Posts classified under: National Humanities Institute

Because constitutional rights were synonymous with the restraints on government embodied in customary law, the greatest threat to English liberties were governmental innovations that undermined centuries-old customs.

This book provides a good example of the distortion of reality, not to mention mind-torturing confusion, that occurs when political documents are viewed through sectarian glasses.

Peter Viereck was born in New York City in 1916. He died on May 13, 2006, at the age of 89 in South Hadley, Massachusetts, in the same house on the edge of the Mount Holyoke College campus where he and his family had lived since he started teaching at the College.

Why did Marx so move the world? Did he shed new light on the human story, plumb its mysteries to previously unsounded depths?

I shall argue, on the other hand, that Kant is not the final word on personal or political ethics. Indeed, his thought suffers from a fundamental weakness that is retained by both Habermas and Professor Day and, to a lesser degree, by Hayek.

Which makes it urgent that their wisdom, much of which is summarized in these two books, be heeded.

Russell Kirk had a distinctive, engaging literary style, and he was accessible not just to academic specialists. He was a man of ideas rather than a technical philosopher.

In Sources of the Self Charles Taylor is both guide and traveling companion on a long, rewarding journey through the history of Western philosophy.

If his work is treated at all, it is considered part of a sectional defense. Calhoun was concerned, however, with the most fundamental of political issues—the nature of society, the character of the human condition, and the structure of government.

Historical consciousness is to civilized society what memory is to individual identity.

The older, humanistic tradition look to literature for cultural self-criticism, while the postmodernists look for reinforcement of their pre-existing impulses.

In an ironic turn, the highly imaginative Rousseau worries about arousing the imagination of his pupil. He regards the imagination as “the most active of all” the faculties, but also highly undesirable.

Paul Gottfried, in his revised and expanded edition of The Conservative Movement, expresses a similar short term pessimism about political and cultural developments in the United States.

Burke never reconciled himself to the French Revolution; but he also held no great hope that the sweeping historical changes that it ushered in could be reversed, at least in the short run.