Here's a nice bit, about David Brat's views regarding religion, virtue and the market. Apparently the guy's never read Mandeville, for whom, famously, the market is a hive of activity that depends on vice (not virtue) to flourish at peak efficiency and productivity. Remember the Fable of the Bees (1723)?: "Thus every Part was full of Vice, Yet the whole Mass a Paradise."

Brat doesn't understand the history of his own enterprise -- the ideological enterprise of supporting the values of commercial society -- very well. But then neither do many or perhaps most of his fellow Tea Partiers. 

Robert Geroux is a political theorist.

Also by this author
© 2024 Commonweal Magazine. All rights reserved. Design by Point Five. Site by Deck Fifty.