Humanitas Journal

What we might learn from Thucydides today does not relate only to worries about the rise of China in its new role as Athens. The main lesson comes from Thucydides as an Athenian who reflects on his own city. Graham Allison and American policy makers need to be as self-reflective about America as they are about the rise of China.

It was an effective myth system that allowed the national security state to operate smoothly in the United States. This was not a “noble lie” on anyone’s part; it wasn’t a lie at all, let alone some grand, “deep state” conspiracy.

It is an understatement to say that the American intervention in Iraq in 2003 will have broad and decisive implications for how the administration of former President George W. Bush will be evaluated by historians.

Of the many thinkers who have had difficulty making sense of Burke’s historical consciousness the most celebrated in recent decades has been Leo Strauss.

Numerous jeremiads today about American higher education demonstrate a disinclination to examine their subject in a broad historical perspective. Thus many such works seldom cast their purview earlier than the academic culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, and see these decades as the years that inaugurated the push to treat higher education as a business.

Although I have been an earnest admirer of Leo Strauss since I first started reading his books, Straussians have a tendency to bewitch themselves with words and phrases from the master’s lexicon in ways that are preposterous.

The authors quote the progressive activist Van Jones giving the perfect response to those who want to maintain a fugitive and cloistered virtue by not listening: "I don’t want you to be safe."

James Matthew Wilson wants to overcome the opposition of mythos and logos. This involves going back to Plato, who is often read as setting up this opposition.

From President Truman’s initiation of war against North Korea in June 1950, presidents have exceeded constitutional and statutory authority in exercising the war power.

Under Polanyi’s revolutionary imaginary, we are deeply, even constitutionally, committed to truth. But in the “commitment to commitment” that Grene correctly perceives at the core of Polanyi, we are committed to some content.

On its face, the promotion of tolerance, like the promotion of multiculturalism, is unobjectionable and even praiseworthy. Multicultural tolerance, however, has little in common with the traditional Western virtue beyond a shared name.

The inhabitants of utopia, their creators insist, are happy. But their lives are depicted as so relentlessly public, so entirely ordered and uneventful that their posited felicity is not something that many readers would willingly share.

Hawthorne’s tale is a finely crafted, perspicuous representation of aporia, that befuddlement or confusion. This is the kind of world we live in, and these are the kinds of creatures we are.

Rawls operates with a decision procedure for ethics that keeps corroborating the same moral outlook, a liberal one, whereas the objectivity he claims for the procedure might reasonably have been expected to be consistent with a wider range of moral, social, or political perspectives, or perhaps with a single position equidistant to polar extremes.

Seaton differs from other traditionalistic culture warriors in proposing a novel intellectual framework for this state of affairs.

Birzer’s book is very thorough and nearly flawless.

Is it possible that the modern focus on the subject is not a radical break with classical natural Right, but rather the fruition of its latent promise?

In the collection of writings published under the title Wilderness in America, David Rodick goes a long way toward filling out the arc of Henry G. Bugbee’s life and career.

This "most readable" of medieval authors was fascinated by execution. Why?

According to Lewis scholar Alister McGrath, “From about 1937, Lewis seems to have appreciated that the imagination is the gatekeeper of the human soul.”

If America seeks a future inspired by the virtues of its past, then it must derive inspiration not merely from the founders but also from the Hebraic and Roman Republics.

The Romantics’ value pluralism anchored in virtue ethics is not an abstraction but a concrete negotiation with a world that is by turns beautiful, baffling, and outrageous.

Emerson sees his work as an extension of Plato's.

A claim that Burke rejects or dismisses transcendent truths and is insincere or reluctant when he makes Natural Law-type arguments really demands considerable engagement with the literature.

The student’s psyche must approach its beloved (the beautiful) with reverence, and under the discipline of the intellect.

Whatever one might think in theory, in practice acting morally is not something like following a blueprint. Guessing and taking risks are often necessary.

The problem is that Ryn, like others who have become desperate, must assume that those who do not read the situation in the same pessimistic light are blinded by some intellectual or moral flaw.

It is true that a moral tradition may contain an error that lasts for centuries, but there is no shortcut. Error must be exposed and corrected by loyal and skillful participants in that very tradition.

Ryn asks the right questions but errs in his endorsement of Machiavelli. Machiavelli is not a tradition-minded "realist" but a political ideologue and a moral revolutionary.

