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Our List of Christmas Holiday Readings and Books of the Year for 2018

Brought to you by the friends of and contributors to VoegelinView!

 

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 at its heart.  In this book he concentrates on analyzing the arts but he also discusses the damage cause by the Frankfurt School.

James V. Schall’s The Universe We Think In

The incomparable Father Schall’s reflections on our place in the universe.

 

Grant Havers (Trinity Western University)

John Bloxham’s Ancient Greece and American Conservatism: Classical Influence on the Modern Right

Bloxham, who is a classicist, provides a very informative and thoughtful assessment of the many ways in which intellectuals on the post-WW 2 American Right have used (and misused) ancient Greek political philosophy to advance their own political agenda.

Travis Smith’s Superhero Ethics

In his creative and insightful comparison of comic book heroes from the Marvel and DC universes, Smith shows how these modern mythologies raise timeless questions about the meaning of justice, human nature, and power.

John von Heyking’s Comprehensive Judgment and Absolute Selflessness: Winston Churchill on Politics as Friendship

Our very own John von Heyking brilliantly demonstrates how the greatest leader of the twentieth century helps us understand friendship as the key to success in politics and statesmanship.

 Catherine H. Zuckert’s Machiavelli’s Politics

Resisting the popular portrait of Machiavelli as a defender of modern tyranny, Zuckert persuasively demonstrates in her comprehensive and intricate interpretations of the Florentine’s major works that he was in fact a consistent defender of democratic republicanism.

 

Jürgen Gebhardt (Erlangen University)

Pankaj Mishra’s Age of Anger: A History of the Present

Mishra draws on Voegelin, especially his analysis of Bakunin, in his diagnosis of how the spiritual will to destroy arises out of a spiritual vacuum in civilization.

 

Richard Bishirjian (American Academy of Distance Learning)

Philip McFarland’s Mark Twain and the Colonel: Samuel L. Clemens, Theodore Roosevelt, and the Arrival of a New Century

This 2012 study explores Clemens negative response to the first Progressives as they entered American presidential politics and advocated an imperial America.

 

William Petroulos, Eric Voegelin Archive in Munich

E. H. Carr’s What is History?

The lectures, published in 1961 and printed many times since, and in inexpensive editions, are not only substantial but also written with humor. So Carr prefaces his lectures on history and historians with a quotation from Catherine Morland in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey: “I often think it odd that it [history] should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention.” I also notice that Eric Voegelin was impressed with Carr’s 1942 book, Conditions of Peace (see EV, Collected Works, vol. 29. P. 336).

 

Michael Buhler (Lay chaplain for Northeastern Catholic District School Board Board in Timmins, Ontario)

Michel Tournier’s The Four Wise Men

I read the English translation from the French. This is a widening of the Christmas story, or an exploration and re-creation of the biblical tale. Tournier is tireless in exploring the depths of potential meaning beyond the surface of things and words. Even the nature of an animal’s movement or physiology carries potential depths of meaning for Tournier. His writing is evocative, and also enjoyable and accessible.

A quote from the book that reflects something of the meditative journey the author and reader can experience when diving into this traveling story: “Stagnant, lifeless water becomes brackish and muddy, while flowing, singing water remains pure and limpid. Similarly, the soul of a sedentary man is a vessel in which endlessly ruminated grievances ferment. From the soul of the traveler pours a pure stream of new ideas and unforeseen actions.”

 

William Thompson-Uberuaga (Duquesne University)

John von Heyking’s Comprehensive Judgment and Absolute Selflessness: Winston Churchill on Politics as Friendship

Heyking studies both Churchill’s practice of friendship and, when available, his views on the same, setting this in the helpful context of his (Heyking’s) considerable studies on friendship in the philosophical and political tradition. Very timely (published 2018) in today’s rather “unfriendly” political context at least in the USA.

Robert Hudson’s The Monk’s Record Player: Thomas Merton, Bob Dylan, and the Perilous Summer of 1966

If you are interested in spirituality and mysticism (Merton), as well as Dylan and music in general, this book is for you. Most of the Dylan pieces are on YouTube, which I visited while reading this engaging book, just out in 2018.

Werner G. Jeanrond’s A Theology of Love

This 2010 book offers a very thoughtful, even provocative, study of the history of how thinkers, mainly philosophers and theologians, but also the writing mystics, have thought about the nature of love and its chief forms (romantic, friendship, agape, etc.). Chiefly western in orientation. And Jeanrond does offer his own proposals throughout.

