Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 113 of the 1969 Revised Edition of Lon Fuller’s profoundly important 1964 book, The Morality of Law:

The source of this tension between theory and everyday wisdom lies, quite obviously, in a concentration by theory on formal structure to the neglect of the purposive activity this structure is assumed to organize.

DBx: Intellectuals – contrary to their arrogant suppositions to the contrary – have knowledge only of formal structures and of aggregate data. Except for the details that they know of their own individual circumstances, intellectuals know nothing – nothing – of the details of the circumstances of any of the millions of individual lives that they presume themselves fit to command.

And yet intellectuals continue haughtily to presume not merely that they are fit, but that they are anointed by history and sufficiently knowledgeable, to inflict on humanity their “rampaging presumptions.”