The Variety of Historical Minds

July 20, 2020
Decades past the peak of New Humanism’s renown, this fine volume ably demonstrates that the movement still has much of crucial value to teach us.
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Liberal Dystopia

July 20, 2020
Deneen explicitly links the Framers to the Progressives of the early twentieth century, implying that the two projects were the same and that the Progressives would have met with the Framers’ approval.
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Of Arms and the Men

July 20, 2020
Like modern America, Republican Rome was nearly always at war: between 415 and 265 BC, fewer than 10 percent of its years did not have at least one recorded campaign.
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Rawls’s Justification Model for Ethics: What Exactly Does It Justify?

May 16, 2018
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.
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Faith over Love a Formula for Social Atomism

January 7, 2018
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.
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An Emblematic American

January 5, 2018
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.
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Butterfield as Historian: Objectivity Over Partisanship

January 2, 2018
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.
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Babbitt, Literary Positivism, And Neo-Positivism

January 1, 2018
There is another major element in Babbitt’s criticism which has a strong resemblance to the positivist method, even to the original statement of it by Comte. This is the concept of the interrelationship of all knowledge.
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The Tribalization of the Western Mind

January 1, 2018
Culture has been degraded to somatic gratification, from which all meaning is now derived. Politically, this requires “using threats of high treason to silence doubt” about the status of the body as a justification for reshaping politics.
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David Hume and the Origin of Modern Rationalism

January 1, 2018
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.
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Marxism as Psychodrama

January 1, 2018
Why did Marx so move the world? Did he shed new light on the human story, plumb its mysteries to previously unsounded depths?
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The Political Moralism of Jacques Ellul

January 1, 2018
On the most general level, then, his response to modernity is not unlike many others in the post-War period: a rediscovery of some form of personal moral anchor, in opposition to the surrounding sources of disorder, as a way out of the nihilism of the twentieth century.
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‘The Living Embodiment of the Nation’

January 1, 2018
History, to most of the authors of the Constitution, was more valuable than political theory because it was more real; as Bolingbroke put it, history was philosophy teaching by example.
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William James and the Moral Will

January 1, 2018
A closer examination shows a thinker not simply dismissive of metaphysics and religion, nor one necessarily hospitable to leftist agendas.
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Strauss and the Straussians

January 1, 2018
Everything I have seen of the Straussians over the years leads me to the unfortunate conclusion that they are agenda-driven political intellectuals.
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Characterizing Historicist Possibilities: A Reply to Claes Ryn

January 1, 2018
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.
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Deconstruction: Fad or Philosophy?

January 1, 2018
Like other great neologisms—ones we wish we would have thought of but didn’t—deconstruction has suffered the fate of its own ascendancy.
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History as Synthesis

January 1, 2018
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.
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Political Morality Reconsidered: A Rejoinder

January 1, 2018
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.
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The Heritage of Lincoln

January 1, 2018
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.
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The Origin of Modern Society

January 1, 2018
Man is a creature of desires, and since these desires are the products of social and economic motives, good government is situated at the crossroads of individual desires. The focus of politics shifts from moral authority to the social contract.
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An Ideal Vital Center?

January 1, 2018
Never does Green allow an early American leader to escape his carping scrutiny. He insists that George Washington was “an unmitigated snob whose personal integrity was protected by his social status at the top of the heap.”
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Another Conception of Knowing

January 1, 2018
Rather than renew a misconceived theory of knowledge, we need to reconstitute the epistemology of the humanities and social sciences along historical-philosophical lines.
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Roosevelt’s Failure at Yalta

January 1, 2018
The United States Government was fully warned, almost prophetically, by its diplomats who had studied the Soviet Union and understood what recognition entailed.
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Timeless Prescription for the Ills of Our Time

January 1, 2018
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.
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Second Thoughts on Graduate Education

January 1, 2018
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.
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New Dogmas for Old In the American University

January 1, 2018
This book, despite its solid scholarship and publication by a major university press, will be ignored by the author’s own generation of academicians because it truly is radical; that is, it goes to the roots.
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Forgotten Roots of Individualism

January 1, 2018
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.
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Thomas More: Virtuous Statesman

January 1, 2018
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."
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Reflections on Past and Present

November 13, 2017
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.
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Defining Historicism

September 8, 2017
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.
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Which Liberalism? Which Soul?

September 8, 2017
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.
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A Dialogue on Reason and Imagination

September 8, 2017
Philosophical Reason: Historical, Systematic, and Humble Claes G. Ryn [From HUMANITAS, Volume VI, No. 2, 1993 © National Humanities Institute] The intellectual…
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Conservatism and Conservation

September 8, 2017
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.
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An Oasis in an Arid Desert

September 8, 2017
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.
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On Practices

September 7, 2017
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.
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Burke’s Historical Morality

September 1, 2017
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.
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