Michio Kaku’s The Future of Humanity: Terraforming Mars, Interstellar Travel, Immortality, and Our Destiny beyond Earth

This 2018 exploration by a theoretical physicist engagingly and fairly clearly puts the reader in touch with much current work in science, and dos not dodge the philosophical and theological issues. He follows Nikolai Kardashev’s type I, type II, and type III civilizational stadial thinking, which followers of Voegelin will perhaps rather hesitatingly greet, but hopefully want to know about.

Bernard McGinn’s The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism, Vol. 6, Part 1, Mysticism in the Reformation 1500-1650, and Part 2, Mysticism in the Golden Age of Spain 1500-1650

Published 2016-2017, these books offer McGinn’s superb study of key writing mystics, from the Anglican poets to John of the Cross. A gold mine of current  scholarship. Part 3 is yet to come.

Lee Trepanier’s Political Symbols in Russian History: Church, State, and the Quest for Order and Justice

Although somewhat older (2007), I found this work very timely, given the current reinsertion of Russia into contemporary political discussion. It offers a wealth of scholarship, and a special bonus is the use of Voegelin’s thought as the guiding source of interpretation and evaluation.

 

Lee Trepanier (Saginaw Valley State University)

Philip Roth’s Nemeses

With the death of one of the greatest, if not the greatest, American author of the second half of the twentieth-century, Roth’s last works are worth readings as he reflects about death, life, and, of course, sex.

Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor

A delightful but under-read play of Shakespeare’s that stars Falstaff as his usual scampy self. It is interesting that contemporary critics dislike the play, while the aristocratic class favored it during Shakespeare’s life, raising the question who is better judge of taste: us or them?

Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments

The companion piece to his Wealth of Nations but often neglected until recently where it has made a bit of a comeback among political theorists.

 

Stephen Satkiewicz (Oakland University)

Siniša Malešević’s The Rise of Organised Brutality: A Historical Sociology of Violence

This book offers a decisive counterpoint to the all-too prevalent perception that modernity has brought about the overall decline of violence. Contrary to this myth, modernity has been marked by many of the bloodiest conflicts in all recorded history, most notably two world wars. This isn’t an accident since modernity by its very large involves that allows for more rationalized forms of social organization that helps to increase the brutality involved in warfare.

William Grassie’s The New Sciences of Religion: Exploring Spirituality from the Outside In and Bottom Up

An interdisciplinary investigation into the multifaceted nature of religion and religious traditions, that avoids both the New Atheist style polemics as well as the common positivist-style reductionist models for understanding religions.

Thomas Waldman’s War, Clausewitz and the Trinity

Aside from his famous dictum about “war being the continuation of politics by other means”, the German military theorist Karl von Clausewitz is also famous for analyzing warfare through the theoretical framework of the Trinity. Yet this has too often been misunderstood, as contemporary debates concerning the continual relevance of Clausewitz’s work have shown. This book delves into the historical contexts and philosophical underpinnings of Clausewitz’s work; not just the Napoleonic Wars but also the decline of the Enlightenment and the rise of German Idealism.

Slavica Jakelić’s Collectivistic Religions: Religion, Choice, and Identity in Late Modernity

This book offers a thorough study concerning the interrelationship between religion and collective identities within the dynamics of Late-modern Europe, with postwar Eastern Europe (i.e. the Soviet bloc) serving as the major case study. As opposed to the common secularization thesis that religions decline in modern society, rather the nature of religious identities are more complex and resilient, thus are fully able to evolve and adapt to new circumstances.

 

Steve Conlin (Independent Scholar)

William Desmond’s The Intimate Universal: the hidden porosity among religion, art, philosophy and politics

This is an important addition to Desmond’s ongoing project on the metaxu. Desmond’s work, it seems to me, builds upon that of Voegelin (and others) and adds further nuances to our understanding of the nature of “the between”.

George A. Panichas’s The Essential Russell Kirk

This is a comprehensive selection from Kirk’s writings, and provides an interesting and very engaging introduction to them.

Bradley J. Birzer’s J. R. R. Tolkein’s Sanctifying Myth: Understanding Middle Earth

Full of interesting insights into elements of Tolkein’s work that are still underestimated. Also, it provided me with an excuse to re-read The Lord of the Rings yet again!

David Bentley Hart’s The Dream -Child’s Progress and other essays

Perfect Christmas reading: insightful and profound yet often witty and amusing.

Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Darker (cd/lp) and The Flame (writings and poems

Cohen’s final recordings (pending posthumous releases) and writings. Sometimes sombre – they seem to reflect Cohen’s “dark night of the soul” – but always deeply moving and finally uplifting. Just the thing for the dark-yet-light Christmas season!

 

Jonathan Radcliffe (Australian National University)

Hilaire Belloc’s The Servile State

Belloc and G. K. Chesterton were the main exponents of the Catholic socio-economic theory called Distributism, which called for the means of production to be distributed as widely as possible to create a self-sufficient and economically just society. Belloc points out that the “Big State” cannot help but appear as a feature of the acceleration of capitalism’s destruction of the local and traditional. If people cannot be relied upon to treat one another in reference to traditional mores, then the State and progressive moral opportunists step in to colonise the vacuum to legislate human relationships, especially those relating to labour. My take away from this is that today we might read this against ideologies such as the Deleuzian theory of“Accelerationism” which assumes that as the global flows of capital accelerate people will be “liberated” both from the traditional and the State. Instead the liberal Leviathan, for fear of the breakdown of the social contract, simply becomes larger, more draconian and more commensurate in order to keep together a society stunned by endless moral, economic and technological “future shock.”

Étienne Souriau’s The Different Modes of Existence

This could quite possibly be the densest book ever published. Written in the late 1940s and almost entirely forgotten until it was recently rediscovered by French philosopher Bruno Latour, Different Modes considers the question of Being not as univocal, but as a series of very different forms of existence. The being of a flash of light is not the same as that of a man or God, or even consciously fictional entities such as the tooth fairy, which rather than being non-existent still exist in a manner that influences human life. Souriau’s approach may be very fruitful to anyone wishing to tackle ontology and especially the nominalist problem of the univocity of being, but it is an extremely difficult read that will leave you with a very sore head indeed.

Giordano Bruno’s Cause, Principle and Unity and Essays on Magic

Bruno today is perhaps only remembered for having been burned at the stake in 1600. Often, he is represented as a martyr of science because of his avid support for the idea of an infinite universe. Most curious of all is the final work that is included in this collection, A General Account of Bonding, which, as Ioan Couliano pointed out long ago, may well be the first modern work on mass psychology and may well be much more relevant to our age of mass-media than the political theories of Machiavelli. Rulers are sorcerers of desire, claims Bruno, they control by placing images in the minds of their audience. Perhaps Bruno offers us an untapped Platonic alternative to the Freudian theories of mass desire from the past century, which have given us both the consumer ideology of Edward Bernays as well as the naive Freud-Marx ideologies of the 1960s.

D. C. Schindler’s Freedom from Reality: The Diabolical Character of Modern Liberty

Of late there have been a number of books coming out of America asking whether liberalism has failed, or perhaps was rotten from the start and merely succeeded in finally flowering into a dysthymic, destructive and atomised social order. Schindler’s work is fascinating because it argues with Locke from a Platonic perspective and finds his ideas not only immoral but diabolical. Schindler concentrates upon Locke’s positing of the will as simply immanent potentiality in nature and its contents entirely subjective and appetitive. Thus, the outcome of this libido dominandi is a flight into personal desire fantasies at the expense of actuality and total closure to divine reality. It is very hard to read this and not think of how the current (neo)liberal threat of “there is no alternative” utilises social media escapism and the culture industry as a kind of heat-sink in order to make up for a closed, disenchanted, futureless vision of reality, which it itself has produced.

J. D. Unwin’s Sex and Culture

Deep down I have a soft spot for eccentric macro-histories that make big claims: Spengler, Sorokin, Deleuze and Guattari, Marshall McLuhan. Unwin’s study is certainly eccentric, a vitalist theory of “social energy”. He claims to have studied 86 different societies and concludes that only those that are strictly monogamous and sexually repressive are able to produce grand civilisations. The idea might well seem rather amusing hyper-reactionary stuff and sometimes those Manosphere types cite this book, though they do not seem to have actually read it. Unwin’s ideas are far weirder and more nuanced, even if they are likely completely bonkers. Unwin certainly has to go out of his way to try to force every society he comes across into his very colonialist and reductive cookie-cutter of zooistic (sexual free for all and simple belief systems), manistic (malleable relations and cult religions) and deistic (monogamy and complex religions). Yet, in the end, he concludes against the ideology of progress that deistic societies are always short-lived and largely unimportant in the scheme of things, that it is immoral to keep women and children basically as chattel slaves. To Unwin the best society would be one in which there was a kind of hierarchical cone where there were equal male and female monogamous deistic rulers, a manistic middle class and zooistic proles. This all seems somewhat reminiscent of Plato’s Republic and the search for the ideal social order and desire in which everyone might have a place in accordance with their qualities. As far as a Freudian politics of desire goes, at very least Unwin’s book is worth a read as a strangely different take to the vitalist Rousseauian Freud-Marx ideologies of the mid-20th century, which failed to produce a liberated “zooistic” paradise and instead seem to have only fuelled resentment, neuroses and utter confusion about sexual mores.

