What We’re Reading

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America. Tocqueville’s classic Democracy in America is a timely read and is as important now as when it was written. When asked to write an essay (book review, really) for a new forthcoming journal by Word on Fire Institute, I naturally took the opportunity to go back to Tocqueville’s classic work that I had first read (in selections) as an undergraduate. We often hear, now, that democracy is under attack and that Christianity, specifically “Christian Nationalism,” is one of the primary threats to American democracy. Yet this is the opposite of what the greatest political observer and theorist of American democracy noted in the 1830s. Tocqueville reminds us that the twin spirit of “religion and liberty” is what propelled American democracy forward; Christian Americans have always been, and remain, the most fervent democratic citizens. Tocqueville is the antidote to the lies and slander of the true anti-democratic and anti-Christian machine that dreams of total control over the United States by demonizing its opponents and establishing and insulating an unaccountable and unelected administrative bureaucracy as the new organ running the United States. Read Tocqueville, not MSNBC.

~ Paul Krause

Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture. Delivered as a lecture series in 1947, Josef Pieper’s Leisure presents an essential message for our time. Pieper worries in this little book that the Western world is forgetting about a necessary foundation of its own culture. This foundation of culture, he clarifies, is the traditional understanding of leisure — an idea shared by thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, and others. According to Pieper, leisure is traditionally understood as a mental and spiritual attitude, an idea distinct from spare time or a vacation. Leisure is “an attitude of mind, a condition of the soul.” It is a “form of silence, of that silence which is prerequisite of the apprehension of reality.” Pieper argues that the foundation of culture is leisure, and that leisure, in its turn, stems from the cultus, from divine worship. As Roger Kimball puts it, leisure is an idea that philosophers of the ancient and medieval world knew was “bound up with the highest aspiration of humanity.”

Pieper’s defense of leisure was written in a historical climate that would have been hostile to his message. As a German philosopher, Pieper wrote Leisure in his native country in the late-1940s, a time when the nation was in the process of rebuilding after the devastating effects of the Second World War. The physical reconstruction of the country was a pressing task, but Pieper believed that moral and intellectual reconstruction was equally important. “To build our house,” Pieper wrote, “implies not only securing survival, but also putting in order again our entire moral and intellectual heritage. And before any detailed plan along these lines can succeed, our new beginning, our re-foundation, calls out for a defense of leisure.” And so, when Pieper calls for the reinvigoration of leisure, he does not mean that we should simply take more time off from our daily duties. To neglect our work and our obligations, of course, will not bring happiness. Instead, Pieper means that we should rediscover the mental and spiritual attitude that is fundamental to a healthy culture and prerequisite to true human flourishing.

~ Darrell Falconburg

Ronald Hayman, Sartre: A Life. Jean-Paul Sartre’s historical significance cannot be easily understood; Hayman’s biography answers these difficult questions, conducting a balancing act between Sartre’s influence on politics and the immediate urge to let it alter his thinking. Hayman writes, “He used his life to test ways of facing up to the evils of contemporary history; if he was not always honest, it was partly because honesty was a luxury he could not afford.” This philosophical concept and characteristic of frank honesty begins in the postwar world in between Sartre’s teaching and a (temporarily) failed writing career. His first novel, La Nausée, helped establish a political stance he always longed to share when it was published in 1938. Later, Sartre made himself editor in chief of Le Temps Modernes, which solidified his overarching appreciation and empathy towards radical (leftist) parties. Sartre ironically denounced Marxism “as deterministic and the Communist party as undemocratic, and he aligned himself with Marxism and relegated Existentialism to being a mere ideology.” These inconsistencies truly made Sartre’s philosophy flourish, especially during the Cold War. He believed Europe needed to remain neutral, not supporting the United States against the Communist bloc. Sartre, however, never became a member of the Communist Party. He did, though, remain on the left, advocating against colonialism and the bourgeoisie. In the last dozen years of Sartre’s life, he attempted to grasp the relation of Marxism to psychoanalysis. Hayman’s biography of Jean-Paul Sartre is an excellent work that dives into the writing and political life of this French Maoist-Marxist.

~ Sarah Tillard

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