from The Collected Works

Hannah Arendt and The Constants of Human Nature

. . . .The delimitation of subject matter through the emotions aroused by the fate of human beings is the strength of Dr. Arendt's book. ^FN The concern about man and the causes of his fate in social upheavals is the source of historiography. The manner in which the author spans her arc from the presently moving events to their origins in the concentration of the national state evokes distant memories of the grand manner in which Thucydides spanned his arc from the catastrophic movement of his time, from the great kinesis, to its origins in the emergence of the Athenian polis after the Persian Wars.

 

The emotion in its purity makes the intellect a sensitive instrument for recognizing and selecting the relevant facts; and if the purity of the human interest remains untainted by partisanship, the result will be a historical study of respectable rank—as in the case of the present work, which in its substantive parts is remarkably free of ideological nonsense. With admirable detachment from the partisan strife of the day, the author has succeeded in writing the history of the circumstances that occasioned the movements, of the totalitarian movements themselves, and above all of the dissolution of human personality, from the early anti-bourgeois and antisemitic resentment to the contemporary horrors of the "man who does his duty" and of his victims.

THE GROWTH OF THE LIBERAL SOUL

by David Walsh

Chapter One:  Crisis of Liberal Politics

Part 1

David Walsh is professor of politics at Catholic University of America. He is the author or editor of many books; he is editor of three volumes of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. His Guarded by Mystery has been serialized here at VoegelinView in its entirety. His most recent book is The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. The Growth of the Liberal Soul is available from the University of Missouri Press and appears here with permission. "Crisis of Liberal Politics" appears here in five parts.

 

In one sense liberal theory and politics have always been in a state of crisis. Even in its earliest appearance in the reflections of John Locke and his con­temporaries, in their uneasiness with the Glorious Revolution of 1688, there was hesitation about the foundations. The American framers at Philadelphia and afterward frequently sounded their uncertainties as to whether their historical experiment in self-government was destined to survive. The advent of mass democracy in the nineteenth century, when "liberalism" became both a movement and a creed, provoked the most profound misgivings in such leading theorists as Tocqueville and Mill. And our own century has witnessed the global confrontation with totalitarianism that has made it the century of the fall and rise of the liberal tradition. So what is different about the present crisis? In what way is liberal democracy, that most defyingly durable of all modern political forms, particularly in danger today?

Chesterton (and the rest)

The Problem of Belloc

by Max Arnott

 

 

I wonder why I don't read more Belloc?

In the ordinary way of things, if one likes this (Agatha Christie,  Shakespeare, or cheddar), it would seem reasonable that one would like that  (Ngaio Marsh,  Ben Jonson, or stilton) which seems so similar.

G.K. Chesterton, whom we read often, worked so long and so closely with Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953), particularly on issues of the Distributionist economic movement, that G.B. Shaw called them Chesterbelloc. They were a sort of intellectual tag-team.

Belloc lived by his pen and he turned out a Missouri River class flow of topical journalism, history, alternative history, poetry, children's poetry, novels, and social commentary and, as might be expected from one who had to please or diet, it is lively stuff.

There is still a Distributionist movement (very small) and one of his books, The Servile State, is very much alive, as background influence, especially in libertarian circles, comparable to the better known Road to Serfdom.

from The Collected Works

The Idea of Progress and "the Authoritative Present"

. . . . When the intellectual and spiritual sources of order in human and social life dry up, there is not much left as a source of order except the historically factual situation. . . .

When, however, a situation of fact is to be used as a source of order, the situation has to be surrounded by a body of doctrine that endows it with a specific legitimacy. Hence, one of the typically recurrent ideas in this contingency is the assumption that the situation of the moment, or a situation that is envisaged as immediately impending, is superior in value to any prior historical situation of fact.