Contemporary Conservatism and the Forgetfulness of the Past
The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left. Yuval Levin. New York: Basic Books, 2014. More and more abound reminders of…
The History of Love
A Philosophical History of Love. Wayne Cristaudo. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers 2012. Tina Turner once asked us, “What’s love got to do with it?” Wayne Cristaudo’s A…
G.K. Chesterton: It’s the First Principles, Stupid
In what we have written here over the months about G.K. Chesterton, we have gone on and on about Chesterton the essayist and about Chesterton the newspaper…
Looking East
The Way of the 88 Temples: Journeys on the Shikoku Pilgrimage. Robert C. Sibley. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2013. Among the most charming aspects…
The Coherence of Biography and Philosophy: Hans Jonas’s Philosophical Biology in the Light of his Personal Memoirs
Hans Jonas (1903-1993) was one of the foremost thinkers of the twentieth century. In three major books: The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology; The Imperative…
Democracy and Industrial Society
It surprises me as a newcomer to this circle that entrepreneurs have been apparently forced onto the defensive by an image of the entrepreneur whose characteristics come…
The Nature of Revolution
Revolutions: Finished and Unfinished, from Primal to Final. Paul Caringella, Wayne Critaudo, Glenn Hughes, eds. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2012. Revolution is a term that has…
Basil Willey and the Terrible, Awful, No-Good Seventeenth Century
. . . the changes of this modern climate ever since the seventeenth century have become the subject of Basil Willey’s perceptive and extensive Background studies, beginning…
The Broken Road: A Modern Xenophon
The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos. Patrick Leigh Fermor. London, Murray, 2013. On reading the new biography of Sir Patrick Michael Leigh…
Antonio Negri’s Revolutionary Utopianism
Time for Revolution. Antonio Negri with Matteo Mandarini, trans. London. Bloomsbury, 2003. Antonio Negri’s Time for Revolution consists of two shorter works, written twenty years apart,…
Toynbee’s History as a Search for Truth
History as a humane study is defined by Toynbee as a concern with the lives of civilizational societies in both their internal and external aspects: "The internal…