The cries of righteous indignation that I can hear show the force of ingrained habit. How could universality possibly express itself in particularity? This is surely “relativism,” “solipsism,” “historicism,” “nihilism” “situationism”! This reaction points to the need for rethinking not just morality but epistemology.

The dysfunction stems, in large part, from the fact that the Senate no longer performs one of the important functions for which the Framers created it.

Eric Voegelin does not offer us a formula but a temperate and mystery-respecting philosophy of consciousness.

There are people who, like Walton, will attempt to transform the state into an unrealistic paradisiacal land.

It is possible, then, to argue that Hayek’s basic formulas are defective in that they try to disconnect social policies from a moral order that transcends individual self-interest narrowly understood.

According to proponents, these new standards are “research and evidence based,” seemingly taking for granted that empirical data alone could provide sufficient warrant for the Common Core’s one-size-fits-all educational goals.

Diversity is par for human existence after Eden. Differences and pluralism are everywhere apparent even in the history of salvation.

The promotion of faith from its traditional subordination to charity led to the virtual destruction of solidarity. Had more Christians lived genuinely Christian lives, things might have been different.

Though Bernardi cites authorities as disparate as Sam Francis and Dinesh D’Souza, the author of 'The Conservative Revolution' is neither a paleoconservative nor a neoconservative.

For the framers of the U.S. Constitution no task seemed more important than to limit and tame power.

The Constitution cannot survive unless its conservative-liberal synthesis is respected and celebrated by all parties.

The story of the states that tarried in ratifying the Constitution helps us put an appropriate emphasis where the framers intended: on the State Conventions.

During the Protests We praise the clink...

Utopia provides the earliest antidote to utopian ideology, which it subtly ridicules by the ironic deployment of stylistic variation.

Herder’s goal was to work against social fragmentation and contribute to restoring the human being to its “original unity,” which comprised more than the sum of its individual parts.

Few parents raise their children from infancy to assume a specific occupation or role in life. Fewer still raise them to be radical reformers. This, however, is precisely what James Mill did with his first-born child, John Stuart Mill.

St. Augustine and Karl Jaspers wrote about humanity as a whole, humankind, the human race—not only everyone around the world, but throughout time, the past and the future, in one shared purpose.

Conservative aversion to environmentalism has contributed to a tendency of many self-identified conservatives to ignore, reject, or simply not involve themselves in real environmental concerns.

Those on the philosophical right habitually appeal to “the Founders” without ever having read them.

The reaction of putative conservatives to the publication of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind in 1987 was symptomatic of deep intellectual confusion.

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern,...

The problem Byrne identifies is an unwillingness to jettison old categories of thought that inappropriately pigeonhole Burke’s novel epistemological approach.

The rebel does not understand his sense of justice as subjective and arbitrary but as universal and authoritative.

In Qatar, my students are perplexed by this fixation American students have about eliminating suffering on a global scale. And they cannot quite escape the suspicion that something more than charity is at work in the minds of the Americans they meet.

Contributing to the multi-faceted crisis Americans now face is the loss of those values and principles that are essential to a healthy economy.

The conflict between advocates of the free market and traditionalist conservatives dates from the beginning of the modern conservative movement. Never have traditionalists and classical liberals comfortably shared the same space.

In the “Conclusion” to the fiftieth anni...

The mainstay of the Turkish modernizatio...

He cut to the truth, and that characteristic, Hawkes believes, makes his work even more essential to our times than to his.

The thesis of this essay is simply state...

Introduction It is a truism, but none...

The national debt is roughly 100 percent of our gross national product, and the people who lend to the federal government are beginning to worry that they will not get their money back. Yet without continuous borrowing, the nation cannot possibly sustain its accustomed lifestyle. Something has got to give.

Much has been written in the past centur...

Though it has been obvious to discerning...

As such, the human world, for Sartre, is nothing but the aggregate of self-creating human beings.

Winter snow covers Twisted steel and cracked marble.

Bacon asked that Nature be “put to the rack” and forced to reveal her secrets.

That great hulk of a man, Dr. Johnson, Had many ills both of mind and body

The hustling and corruption which I once celebrated as a sort of shady virtue that helped explain America’s spectacular growth now appear to me as a vice and, at its worst, a sin whose wages are death.

