Standing with his father as they watched the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775, eight-year-old John Quincy Adams must have wondered in amazement at the bloody and brutal nobility of it all. And, what must he have thought...
We have all seen the scene at least once, although some of us have savored it perhaps dozens of times. The handsome, dynamic, misunderstood, modernizing young king, with his slender physique, slender beard, and even more slender...
Western civilization has been gutted from within. At the core of this moral bankruptcy is a watered-down Christianity that lacks the conviction to defend itself... Today mankind enjoys unprecedented technology, but lacks the wisdom to regard technology...
Tyrants—intelligent, charming men as they usually are—rush into politics without first examining their souls. Politics without wisdom is not politics... A recurring theme in Plato’s dialogues, including his Seventh Letter, describes the...
The rule of democratic tyranny, Tocqueville held, "reduces each nation to nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd”... Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Patrick Deneen as he traces Alexis...
Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor agreed that “tenderness leads to the gas chambers,” and what they were trying to get through our thick heads is that tenderness without truth is tyranny.
As Rodney Stark has pointed...
"I am convinced that the most advantageous situation and the best possible laws cannot maintain a constitution in spite of the manners of a country; whilst the latter may turn to some advantage the most unfavorable...
Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Tracey Rowland as she examines the dangers to the family if political leaders are allowed to act as God. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher
How can the wealthiest people make democracies worse? Plato investigates the question in Book VIII of the Republic. Socrates suggests there that, in pursuit of more and more wealth, oligarchic citizens...
In the fifth century B.C., Athens and her allies were at war with Sparta and her allies in the Peloponnesian War, made famous by the great historian Thucydides. In the first part of the...
Plato tried to act as a political advisor to the tyrant Dionysius II of Syracuse. Famously, it was a fiasco. What are the sources of this failure?
Cicero, in...
Glenn Frank
One of our great cultural temptations since the 1960s is to think of songsters as poets. Stephen Foster never claimed to be, nor did Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, or Oscar Hammerstein. Suddenly,...
The word “tyranny” has a long history in American political discourse. Since at least the American Revolution, Americans have used the word to describe political actions they find distasteful. But what is tyranny? Some have defined tyranny...
