For more than a century and a half, the specter of secularization has haunted the West. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Max Weber famously spoke of the “disenchantment of the world.”  He premised a “rationalization” of the world where “facts” and values” were definitively separated and where…

This is the third of a series of essays that will explore what prominent thinkers and philosophers can teach us about today’s public multiversity, the modern university with its many colleges, departments, and other administrative units that play multiple functions and roles in our society. This essay was originally…

Concepts of Nature: Ancient and Modern. R.J. Snell and Steven F. McGuire, eds.. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016.   The word, “nature,” is a broad term, often used ambiguously due to the long history of debate over its possible meanings.  The ambiguous use of the term derives, too, from…

The Political Discourse of Carl Schmitt: A Mystic of Order. Montserrat Herrero. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.   Montserrat Herrero is Associate Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Navarra, Spain. In the vast and growing scholarship about Carl Schmitt, Herrero’s book provides a new and insightful interpretation…

I. Guénon, Voegelin, and the Modern Crisis The concupiscent subject’s response to the Siren Song of the ecumene, to conquer and possess it, qualifies as Voegelin’s privative exodus in at least two senses. Pragmatically, the conqueror in going forth leaves home; he generally leaves it, moreover, with the cream…

I. Introduction: The Diadochic Kingdoms No area of Western history is quite as recondite as that of the Diadochic empires, the successor-kingdoms that sprang up in the wake of Alexander the Great’s meteoric campaigns (334 – 323 BC) to subdue Asia under militaristic Hellenism.  Educated people know that the…