Because these hostile ideologies rest on opposing (and unexamined) “abstract principles,” contemporary political discourse is usually shrill and fruitless.

Whatever the merit of the claim that America can be called a Christian nation, this much is for sure: Americans are fish swimming in a civil religion that is not the same as Christianity.

Shakespeare has the Duke stage a brilliant Machiavellian parody of the extremes of the Christian apocalyptic expectation of rewards and punishments by demonstrating their political usefulness.

Reflection on the Old Testament diplomatic traditions could provide the starting point for a return to a more sober foreign policy.

When and why did I begin to bristle under the rigid codes of belief and behavior imposed by American politics, academics, and culture?

Perhaps its unsparing analysis of the psychology of utopian reformers still strikes a little too close to home for it to make its way onto reading lists at most schools and colleges.

Clear and irreconcilable differences in the political and constitutional philosophies of Jefferson and Marshall sparked heated debate over such monumental issues as the use of judicial review over acts of Congress and the development of the doctrine of “implied powers.”

It is upon small-scale values and practices—not the abstractions of cosmopolitanism or “global thinking”—that the literal survival of the world depends.

Among tall aspen—leafy, elegant—and spruce, severe, the road has crested over Willow Creek Pass,

Civilization stands or falls with those who set the tone in society. Are they proper models for emulation? Do they inspire others to realize their better selves, or are they schemers manipulating others for their own benefit?

Betty, I cried in the night, come closer. I’m chilled to the bone, and my brain is foggy; A kind of numbness steals through every limb.

McIntire’s study would have been better had the author provided a stronger historical context, but this deficiency should not obscure the fact that this is an impressive work of scholarly research and textual analysis. Herbert Butterfield is not a typical biography; rather, it is an analysis and explication of the subject’s intellectual achievement.

Though not a student of the history of t...

Emerson scholars have long noted the ubi...

At its core, the emphasis on communal perfection seeks to quell the religious anxiety generated by a faith that is demanding, uncertain, and absolutist in its claims.

Justice’s enemies, both Ancient and Modern, were not entirely wrong.

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.

March 1, 2012, will mark the 175th anniv...

Yet an historical perspective reveals that the conflict over the family may only be beginning and that we may be on the verge of a wider confrontation that will decide not only the survival of the family but fundamental questions about the scope and nature of the modern state.

In his Essay on Duties, Marcus Tullius C...

From Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre in the eighteenth century through such twentieth-century critics as Lewis Mumford, Karl Popper, and Isaiah Berlin, the utopian concept of a rationally planned or dirigiste society is viewed as one of reason’s most nightmarish monsters.

In a non-didactic manner, the film offers a lesson that our time badly needs to learn: that all is not gold that glimmers.

Many who have heard Reagan's words have not really listened to them. They have taken away vague impressions of his rhetoric and have not fully understood the meaning and significance of what he actually said.

While animals cannot reason, plan for the future, or think through a long-range plan of action, people can and should engage in these actions. Why should we choose to act like animals when we can choose not to and when we can create an environment in which acting like animals is unnecessary?

The idea that war might somehow be mediated by reasonable agreements, heroic values of resistance, and religious scruples, such as those governing the burial of the dead, has been reduced to a shambles by the internal dynamics of war and the logic of violence itself.

I contend that Žižek does not deliver the insights that he repeatedly promises. I propose to subject one of his works Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? to close examination.

The relationship between tradition and modernity has been a central theme of postcolonial African philosophy. While African philosophers have examined this theme from many angles, several basic questions have become the focus of ongoing debate and discussion: What is the relevance of indigenous African traditions to the challenges of contemporary life?

Ultimately, it is this reverence, this humility before God, and this faith in the goodness of life that are at the heart of Panichas’s long and productive career, and that also underlie the sort of conservatism that he has defended so admirably over the course of the past four decades.

Over a long and accomplished career, Peter J. Stanlis has often worked at the intersection of literature, philosophy, and political philosophy, and this emphasis is evident in Robert Frost: The Poet as Philosopher, a study that explores Frost’s relationship to developments in the sciences, the humanities, and politics from the age of Charles Darwin to the time of John F. Kennedy’s presidency.

After Mill discovered Romantic poetry he decided to abandon the “mere reasoning machine” that was his old self—and he emerged from this period a changed man.

