378 research outputs found
Providence and democracy
"Alexis de Tocqueville was a liberal, but, as he once wrote, a “new kind of liberal.”
For us, no feature of his new liberalism is more remarkable than the alliance
between religion and liberty that he saw in America and proposed to be imitated,
wherever it can, in every free society.
In liberalism today, there is a debate over whether liberal theory needs—
or should avoid—a “foundation.” Tocqueville seems to take the anti-foundational
side: lie never mentions the “state of nature,” which was the standard foundation
of 17th-century liberalism, and in Democracy in America he omits any reference
to the Declaration of Independence with its ringing foundational assertion that “all
men are created equal.” Yet, if he avoids laying a foundation in reason, he also
thinks that religion is essential to political liberty because of the “certain fixed ideas”
that it offers to ground the practice of self-government. These are doctrines of
faith, since for Tocqueville “religion” means revealed religion, not a rational or
natural religion."(...
Liberty and Yirtue in the American Founding
"Liberty and virtue are not a likely pair. At first sight they seem to be contraries, for
liberty appears to mean living as you please and virtue to mean living not as you
please but as you ought. It does not seem likely that a society dedicated to liberty
could make much of virtue, nor that one resolved to have virtue could pride itself
on liberty. Yet liberty and virtue also seem necessary to each other. A free people,
with greater opportunity to misbehave than a people in shackles, needs the guidance
of an inner force to replace the lack of external restraint. And virtue cannot come
from within, or truly be virtue, unless it is voluntary and people are free to choose
it. Americans are, and think themselves to be, a free people first of all. Whatever
virtue they have, and however much, is a counterpoint to the theme of liberty. But
how do they manage to make virtue and liberty harmonious?"(...
What Tocqueville Says to Liberals and Conservatives Today
"Russell Baker once said that in our time people cite Tocqueville without reading
him even more than they do the Bibie and Shakespeare. Every American president
sińce Eisenhower has ąuoted him, no doubt without reading him, and some of our
professors, to say nothing of other citizens, have picked up their habit of fishing for
what they like, and throwing back the rest, in Tocqueville’s great work Democracy
in America."(...
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ADCC Develops Over Time during Persistent Infection with Live-Attenuated SIV and Is Associated with Complete Protection against Challenge
Live-attenuated strains of simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) routinely confer apparent sterilizing immunity against pathogenic SIV challenge in rhesus macaques. Understanding the mechanisms of protection by live-attenuated SIV may provide important insights into the immune responses needed for protection against HIV-1. Here we investigated the development of antibodies that are functional against neutralization-resistant SIV challenge strains, and tested the hypothesis that these antibodies are associated with protection. In the absence of detectable neutralizing antibodies, Env-specific antibody-dependent cell-mediated cytotoxicity (ADCC) emerged by three weeks after inoculation with SIVΔnef, increased progressively over time, and was proportional to SIVΔnef replication. Persistent infection with SIVΔnef elicited significantly higher ADCC titers than immunization with a non-persistent SIV strain that is limited to a single cycle of infection. ADCC titers were higher against viruses matched to the vaccine strain in Env, but were measurable against viruses expressing heterologous Env proteins. In two separate experiments, which took advantage of either the strain-specificity or the time-dependent maturation of immunity to overcome complete protection against challenge, measures of ADCC activity were higher among the SIVΔnef-inoculated macaques that remained uninfected than among those that became infected. These observations show that features of the antibody response elicited by SIVΔnef are consistent with hallmarks of protection by live-attenuated SIV, and reveal an association between Env-specific antibodies that direct ADCC and apparent sterilizing protection by SIVΔnef
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