John von Heyking

Written by John von Heyking

John von Heyking is a Board Member and Book Review Editor of Voegelinview as well as a Professor of Political Science at the University of Lethbridge in Canada. He is author and editor of several books, including The Form of Politics: Aristotle and Plato on Friendship (McGill-Queen's, 2016) and Comprehensive Judgment and Absolute Selflessness: Winston Churchill on Politics as Friendship (St. Augustine’s, 2018).

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Michael Henry (St. John’s University)
Michael Walsh's The Fiery Angel: Art, Culture, Sex, Politics, and the Struggle for the Soul of the West
Walsh her continues his effort to restore an appreciation for Western Civilization and counter those who profess to hate it by focusing on showing how the Heroic Narrative lies…

People hope and pray that their nation will enjoy peace, security, and at least a modicum of neighborly flourishing. They are willing to suffer and bear large amounts of corruption and injustice in the body politic until a time comes when measures are required to save the polity, and perhaps even the cause of justice in the world. Unfortunately, people…

I thank Steven McGuire for organizing this symposium and Lee Trepanier for publishing it here on Voegelinview. Away from the friendships unfriendly that dominate the internet and social media, Voegelinview is an online forum for serious discussion open to anyone who wishes to participate. I am grateful to the contributors—Carol Cooper, Rudy Hernandez, James Greenaway, and Joshua Bowman— for taking…

For I saw it was impossible to do anything without friends and loyal followers; and to find such men ready to hand would be a piece of sheer good luck, once our city was no longer guided by the customs and practices of our fathers, while to train up new ones was anything but easy.
- Plato, Epistle VII, 325d.
 
In…

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Jonathan Radcliffe (Australian National University)
Kojin Karatani's Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy
Karatani is a kind of heretical Marxist - and a very interesting one at that. He rereads economic history not as a series of developmental stages, but as four “modes” that occur and recur: gift economies, state formation, capitalism…

Liu Xiaobo was the Chinese dissident writer and 2010 Nobel Peace Prize recipient who passed away this past June. He died of liver cancer while serving out the eleven-year sentence he received in 2009 for his role in the Charter 08 movement that modeled itself after the Charter 68 movement of dissidents of communism in Czechoslovakia. Liu’s work promoting freedom…

Conversation and the “Turning Around of the Soul”
One of the common criticisms of the contemporary university is that it lacks individuals unwilling or incapable of conversing. Critics such as Anthony Kronman and Stephen Miller rightly observe that there’s something about contemporary culture and the contemporary university hostile to the arts or to habits of conversation. Conversation has had a place…