Review of Mad Men: The Death and Redemption of American Democracy
Mad Men: The Death and Redemption of American Democracy. Sara MacDonald and Andrew Moore. Lexington Books, 2016. It’s been a decade since Mad Men premiered on television, with its alluring and disturbing portrait of America in the 1960s. This prestige drama and its mysterious protagonist, Don Draper, captured…
Justice as Friendship: A Theory of Law
Justice as Friendship: A Theory of Law. Seow Hon Tan. Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2015. The field of study delineated by the theory of law is among the most relevant of philosophic disciplines given the proliferation of both legislative judicial review and quasi-judicial administrative tribunals, but is…
Sojourns in the Western Twilight: Essays in Honor of Tom Darby
Sojourns in the Western Twilight: Essays in Honor of Tom Darby. Robert C. Sibley and Janice Freamo, eds. Eastern Townships, Québec: Fermentation Press, 2016. Sojourns in the Western Twilight: Essays in Honor of Tom Darby is, as co-editors Robert C. Sibley and Janice Freamo state in the Introduction,…
Thinking About the Politics of Multiculturalism
Citizen and Multiculturalism in Western Liberal Democracies. David Edward Tabachnick and Leah Bradshaw, eds., Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017. Multiculturalism is among the ambivalences of our time. The word refers to the fact of ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity in political communities. In this sense, it is a…
Fate and Freedom in the Novels of David Adams Richards
Fate and Freedom in the Novels of David Adams Richards. Sara MacDonald and Barry Craig. Lexington Books, 2017. David Adams Richards is a Canadian novelist and member of the Canadian Senate (nominated by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and appointed in 2017). Born in 1950 in Newcastle, New Brunswick,…
Rediscovering the Center: A Meditation
I finished my last article in this very VoegelinView claiming that only with a conscious acceptance and participation in the real, mankind (especially the Western part of it), could return to a state of spiritual healthy. With the wisdom of hindsight, I now wish to continue that enquiry. The…
Browning's Monstrous Duke: The Metaxy, Quantum Mechanics and the Process to Destruction of the Phaulos in My Last Duchess
In his poem My Last Duchess, first published in 1842, Robert Browning creates one of the rarest types of character in literature: the phaulos. Understood in the sense of being the opposite of the spoudaios described by Aristotle, who is the person perceived as a moral exemplar, the phaulos…
The Second Realities of Madame Bovary
The extraordinary pearl of the tortured genius of Gustave Flaubert—the novel, Madame Bovary—exemplifies the kind of captivating puzzle that attracts attention well beyond the world of literary criticism. In the early twentieth century, for example, it inspired Jules de Gaultier’s philosophy of “Bovarysm,” a psychological complex distilled from the…
In a 1969 interview with Playboy magazine, the Canadian philosopher of media Marshall McLuhan offered some piercing observations on the “television-conditioned young” who search for an identity in a fractious world. “From Tokyo to Paris to Columbia, youth mindlessly acts out its identity quest in the theater of…
James McAdams has provided a compendious but readable account of communist parties from 1848 until now when he claims communist parties have died or withered away. McAdams, in my opinion rightly, does not consider the dynastic authoritarianism of Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il and…
Historians like Eric Hobsbawn had argued that the Russian Revolution was the seminal event of the twentieth century: “for “a mere thirty to forty years after Lenin’s arrival at the Finland Station in Petrograd, one third of humanity found itself living under regimes directly derived from…
The Bolshevik coup d’état of October 25 (November 7 according to the Western calendar), 1917, is known the whole world over as the Russian Revolution. It is nearly universally considered to be either a liberating event or a catastrophic one, but one…
No one doubts that Crime and Punishment has a prominent place in the pantheon…
Giving the Devil His Due is a self-published book that grew out of Professor Wilson’s dissertation written under the guidance of the O’Connor scholar, Ralph Wood, at Baylor University.
It is clearly a wonderful idea to put O’Connor…
When suffering from tuberculosis and confined to a sanatorium, Percy read Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground which led him to question whether science could answer life’s existential questions. This experience eventually led to Percy’s conversion to Catholicism and career as a novelist.…
This book is a history of the idea of humanity across world history. Stuurman analyzes the idea of humanity into two other concepts, equality and cultural difference, and he offers discussions of wide range of thinkers, some well-known to a general academic…
In these theological and philosophical essays on poetry and philosophy, as Martin describes them in his subtitle, we are presented with what amounts to a pioneering work in the burgeoning field of agapeic (literary) criticism.
What is this “new” area, precisely? Martin explains:
"My…
Review of Mad Men: The Death and Redemption of American Democracy 
The Life of the Scholar 
The Use of Force 
“A Cow Is Just a Cow”: George Grant and Eric Voegelin on the United States 
The Collected Works: The Drama of Humanity (Volume 33) 
Eric Voegelin as Master Teacher 
New Political Religions, or An Analysis of Modern Terrorism 
What is a Miracle? 
What Enlightenment, Exactly? 
God is Not Just the Good, as Plato Claimed But Love 
Justice as Friendship: A Theory of Law 
Sojourns in the Western Twilight: Essays in Honor of Tom Darby 
Thinking About the Politics of Multiculturalism 
Fate and Freedom in the Novels of David Adams Richards 
Rediscovering the Center: A Meditation 
Browning’s Monstrous Duke: The Metaxy, Quantum Mechanics and the Process to Destruction of the Phaulos in My Last Duchess 
The Second Realities of Madame Bovary 
God the Father: Emily Dickinson, Psychoanalysis and the Paternal Relationship 
Hawthorne’s Counterfeiting History in The Scarlet Letter 
The Need for Renewal: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Conservatism