Ferenc Hörcher

Professional update: I won a visiting research fellowship 2026, to the Politics Department of @Princeton University, generously sponsored by the James @MadisonProgram, led by @McCormickProf. My research topic is: Township, Subsidiarity, Oikophilia: In Defence of the Local. 2/1

@MingtheMercil15 @R_Buttiglione Yes, Rocco is great, too. Actually, if they later met, I think they would have been on friendly terms.

I remember having lunch with @R_Buttiglione in Liechtenstein, I brought up Scruton & surprisingly Rocco had never heard of him. I saw you've posted about Havel & Scruton separately, I totally get it. But in fairness to Rocco, he would tell wonderful stories about getting drunk with Umberto Eco. So in my eyes, Rocco's totally redeemed.

In case you are interested in this exceptional thinker's views on art and politics.

@elie_foube16925 I am interested in Neumann, because he remained in politics well after the (post)war crisis.

@HorcherF Top scientist biographies the best - Neumann, von Kármán, Vannevar Bush, Gödel, Turing, van Allan, and dozens of others! I also have and read this one. cerncourier.com/a/the-martians…

I am very much interested in this one. An exceptional mind - engaged in Washington politics.

@elie_foube16925 I envy you for that.

@HorcherF I read this two years ago! good book!

@MingtheMercil15 March 15th is indeed a great national holiday over here.

@HorcherF It was indeed. Marching up the castle hill to Obuda in a torchlight procession on that day was a thing of great beauty, the purest expression of the human yearning for freedom.

Hey @HorcherF, it is with great pleasure I follow you: I found your feed by accident, but many aspects of it are familiar to me. It’s good to see the Aristotelian legacy alive & well. Once upon a time many years ago, I was a fellow student of Professor Balázs Mezei, in Liechtenstein of all places!

@MingtheMercil15 Sounds memorable.

We're mutuals on FB still, I owe a lot to Balázs, it was thanks to him I first went behind the Iron Curtain, my friend Professor Max Torres & I hitchhiked from Vienna to Budapest on 15th March 1989 to join the demonstrations on that day. Max & I crashed at Bálazs' place. One of my formative experiences to this day!

@ndmcafee I see your point. A sad story.

@HorcherF I see a vast, oceanic graveyard of conversations run aground - in no small measure because "liberalism" was no lighthouse.

If conservatism and liberalism are not either-or, we need to investigate their - perhaps intricate and complex, yet crucial - relationship. As did Scruton. 2/1

@jguipre I learnt that discipline from the Cambridge historians of political thought.

@HorcherF Intellectual history or genealogy is a difficult art. One of the reasons Strauss is so interesting is that he seems good at it.

"For Aristotle, the household comes first. The village comes next. The polis emerges to serve these natural communities, not to constitute them. For Aquinas, the same principle holds, deepened later by the Leonine doctrine of subsidiarity"

@ImMadhuryaC Perhaps one can argue that the rule of law is a common denominator, beyond the concept of individual liberty itself.

@HorcherF I must read him then!

@aufgehenderRest I am not sure they were so happy for a long time.

Young Schelling, Hegel, and Hölderlin dancing around the Freedom Tree, singing "Hen Kai Pan."

@ImMadhuryaC I am arguing in defence of that thesis within the ANglo-American context, from the Old Whigs to fusionism and further. In other words, as a historian of political thought, and less as a political theorist. Kekes is one of the best examples of this complex relationship.

@HorcherF I'm on the fence about the assumption, but let's say we know, e.g., Kekes had two separate books, one against liberalism, one for conservatism. I'm not learned enough on those two, but why do you think these are not either/or?

"Scruton’s approach to conservatism in his final book on the subject, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition... is more dialectical, more keen to emphasize certain affinities between conservatism and the liberalism that it aims to moderate and correct." (Mahoney) 2/2

The @SalfordDiocese has opened the cause for Beatification of Pedro Ballester. We lived together in 2014, he challenged me to ask myself questions I’d never considered before, and I have no doubt he is interceding for me - and you - now. Ora pro nobis! dioceseofsalford.org.uk/cause-for-beat…