Evil as nothing cannot triumph in the face of goodness that is something—indeed everything.

Liberalism “is now fading out of the wor...

It should also be stated that, needless to say, the socalled conservative movement has had many admirable features. Some of its members resisted the trends that brought it to its present low point. Unfortunately, as it tries to recover, it may ignore those voices again and repeat its old mistakes.

What is at issue is the meaning of greatness. Our first president chose a modest path, the greatness of Cicero and Cato.

His orations, sermons, and poems in the last third of the eighteenth century—during the critical years of the nation’s founding—reveal a framework of thought that situated America as the endpoint toward which all prior history had been tending.

Loving thy neighbor is hard to do: that...

To say that justice is mutable and that it adapts to meet moral needs specific to historical circumstances is not to imply that justice is arbitrary or historically relative.

Thus it is my purpose in this article to discuss the balance of similarities and differences between Simms and Nietzsche on the question of historiography.

A careful reading of Kundera’s observations about the novel suggests that they do not quite cross the border to unmeaning, but in any case it is the novels themselves that embody the deeper insight, as the author himself would no doubt cheerfully concede.

Few critics have stressed the humorous aspects of the Iliad, or pursued Pope’s hint “That Homer was no enemy to mirth."

As in his previous work, Gottfried is critical of the neoconservative project. Gottfried attributes the neoconservatives’ success mostly to their relentless self-promotion and what in the business world is called cross-selling, massive fundraising efforts, and their close ideological (and, in some cases, personal) connections with the liberal establishment.

Only these figures, their inner lives properly regulated, are meant by nature to rule the rest, just as the head rules the body. “A multitude,” Plato asserts, “cannot be philosophical,” a capacity reserved for a select few.

There is much that is still alive in Santayana’s philosophical explication of Goethe’s Faust, especially Goethe’s appeal to the understanding to be derived from phenomena themselves.

The Medieval understanding of theology and politics, rooted in Exodus, exceeds the limiting categories Carl Schmitt provides.

It is not the mere division of tasks that results in the collective good—there is no “invisible hand” in John’s functionalism.

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.

How does Locke understand language and its role in conveying information and meaning between persons?

His noetic mysticism makes him better equipped to transcend the ideological deformations of modernity and the Islamic world. Yet his mysticism is ultimately solitary, making it insufficient to accomplish its task.

Idea-drugs don’t help very much.

Literary interpretation is at its maximum free of dogma.

Unlike most other texts, the “classics” have the potential to upend our typical modes of understanding, challenge our baser impulses, and confound our historically and culturally constituted presuppositions.

Babbitt and the romantics agree that imagination is vital to the development of the educated person, but each school of thought advocates a different quality of the imagination.

While Rorty makes a sound move in attempting to defend democracy on a non-foundational basis, he goes too far in the Sophists’ direction.

The work of both Michael Polanyi and Alasdair MacIntyre contributes significantly to overcoming the problems posed by late modernity. They harbor no nostalgic illusions; neither do they believe that skepticism and despair are satisfying alternatives.

Much of Peter Viereck’s prose writing wa...

It is argued here that understanding Burke’s romanticism is an important part of understanding Burke. Understanding Burke’s romanticism also helps one understand the subtle ways in which aesthetics, ethics, and politics interact.

My goal in this essay is less to impart a specific teaching than to tell a story. This story, I first should point out, is not a myth made up for didactic purposes, as so many such stories tend to be.

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.

What is conservatism? Is it simply an older version of liberalism? Which traditions do conservatives “conserve” in an age of modern change? Is conservatism populist or elitist, democratic or aristocratic?

Everything I have seen of the Straussians over the years leads me to the unfortunate conclusion that they are agenda-driven political intellectuals.

Because of the elusiveness of Truth, Strauss is tempted to doubt the existence of universality, and he flirts with nihilism.

Frost’s perception of the continuity and unity in historical events came to him through an intuition, or revelation, expressed in “Kitty Hawk”: “Then I saw it all.”

Concern about the ethical condition of m...

The very purpose of the prudential tradition is to prepare men and women with the deliberative capacity to decide how to act in such situations.

She tapped, three times at my door, Eac...

Herder’s philosophical work forces us to reexamine the objections made against nationalism from a philosophical point of view.

To examine the role of humility in contemporary society, we must look in unexplored places. The best sellers of our time rarely deal directly with theological or moral issues.

