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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In preparation for our annual List of Christmas Holiday Readings and Books of the Year for 2018, please email your suggestions to John von Heyking at [email protected]
When submitting your suggestions, please do the following:
1. List author first and then title of book, with the book title italicized, e.g., John von Heyking's Comprehensive Judgment and Absolute Selflessness: Winston Churchill on Politics…

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…

A Torch Kept Lit: Great Lives of the Twentieth Century. William F. Buckley with James Rosen, ed. New York: Crown Forum, 2016.
 
James Rosen provides the reader with a selection of obituaries written by William F. Buckley for National Review. The cast of characters memorialized include significant political figures, family, entertainers and artists, friends, and friends who were political adversaries.
It is…

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Jacqueline Pfeffer-Merrill (Fund for Academic Renewal)
Dickens' other fine Christmas pieces besides A Christmas Carol - the best is surely The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain, but worthwhile too is The Goblins Who Stole a Sexton.
 
Tilo Schabert (University of Erlangen)
Sir Walter Scott's Old Mortality
The novel deals with the conflict between religious…