“One of the great things about liberalism is that it allows for more paths for just that pursuit. In tribal society, there was little to no division of labor beyond what was rooted in age and sex. In feudal monarchies and modern totalitarianisms alike, there is division of labor, but it is imposed on people by rulers: “You will be a soldier.” “You will be a fry cook.” “You were born to be a slave or a serf.” In a free society, you have choice. It’s not perfect: You can’t choose to be a Marine if you do not meet the requirements, but you are free to try.”

— Jonah Goldberg

2010s, 2018, A Free People Must Be Virtuous (2018)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "One of the great things about liberalism is that it allows for more paths for just that pursuit. In tribal society, the…" by Jonah Goldberg?

Jonah Goldberg 89

American political writer and pundit 1969

Related quotes

“You can’t treat values like workers, hiring and firing them at will and assigning each a place in an imposed division of labor. The taste for freedom and pleasure can’t be compartmentalized.”

Bob Black (1951) American anarchist

The Libertarian as Conservative (1984)
Context: Murray Rothbard thinks egalitarianism is a revolt against nature, but his day is 24 hours long, just like everybody else’s. If you spend most of your waking life taking orders or kissing ass, if you get habituated to hierarchy, you will become passive-aggressive, sado-masochistic, servile and stupefied, and you will carry that load into every aspect of the balance of your life. Incapable of living a life of liberty, you’ll settle for one of its ideological representations, like libertarianism. You can’t treat values like workers, hiring and firing them at will and assigning each a place in an imposed division of labor. The taste for freedom and pleasure can’t be compartmentalized.

“Slaving gave rise to a division of labor”

Eric Wolf (1923–1999) American anthropologist

Source: Europe and the People Without History, 1982, Chapter 7, The Slave Trade, p. 229.
Context: Slaving gave rise to a division of labor in which the business of capture, maintenance, and overland transport of slaves was in African hands, while Europeans took charge of transoceanic transport, the "seasoning" or breaking in of slaves, and their eventual distribution.

“We know what we want to do as a Conservative Party. There are two ways to run a country. One is towards Socialist Marxism and the other is to a free society. The more you have nationalisation and the more the State takes choice away from the people, the further you are going to the total Socialist Marxist society. The more you do that, the more you relinquish your freedom and income to the State.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Speech to Taunton Conservatives (20 February 1976) https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/102833
Leader of the Opposition

“Don't we hear nowadays objections on the part of the labor unions to importing goods from China, which are made with slave labor? Is the existence of slave labor not a reflection upon the idea of a free commercial society?”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), Rebuttal

“It’s like having to make a choice: a blessing or a curse. The one thing you can’t do is choose neither.”

Philip Pullman book The Subtle Knife

Source: The Subtle Knife

“When yu’ can’t have what you choose, yu’ just choose what you have.”

Owen Wister book The Virginian

The Virginian (1902), chapter 13, p. 149.

“Social differentiation is a universal characteristic of human societies. Early human societies survived and became dominant among animal species because of their superior social organization — that is, their more elaborate division of labor and consequent close coordination of activities.”

Walter F. Buckley (1922–2006) American sociologist

Source: Class and society (1959), p. 4.

“Religion is immediate self-consciousness. It liberates the individual from the determinative forces of society. … It is effective only in individuals, where "in-dividuals" means whose who are undivided, that is, who are liberated from the psychological, social, and logical consequences of the division of labor in society and who actually live concretely and historically, unfettered by abstract norms.”

Friedrich-Wilhelm Marquardt (1928–2002) German theologian

"Socialism in the Theology of Karl Barth"

“Amazon society, as mythology, history, and universal male nightmare, represents a culture in which women reign culturally supreme because of their gender. Amazon societies are also important because women were trained to be warriors—military and, presumably, in other ways as well. ...

In Amazon societies, women were mothers and their society's only warriors; mothers and their society's only hunters; mothers and their society's only political and religious leaders. No division of labor based on sex seems to have existed in such societies. Although Amazon leaders existed and queens were elected, the societies seem to have been … ones in which any woman could aspire to and achieve full human expression.

In Amazon society, only men, when they were allowed to remain, were, in widely differing degrees, powerless and oppressed.”

Phyllis Chesler (1940) Psychotherapist, college professor, and author

Women and Madness (2005), pp. 335–336 (emphases in original), and see Women and Madness (1972), pp. 284–285 (similar text).
Women and Madness (1972, 2005)

“Division of labor is a justification for sloth.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

Source: Path of Life (1909), p. 79

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Jonah Goldberg 89

Related quotes

Related topics