Babbitt’s influence has been substantial and salutary, and that there is a major resurgence of interest in Babbitt that may prove significant for the future of China and thus the world.

My late father, Wu Mi, had carefully kep...

Irving Babbitt, the great American humanist, was bound to the modern Chinese culture even though Babbitt himself might not have been aware of it. His erudition and glamour enticed a dozen young Chinese scholars into Harvard University to seek instruction from him.

Irving Babbitt and his intellectual ally Paul Elmer More played a crucial role in Liang’s literary battle with Lu Xun, who was everywhere regarded as China’s leading leftist or “proletarian” writer.

They were in direct opposition to the New Culture Movement led by the New Intellectuals, and it is in this sense that I consider them conservatives.

The novel’s aesthetic and interpretive complexity, it will be seen, underlines the multi-layered meaning of salvation itself, in a modern world in which salvation is not necessarily one of divine grace, of deliverance from sin and damnation, in short, of redemption in the hands of an all-powerful God.

When existence is understood as boring and burdensome, often a more dangerous rejection of reality follows.

Here are superbly imaginative treatments...

Skepticism, albeit in a Humean “mitigated” sense, has a guiding role to play in philosophy.

We live in a postmodern spiritual wasteland created by an impenetrable wall of separation between the City of God and the City of Man.

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

1. Introduction Ceux qui, comme porte n...

There are now three changed editions of...

At the conclusion of his writing career, Nietzsche ironically and unintentionally ends up affirming a perspective on life that resonates with what can be termed a “Christianity of Joy.”

Augustine’s thought has ever held a deep attraction for the Western mind and has, of course, profoundly shaped the moral traditions that inform Western political culture.

It follows, then, in the light of the Anthropic Principle, that, if man is to exist as a subject endowed with free will, the iniquity of nature, pain and suffering must also exist.

What separates Voegelin from most modern philosophers is not so much a difference of intellect as a difference of imagination.

The United States Government was fully warned, almost prophetically, by its diplomats who had studied the Soviet Union and understood what recognition entailed.

It is apt for Plato to describe the quar...

To be modern is to give up the “sense of place” associated with the late medieval hierarchical world in favor of a space and time conceived to be populated by infinite numbers of entirely exchangeable loci.

It is tempting to think of Irving Babbit...

Esau grew to be a “natural man,” a man of the field and the hunt, an “elder” or more primitive image of humankind, while Jacob grew to be a “smooth” civilized man, a logo-centric man of the tent, or the polis.

I soon began to wonder how this cheapening of the word "democracy" might be linked to the cheapening of the underlying concept

The respect which Habermas accords to Kant’s moral and political ideals is what separates his interpretation of the Kantian project from Hayek’s.

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.

According to a perhaps naive, but still...

Modernism’s essential features were already understood long before the era of modernity.

I went down yesterday to the River. I wa...

In the history of writing history, there are a handful of volumes that become established as a model. The most recent work by Jacques Barzun is such a volume.

Praise of contemplation and speculation does not constitute a refutation of positivism.

I did not really understand the battles that swirled about us on campus in those days. Yet I learned to discern with my heart the quality of a man’s character and to cleave to what proved true.

Men and women in the Middle Ages were far more alive to symbolism than the most sensitive moderns.

Eric Voegelin’s treatment of Christianity is notoriously problematic.

In the present age Hegel claims that "the form of art has ceased to be the supreme need of the spirit."

Babbitt holds up what he calls “our great unionist tradition” as the crucial “offsetting influence” to all the temptations to which democracies are particularly vulnerable.

Babbitt claimed to be rescuing Lincoln from the sentimentalists of his day; he claimed that he knew the “real Lincoln.”

Like Gamble and Babbitt himself, I think that the Progressives distorted the historical Lincoln. In my view, however, a careful study of the words and deeds of Lincoln reconfirms Lincoln’s moral and intellectual stature.

As Mill proceeds in On Liberty, he seems to take away a good deal of what he “gives” at the beginning.

Politics for Descartes is not a part of philosophy proper.

Mill muddied the waters of classical-liberal philosophy by his conviction that the end of government is the “improvement of mankind” and not the preservation of individual liberty.

A closer examination shows a thinker not simply dismissive of metaphysics and religion, nor one necessarily hospitable to leftist agendas.

