England and the spirit of law
Let me begin with this triviality: the core of civilization lies in the balance between liberty and justice. LIBERTY Liberty is central because its deprivation is a threat to the survival abilities of individuals: freedom of choice is what guarantees that one feels responsible for his or her personal development in life, therefore for what he or she counts as a better way of surviving harmoniously in society. There is an automatic positive cognitive response to the concept of liberty: words of freedom are thus very constantly used in political discourse to attract consent by the audience, together with a number of other 'keywords' (a concept well established in contemporary discourse analysis). Similarly, there is an automatic negative cognitive response to concepts evoking the lack of liberty. Some politicians also tend to make an overuse of this mechanism in persuasive discourse, for example when it comes to assert that Europe is a threat to the liberty of individuals, or...