“To Preserve and To Continue” Remarks On Montaigne's Conservatism

Abstract

This is how Montaigne explains the principles which he followed in his role as mayor, a statement whose very expression casts all the light needed on the nature of what has been called Montaigne's conservatism. In Montaigne's political language, to conserve is defined by its opposition to innovate. Conservation receives its lexical “value” from its contrasting relation with innovation and with “novelties.” This semantic pair, common in sixteenth-century French and in most European languages, is profoundly different from the present system. In today's language, the concept of conservatism (itself of recent formation) is defined principally in terms of the notion of progress or (because of the symmetry of the suffixes) of progressionism, in the sense which it had taken on during the 18th century, but the antonym innovation has not ceased contributing to the “value” of conservation. Today's semantic system cannot avoid attributing to “conservatism” an essentially antithetic function in reference to historic “progress,” or to theories of progress in which innovation is generally seen in a favorable light.

Flat limits of curved interacting cosmic fluids

“…These calculations will be included elsewhere [21]. A similar negative conclusion applies to the curved perturbations of the various flat decaying asymptotics, i.e., those stemming from the flat decomposition f (1) = (y, −Axy − Bx 3 ) constructed in Ref. [15].…”

“…Intuitively this means that the given decomposition of f starts with the most nonlinear part of the vector field and proceeds down to the least dominant component. From the asymptotic system (A.4), we know that the dominant part, f (0) , asymptotes as τ P −diag (1) , and therefore dividing both sides of Eq. (A.7) by τ P −diag (1) and taking the asymptotic limit to the singularity as τ → 0, we arrive at a condition that has to be satisfied if the candidate subdominant part is to be less dominant than the dominant part of the given decomposition.…”

“…From the asymptotic system (A.4), we know that the dominant part, f (0) , asymptotes as τ P −diag (1) , and therefore dividing both sides of Eq. (A.7) by τ P −diag (1) and taking the asymptotic limit to the singularity as τ → 0, we arrive at a condition that has to be satisfied if the candidate subdominant part is to be less dominant than the dominant part of the given decomposition. This is the subdominance condition,…”

“…There are many astrophysical situations where an exchange of energy between two cosmic fluids becomes important, even necessary for a correct and complete description of the key cosmological processes involved. The fact that matter may possess multiple interacting components was already emphasized with the advent of the inflationary universe [1], but also in M-theory [2] and in models of cosmic acceleration [3]. Such fluids admit a covariant description [4], various scaling solutions [5], support an interesting theory of cosmological perturbations [6] and are used abundantly in models with dark components [7].…”

“…that matter may possess multiple interacting components was already emphasized with the advent of the inflationary universe [1], but also in M-theory [2] and in models of cosmic acceleration [3]. Such fluids admit a covariant description [4], various scaling solutions [5], support an interesting theory of cosmological perturbations [6] and are used abundantly in models with dark components [7].…”