Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One (1773)
56 freediver 13 8/6/2025, 11:29:11 PM founders.archives.gov ↗
Comments (13)
sebast_bake · 1h ago
Timeless rules… They can be applied generally to large organisations, and serve as an excellent summary of symptoms of elite blindness
croemer · 1h ago
Interesting that all nouns are capitalized, like in modern German and unlike in most other modern languages that use the Latin alphabet.
Telemakhos · 1h ago
Satire, Piece, and Virtues are the first Nouns that I find not capitalized. They occur within the first few Sentences, and I trust that my Observation and Diligence in this Matter might not go without Recognition.
linguae · 1h ago
The Declaration of Independence and the original US Constitution (the main portion plus the Bill of Rights) are also written in this style, though not all nouns are consistently capitalized.
analog31 · 50m ago
I was curious, so in case anybody else was, the first printed versions of these documents also retain this style. It wasn't just a habit of handwriting.
Jap2-0 · 24m ago
Decreasingly so, but even in stuff written in the last hundred years or so you'll sometimes find words capitalized for emphasis or similar.
wging · 56m ago
It’s not uncommon for the time. E.g. “in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity…”
burnt-resistor · 1h ago
Now, we can't even get people to capitalize proper nouns to disambiguate soil from a planet.
shikon7 · 20m ago
In a some sense that goes back to the roots, as you can't distinguish these in German either ("Erde" is always capitalized)
prpl · 49m ago
or engineers from Engineers
quantummagic · 6m ago
or trump from Trump
hellojimbo · 1h ago
Is this like the prince or art of war where we are supposed to draw some lesson from very specific critiques and extrapolate it to every scenario.
skybrian · 14m ago
Yeah, historical analogies are good mostly for suggesting possibilities you hadn't thought of. They don't prove anything.