier to grasp the concept of your existence, based as that concept is on evidential proof, than to grasp the concept of Hegelian philosophy or Keynesian economics.

Aardvark · 16-04-2008, 09:02 AM

Good morning aarable. Yesterday you spoke to a long dead (200 years or so) Professor to get him to confirm or deny a quote attributed to him.

Could you have a quick chat with Gaius Julius Caesar and ask him to confirm he said, 'Veni, vidi, vici'? I'd be really interested to know.

Thanks in anticipation.

15-04-2008, 05:39 PM	#42 (permalink)
Aardvark Moderator Join Date: Dec 2004 Location: Oxonia Posts: 3,133	A detailed analysis of the 'origins' of the quote is at the following link: The Truth About Tytler It is an excellent analysis and rather disproves the nebulous assertion that Tyler/Tytler made the quote in a book that he didn't write. aarable, If you were my researcher I'd fire you for incompetence. You actually have no idea of how to carry out research or how to check the veracity of your statements. The Internet is an excellent tool for research as it saves me a lot of time going into the Bodleian Library, but you must not take everything you read at face value. __________________ When in Woking do as the Wokes do. "I do not wish to form my opinions by thoughtlessly quoting others; I wish others to support their opinions by sensibly quoting me." Paul Wesson (Aardvark) 13th April 2008

15-04-2008, 05:43 PM	#43 (permalink)
Aardvark Moderator Join Date: Dec 2004 Location: Oxonia Posts: 3,133	..and another one: Urban Legends Reference Pages: The Fall of the Athenian Republic ..or two: Alexander Fraser Tytler - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia __________________ When in Woking do as the Wokes do. "I do not wish to form my opinions by thoughtlessly quoting others; I wish others to support their opinions by sensibly quoting me." Paul Wesson (Aardvark) 13th April 2008

15-04-2008, 05:47 PM	#44 (permalink)
Aardvark Moderator Join Date: Dec 2004 Location: Oxonia Posts: 3,133	BD, If you've a few hundred quid to spare you'd be interested in Tytler's books at: Amazon.co.uk: Tytler I think he would have been disappointed to have been misquoted in the way that aarable has misquoted him. __________________ When in Woking do as the Wokes do. "I do not wish to form my opinions by thoughtlessly quoting others; I wish others to support their opinions by sensibly quoting me." Paul Wesson (Aardvark) 13th April 2008

15-04-2008, 06:09 PM	#47 (permalink)
Aardvark Moderator Join Date: Dec 2004 Location: Oxonia Posts: 3,133	aarable, You can now talk to the dead?????? Alexander Fraser Tyler is alleged to have said those words in 1787!!!!!!!!!! You did not talk to 'Alex' this morning unless you were holding a seance or had communicated by way of a Ouija board. I know you want to win an argument at any cost and without reference to the truth, but you are stretching the bounds of credibility when you claim to have had a chat to someone who is almost certainly very dead. You really must try harder than that. __________________ When in Woking do as the Wokes do. "I do not wish to form my opinions by thoughtlessly quoting others; I wish others to support their opinions by sensibly quoting me." Paul Wesson (Aardvark) 13th April 2008

16-04-2008, 09:02 AM	#50 (permalink)
Aardvark Moderator Join Date: Dec 2004 Location: Oxonia Posts: 3,133	Good morning aarable. Yesterday you spoke to a long dead (200 years or so) Professor to get him to confirm or deny a quote attributed to him. Could you have a quick chat with Gaius Julius Caesar and ask him to confirm he said, 'Veni, vidi, vici'? I'd be really interested to know. Thanks in anticipation. __________________ When in Woking do as the Wokes do. "I do not wish to form my opinions by thoughtlessly quoting others; I wish others to support their opinions by sensibly quoting me." Paul Wesson (Aardvark) 13th April 2008

15-04-2008, 05:55 PM	#45 (permalink)
aarable Junior Member Join Date: Feb 2008 Posts: 88	I talked to Alex this morning. He said that He did not say it but that he wished he did.

15-04-2008, 06:42 PM	#48 (permalink)
Geoffrey Collier Senior Member Join Date: Dec 2007 Posts: 667	Chikrodah: At least you know I exist. Please spare me all this speculation. Yes, it was possible to speak to me this morning, as half the 'double-glazing' salesman in the Kingdom will confirm.

16-04-2008, 08:54 AM	#49 (permalink)
chikrodah Senior Member Join Date: Jan 2005 Location: Midlands Posts: 1,134	Sorry, Geoffrey, I never meant to suggest that your existence was suspect. After all, it's far easier to grasp the concept of your existence, based as that concept is on evidential proof, than to grasp the concept of Hegelian philosophy or Keynesian economics.

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