28 junho 2009

Frank Knight


Ainda sobre Frank Knight e alguns temas que o Professor Arroja tem colocado neste blogue, diz Robert H. Nelson em “Frank Night and Original Sin”:

“(Frank Knight)…strongly favoured the market over central state control, here again he was manifesting the Calvinist quality of his thinking. As compared to Roman Catholicism, Protestantism in its infancy was fundamentally an individualistic religion in making each of the Protestant faithful responsible for his relationship with God; salvation was a matter of individual “faith alone.”

This strong individualism eventually had profound social consequences outside the realm of theology. The religious beliefs of the English Puritans laid the basis for modern freedoms in the realms of both government (the democratic system) and the economy (the free market). As the distinguished German theologian Ernst Troeltsch would explain with respect to the great impact of the Puritans in shaping the basic values and social institutions of the modern age:The great ideas of the separation of Church and State, toleration of different Church societies alongside of one another, the principle of Voluntarism in the formation of these Church-bodies, the (at first, no doubt, only relative) liberty of conviction and opinion in all matters of world-view and religion.

Here are the roots of the old liberal theory of the inviolability of the inner personal life by the State, which was subsequently extended to more outward things; here is brought about the end of the medieval idea of civilisation, and coercive Church-and-State civilisation gives place to individual civilisation free of Church direction. The idea is at first religious. Later, it becomes secularized. . . . But its real foundations are laid in theEnglish Puritan Revolution. The momentum of its religious impulse opened the way for modern freedom. (Troeltsch, Ernest. [1912] 1958. Protestantism and Progress: A Historical Study of the Relation of Protestantism to the Modern World. Boston: Beacon.)”

D. Costa
Anonymous 06.28.09 - 1:39 am #

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