Bernard Bailyn challenges card-carrying historians and interested citizens alike to embrace intellectual humility and amiability at a time when public discourse has taken a decisive turn away from such virtues. This challenge is evident in Bailyn’s final work, “Illuminating History.” Bernard Bailyn The American historian Bernard Bailyn, who died of heart failure at [...]
Niccolò Machiavelli can enter public debate not merely as a wicked man concerned only with power and political maneuvering, but as a philosopher with myriad insights to offer modern politics, politicians, and even apolitical members of the public… Be Like the Fox: Machiavelli In His World, by Erica Benner (384 pages, W. W. Norton & [...]
The Relentless Rationalist will twist humanity for a so-called greater good, even if it means forcing human faces under a boot and stamping on them forever. Totalitarianism is the only conclusion: hell for the human, paradise for the prophets-turned-gods... “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” [...]
Relentless Rationalism burns up the “life, mind, morality and reason” of man, seeing in the ashes the only true liberation of humanity… “Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.” —Jules Verne, The Journey to the [...]