Like other great neologisms—ones we wish we would have thought of but didn’t—deconstruction has suffered the fate of its own ascendancy.

I shall concentrate on four themes in Babbitt’s writings that are relevant today to the discipline of comparative literature as well as to related disciplines for which the study of literature may be more important than is generally recognized, whether or not these themes have been reflected in recent critical texts.

Sixteen hundred years ago, St. Augustine warned against the inherent idolatry of empire. To assign to one’s earthly nation the mission that by right belongs only to the Kingdom of Christ is to be guilty of the worst of disordered loves.

Mark Lilla held that for Kimball "the cause of the Sixties was quite simply . . . the Sixties. They just happened, as a kind of miracle, or antimiracle—Why did such a profound revolution take place?" In my opinion, Kimball’s reply is not entirely satisfactory.

When Thucydides’ understated but crucial role in Strauss’s thought is fully exposed, Strauss’s philosophy as a whole starts to appear differently.

Professor Ryn ascribes too much philosophical and aesthetic baggage to those who simply craved material security and were not equipped to think about the larger questions.

How weak are my putatively weakest points? What about the relevance of “beautiful language,” or female beauty? Are they quite so extraneous to a discussion of political power as Gottfried assumes?

I wish to take issue with Bevir’s treatment of tradition precisely because it is so utilitarian. It reduces a social reality to an amorphous material with no meaning or purpose of its own.

Practices are concrete social realities, but they are not natural kinds. Thus, we have to allow, as I do but Frohnen does not, that in a sense we construct or individuate particular practices to suit our purposes.

Not even dictatorial rule can be sustained without the grudging acceptance of a populace whose anxieties and other propensities incline them to submit rather than to rebel.

The ability of traditions to confer legitimacy on social practices helps to explain why cultural nationalists, states, and even radical movements have tried to invigorate their political projects by inventing appropriate traditions, symbols, and rituals.

Betrayal changes not only our sense of the world, but our sensibility toward the world.

Lionized in his early career by much of the historical establishment, Beard fell out of favor with his fellow liberal and progressive academics because of his opposition to the nation’s foreign policy in the years prior to World War II.

He deliberately sets out to defy Platonic Truth, worshiping the Shadows—the felt, believed, imperfect, flawed perception of touched reality. This—and nothing else—is truth, or at least the only truth that matters.

Charles Adams, a libertarian and prominent historian of taxation, seeks to demolish the “Northern interpretation” of the war, which holds that the conflict was a great moral crusade to preserve democracy.

The study of the past always confronts two difficulties. The first is particularism, which exaggerates the difference between past and present. The other is its opposite, anachronism.

This is the story of a man in search of some form of atonement once he recognizes that his dream of “the success of his imaginary achievements” constitutes a romantic illusion.

Most importantly, Ryn holds that I place such emphasis on contingency, particularity, and finitude that I have difficulty explaining the basis of the continuity and coherence, weight and responsibility, that I myself find necessary for the reconstructive middle ground.

Professor Roberts and I may have not so much a fundamental philosophical disagreement as a difference of philosophical nomenclature and emphasis. Ideas in Roberts’s thinking that are still only tentatively stated could well evolve in ways that will reveal further consonance between us.

The only way to do this properly, it seems to me, is to travel along with Homer, hitting the highlights and commenting as I go.

Transcendence understood as separate from the historical world of practice leaves the transcendent empty. It invites individuals to fill the emptiness with whatever personal desires and dreams they would like.

Augustinian Christianity is unable to sustain its own posture of radical transcendence. That position is so harsh, so immoderate, and so inhuman that it leads its advocates to succumb to an extremism of another kind.

Her Inspiration An afterthought’s ref...

The question of the moral and social effects of literary study is so knotty that even people who have made a career of teaching literature sometimes reverse their beliefs concerning the effects of the study of literature upon human conduct.

Formalists separate the aesthetic and the ethical. In this article I argue that moral considerations may play a decisive role in our appreciation of particular works of art.

While there are countless extant definitions of culture, I know of no strictly ontological investigation in this field.

More and more, educated and cultured Europeans recognize Irving Babbitt as an emblem of an almost hidden and all too easily ignored side of American culture.

If an ananalytic philosopher has a powerful argument, what difference does it make whether it came from reading Kant or from reading a comic book?

