The Threat of Punishment
On the nature of free will, the author considers the nature of imposing will through the threat of punishment. The differential here lies in that this is punishment for a perceived transgression rather than for actually committing the transgression. Animal imagery often populates metaphor and it is especially applicable in this case:
“To justify punishment in this way is like raising one's stick at a dog; it means treating a human being like a dog instead of respecting his honour and freedom.”
The Power to Pardon
The power invested in a single individual to pardon a criminal is really a metaphor for God’s power to forgive sin. This concept originated in the world of supreme monarchs. So, actually, when you start to consider it historically, the power of the American President to issue a pardon is distinctly undemocratic:
“The sovereignty of the monarch is the source of the right to pardon criminals, for only the sovereign is entitled to actualize the power of the spirit to undo what has been done and to nullify crime by forgiving and forgetting.”
The Owl of Minerva
This example of metaphor is one that illuminates the problem with using them. Even when he wrote the text, the bulk of readership probably wasn’t terribly familiar with the meaning. Today, the situation would be even fewer. Since the purpose of metaphor is clarity through comparison, the whole concept sort of falls apart when the metaphor itself has to be explained in a footnote:
“The owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the coming of the dusk.*”
“*The owl is the sacred bird of Minerva (Greek: Athena), goddess of wisdom. The apparent meaning of this famous saying is that a culture's philosophical understanding reaches its peak only when the culture enters its decline.”
Prescience
The text was initially published in 1820. The Industrial Revolution was only just barely underway. Nevertheless, the author constructs a metaphor which predicts the transformation of farming into an actual industrial undertaking even though he completely overstates the state of industrial farming at the time:
“In our times, the [agricultural] economy, too, is run in a reflective manner, like a factory, and it accordingly takes on a character like that of the second estate and opposed to its own character of naturalness.”
The Rabble
Rabble is the all-encompassing metaphor used to describe that part of society living at the “the lowest level of subsistence.” But it is more than a merely economic statistic. As a metaphor rather than merely statistical identity, social consciousness enters into the definition:
“Poverty in itself does not reduce people to a rabble; a rabble is created only by the disposition associated with poverty, by inward rebellion against the rich, against society, the government, etc.”
