The Age of Caesar: Five Roman Lives
The Age of Caesar: Five Roman Lives. Plutarch. Translated by Pamela Mensch with Preface and Notes by James Romm and Introduction by Mary Beard. New York: W…
Crisis and Constitutionalism: Roman Political Thought from the Fall of the Republic to the Age of Revolution
Crisis and Constitutionalism: Roman Political Thought from the Fall of the Republic to the Age of Revolution. Benjamin Straumann. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Crisis and…
Pursuits of Wisdom: Six Ways of Life in Ancient Philosophy from Socrates to Plotinus
Pursuits of Wisdom: Six Ways of Life in Ancient Philosophy from Socrates to Plotinus. John M. Cooper. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. Pursuits of Wisdom examines…
The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400-1200
The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400-1200. Mary Carruthers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. The craft of monasticism is to make…
The Medieval Craft of Memory: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures
The Medieval Craft of Memory: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures. Mary Carruthers and Jan M. Ziolkowski, eds. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). This anthology…
The Centrality of the Regime for Political Science
The Centrality of the Regime for Political Science. Clifford Angell Bates, Jr. Warsaw, Poland: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Waszawskiego, 2016. The Centrality of the Regime for Political Science…
Democracy and Industrial Society
In Voegelin’s essay about industrial society, he explored how the American economy had adapted to ever-changing economic circumstances, with its technological productivity and rationalization of forms of…
Industrial Society in Search for Reason
In his 1960 essay, “Industrial Society in Search of Reason,” Voegelin described the features of industrial society as follows: 1) the worker was separated from his tools…
Democracy in the New Europe
Voegelin’s essay, “Democracy in the New Europe” (1959), was written in a period of transition in Eric Voegelin’s career, having left Louisiana State University in the United…
Socratic and Secular Irony
A Case for Irony. Jonathan Lear (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). Today we often misunderstand irony for sarcasm, self-detachment, or cleverness instead as a source…
Poetry Over Positivism: Owen Barfield on the Rational and the Representative in the World
Owen Barfield (1898-1997) was a British philosopher, poet, and solicitor who had a tremendous influence on the likes of C.S. Lewis, T.S. Eliot, and Saul Bellow. He…
War, Progress, and Sociology in the Age of Ideology
In the preface to The Quest for Community, Robert Nisbet explained the theme of his work: “I have chosen to deal with the political cause of the…
The Essential College Professor: A Practical Guide to an Academic Career
The Essential College Professor: A Practical Guide to an Academic Career. Jeffrey L. Buller. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2010. When one enters academia as a professor, what…
The Faculty Factor: Reassessing the American Academy in a Turbulent Era
The Faculty Factor: Reassessing the American Academy in a Turbulent Era. Martin J. Finkelstein, Valerie Martin Conley, Jack H. Schuster. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2016. …
A New History of the Humanities: The Search for Principles and Patterns from Antiquity to the Present
A New History of the Humanities: The Search for Principles and Patterns from Antiquity to the Present. Rens Bod. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. A New…