American Beauty is a profoundly sad movie. Or one could say, as does David Denby of The New Yorker, that it is "a funny movie that hurts."

Some theorists define politics as who gets what, when and how. Alasdair MacIntyre defines it as "civil war carried on by other means."

Mark Twain and Irving Babbitt Accordi...

Although broad tendencies that may be la...

An anti-traditionalist intelligentsia and government, it may be argued, continue to undermine America’s traditional civilization and regime.

Rousseau’s political ideas were at once idealistic, “mystical,” and collectivist.

This article focuses on the relevance of early Christian writings on acedia and tristitia to the primary modern and postmodern maladies of the subject, i.e., chronic ennui, alienation, estrangement, disenchantment, angst, neurosis, etc.

Although most people do not consciously accept postmodernist doctrines, these doctrines may still reflect the working assumptions that most of us live by but refuse to acknowledge.

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.

The original studia humanitatis which arose in fifteenth century Italy was “a cultural revolution."

A few years before my grandmother died,...

The Whig party had presupposed acceptance of the basic character of the country as it was. They sought redemption only through peaceful means and through the established constitutional edifice.

Though a sine qua non for good government, according to Fabius, a strong confederation alone is insufficient to ensure that government will live up to its “sacred trust.”

The respective governments, in Budapest and Bucharest, may sign many friendship treaties: still they will not be friends, allies, cousins.

The American academy has been abuzz in recent years with a need to identify and get rid of "foundational" thinking. There are, we are told, no suprahistorical essences, no permanent ends, no enduring identities, meanings, or truths.

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

It may be possible to make Walsh’s hermeneutic inclusiveness work, but there is no evidence it does, and certainly not on the basis of his lavishing of liberal certificates upon a multitude of dead and living thinkers.

This story is loosely based on an encounter between the Russian photographer Yevgeny Khaldei and the American photographer Robert Capa, as reported by Michael Specter of the New York Times, in a July 1995 interview.

A critical exploration of cultural beliefs will enable us to see how people make rational or justificatory connections among their socio-culturally structured evidence, counter-evidence, relevant alternatives, and beliefs.

Until recently, the humanistic impulse h...

Physicists talk of two of the fundamenta...

While trying at age eighty to survive my own recent heart attacks, I'm writing these rhythm-variations of dying for Joseph Brodsky (for, not about, not to), who died of a heart attack January 28, 1996.

In 1997, at eighty years old, Peter Vier...

At its core, the modern moral-imaginative dynamic is a rebellion against whatever interferes with our favorite desires. It is an expression of a great self-indulgence.

The Eikones is translated and transmuted time and time again by those who wish to 'recapture' antiquity.

My own ideal, already partially fulfilled, is for my work to be made obsolete, of mere historic interest, by the much better achievements of my apprentices. That is the only way I know to surpass my own limitations.

The opposition between an individualistic and an anti-individualistic culture is not identical with the opposition between a world-affirming and a world-negating culture.

The canon is necessarily developmental, and one system can be peremptorily displaced by another.

Of the statesman's charge, More in Utopia says: "What you cannot turn to the good, you must at least make as little bad as you can."

Tate argued against both censorship by Catholic authorities and what he termed the literary "angelic imagination," advocating instead the Dantesque "symbolic imagination."

Redeeming the Time is a pointed, prescient and at times disturbing collection. It is filled with the sense of "the unbought grace of life" by which Kirk lived his own life, and through which we renew our commitment to the permanent values of our civilization.

Introduction: Perennial Philosophy Histo...

In the view of many scholars, Leon Pompa...

Foucault claims his enquiry radically diverges from traditional uses of historical analysis.

Edmund Burke, the passionate defender of...

It is no accident that "The English Patient"—surely the best movie to come on the American screen in a very long time—chooses the Greek Herodotus as a leitmotif.

That such a question can be asked . . . is punishment enough.

And yes of course you saved me for continued use.

A revolt against the dual tradition of Christian and humanistic self-discipline, and the substitution of a new basis of morality, lies at the heart of the breakdown of internationalism.

More than twenty years earlier as a Nebraska congressman, "The Great Commoner" had joined the struggle to free the Senate from the control of corrupt state legislatures, and despite three failed campaigns for the presidency, he never wavered in his determination to make the Senate a popularly elected body. 

Rose After the thorn I made myself su...