8 October

In the 18th century Edmund Burke watched the French Revolution murdering thousands of people. What he took from those events is an idea of freedom opposite to how we've been taught to think of it - he's one of the reasons I have a passion for institutions. We've been taught that to be free is to be free *from* things, from connections and ties. Burke thought exactly the opposite, that we can only be free if we put in place restraints to individuals trying to hog everything for themselves. And the way humans do that is through their institutions, which do the job of managing that social restraint. As he says below.