John Farthing
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John Colborne Farthing | |
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| Born | 18 March 1897 |
| Died | 9 March 1954 (aged 56) |
| Resting place | Anglican Cemetery, Woodstock, Ontario |
| Education | McGill University (B.A., 1921) New College, Oxford (B.A., 1924) |
| Military career | |
| Allegiance | .svg){kind=small} Canada |
| Service/ |  Canadian Army |
| Years of service | 1916 – 1916 |
| Rank | Sergeant |
| Unit | 66th Field Battery, Canadian Artillery |
| Battles/wars | World War I |
John Colborne Farthing (18 March 1897 – 9 March 1954) was a Canadian soldier, thinker, philosopher, economist, teacher, and author of the seminal tract Freedom Wears a Crown, published posthumously. It rather quickly became an
Early years
Farthing was born in Woodstock, Ontario on March 18, 1897 to John Farthing and Mary (née Kemp) Farthing. His father was an Anglican priest who rose in the church hierarchy in Ontario, becoming Dean of the Diocese in 1907. In 1909 he was called to Montreal as bishop of the Anglican Diocese, where he served until 1939. His aunt Ann Cragg Farthing served as an Anglican missionary in the United States territory of Alaska, in the Interior. She served in Fairbanks and then in smaller Alaska Native villages.
The youngest of two sons, Farthing attended
Post-war
After the
He spent the tumultuous decade of the 1930s and the
.Philosophy
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In Freedom Wears a Crown (published posthumously), Farthing argues that the world is torn between a United States-style
The central problem with republicanism is that it assumes that the majority is always right, and that majorities will always rule justly. The opposing socialist paradigm, is also problematic because it assumes that the masses are always right and that they will rule justly. Both systems are seen as tending to, or desirous of, perfection. As perfection is unattainable, creating a political and economic system with that as the ultimate goal, can only lead to anarchy and alienation.
Farthing notes:
...There is no such pride and presumption in the ideal of kingdom. It knows nothing of absolute perfection, whether of the present state of liberty, or of a future state of communism. It seeks only to retain what it knows to be good and to attain to whatever is better. And meantime to perform the duties of the moment in which past and future are fused.
The essence of the critique is that
To Farthing, the
and further ...
...The British idea of a Realm does not deny the importance of Law. It denies only that Law is Supreme.
This is a critical distinction to Farthing, for the law is mutable and changes with the generations to fit the needs of particular times. To saddle an entire culture with base laws that are said to speak for all times, is the height of folly. Who can know what will be deemed "just" 400 years from now? For Farthing, only free men assembled in a parliament can know such things. Parliament alone is Supreme. And that
That the unwritten
Farthing's work is derivative of Hooker, Edmund Burke, and Tory thinkers of English patrimony. What set Farthing's work apart from theirs is that he was addressing his defence of the British system from the perspective of outsider, in the sense that what he was defending was no longer de rigueur politically.
Farthing died in Montreal on March 9, 1954.
Arms
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References
- ^ "John Cragg FARTHING". Canadian Heraldic Authority. Retrieved 27 May 2020.
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