John Milbank’s and Adrian Pabst’s The Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and the Human Future

The Politics of Virtue is the most commensurate Radical Orthodoxy contribution to political theory to date. It outlines a complex plan for a political order after liberalism. Instead of the idea of social contract they emphasise a Christian virtue ethics centred around the theology of the reciprocal gift and community. The book is equally savage to both the neo-liberal “there is no such thing as society” and the “poisoned gift” of an automated welfare system. However, Milbank and Pabst are under no illusion that today we live in pluralist societies, so their aim is certainly not to try to forcibly re-Christianise Britain. Rather, as is in keeping with the RO theory that we are living out a “certain middle ages,” their efforts hinge upon trying to find an alternative in which Christianity might still play a major part. Most integrally the authors recognise that the liberal union between Protestantism and capitalism that took place in early British modernity does not necessarily mean that the rule of law, respect for the person, private property and due process belong solely to liberalism (which often seems to be the defensive assumption when someone criticises the system). Rather liberalism is a latecomer, fuelled by a perverse Calvinist belief in the abject beastliness and selfishness of mankind, which from Hobbes, Locke and Mandeville and Malthus down to the present (I’d add Nick Land and John Gray) has engaged in the need to “naturalise” this pessimistic theological view through theories of socio-biology and economics. The core to Pabst and Milbank’s plan is the call for a return to strong regional communities and a greater role for regional cities in the British political system, which they outline in great detail.   An amazing read.

 

Zuzana Svobodová (Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic)

Martin Palouš’s The Solidarity of the Shaken. A Debate on Jan Patočka´s Philosophical Legacy in Today´s World

I am recommending this book because Voegelin is in many pages of this book as a root of thinking, e.g. chapter: Glenn Hughes: Understanding the Principle of Inherent Human Dignity, pp. 57-69, or chapter: Martin Palouš: Addendum. A Philosopher and His History (Jan Patočka´s Reflections on the End of Europe and the Arrival of the Post-European Epoch), pp. 85-124.

 

John von Heyking (University of Lethbridge)

Scott Berg’s Max Perkins: Editor of Genius

This is a biography of Perkins, editor and friend of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, and others. If being a friend means offering yourself and demanding no recompense, then writers should realize their editors fit this bill. The editor must come to understand the author has he understands himself. The editor and author must share what Aristotle calls “sunaisthesis.” Perkins especially, who was burdened with rather difficult writers/friends such as those mentioned, was genius at the art of friendship, and this 2008 biography beautifully portrays it.

David Roll’s The Hopkins Touch: Harry Hopkins and the Forging of the Alliance to Defeat Hitler

Harry Hopkins was hated by the American right for running FDR’s New Deal programs and was suspected of being a Communist spy (I doubt it). Even so, he had the “Hopkins touch” that enabled him to a close friend of FDR, the “American sphinx” who was notorious for not being close with anyone. Hopkins’ daimonism enabled him to serve as the go-between for FDR and Churchill and Stalin. Churchill loved him as did Stalin, who despite his avowed atheism said Hopkins had a deep soul. If you want to see how the high arts of friendship need to be practiced at the highest levels of diplomacy and statecraft, check out this biography.

Sheila Fitzgerald’s Stalin’s Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics

The classical critique of the tyrant is that he has no friends. Stalin made his circle, including Malenkov, Molotov, Beria, and Khrushchev, stay up all night drinking vodka, telling jokes, and watching John Ford Westerns. There was lots of bonhomie among these vampyric men as their totalitarian dreams ruined their nation and millions of lives. Were they friends? Hardly though this fascinating study shows that even in the deepest pit of Hell, even the trappings of friendship are displayed when its essence is lost. The 2017 movie Death of Stalin also captures the absurdity and terror of this historical period in a way that Voegelin’s favourite satirist, Karl Kraus, might admire.

Barry Cooper’s Consciousness and Politics: From Analysis to Meditation in the Late Works of Eric Voegelin

Sets the standard for Voegelin studies.

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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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