The theme of this “historical meditation” is the crisis and decline of civilization in the West during the twentieth century. That perspective is the product both of an individual temperament and also of a historical consciousness. One hundred, or even fifty, years hence neither the temperament nor the perspective may matter very much. But I [...]
The best that E. L. Godkin, the editor of the liberal journal The Nation, could say about United States congressmen in 1874 was that “we underrate their honesty, but we overrate their intelligence.” Henry Adams, another patrician critic of late nineteenth-century American politics, remarked that to disprove Darwin’s theory of evolution one need only study [...]
Donald Davidson Confident that industrial prosperity would create the material foundations for a vigorous, democratic civilization in the South, southern liberals since the 1880s had repudiated much of their heritage and embraced science and industry as the salvation of mankind. Liberal educators, journalists, and social scientists of the immediate postwar era, such as [...]
Religious fundamentalism has displayed a seemingly limitless capacity for simplification and hatred, which has often turned murderous. It is easy for us in the West to condemn Islam, but throughout its long history Christianity has also merited censure. The tumultuous and destructive wars between Catholics and Protestants that extended from the middle of the sixteenth [...]
The theme of this “historical meditation” is the crisis and decline of civilization in the West during the twentieth century. That perspective is the product both of an individual temperament and also of a historical consciousness. One hundred, or even fifty, years hence neither the temperament nor the perspective may matter very much. But I [...]
Anyone who writes about Abraham Lincoln must confront the “Lincoln Myth.” To penetrate the legend that now surrounds Lincoln is a formidable task for, as M. E. Bradford noted, the events of Lincoln’s life and the circumstances of his death placed him “beyond the reach of ordinary historical inquiry and assessment.” He is, Bradford continued, [...]
“The worst lies,” declared the French writer Georges Bernanos, “are problems wrongly stated.“ How applicable that observation is to so many concerns at present, not least the tragic events that took place in Boston. The chatter that fills the airwaves with speculation about the ideology that motivated two young men to detonate bombs on a [...]
America, that bright, shining land of freedom, opportunity, and progress, is irredeemably corrupt. It is in the hands of debased and hypocritical politicians, judges, businessmen, and their servants, such as the debauched Hollywood film maker Jack Woltz, the belligerent New York police captain Mark McCluskey, the rapacious Las Vegas gambler Moe Greene, and the contemptible [...]
America is the land of progress, speculative, contingent, pragmatic, experimental, traditionless. An American conservatism, accordingly, is oxymoronic, blundering, graceless, and embarrassing in a society devoted to change and forgetful of the past. “The storybook truth about American history,” began Louis Hartz in The Liberal Tradition in America, is that the country “was settled by men who [...]
Mark Malvasi Did we think we would get away with it? In the coming days and weeks we will hear much discussion about how video games, television shows, and the movies have contributed to the rising tide of violence that seems to be engulfing American society. Such talk has already begun. I have [...]
In Aristotle's view, “true wealth” was finite, restricted to those articles “useful to the association of the polis or the household,” and thus necessary to sustain “the good life.” The exchange of commodities for money with the aim of making a profit was an artificial, and potentially destructive, enterprise. Trade, Aristotle declared, should be mutually beneficial, [...]
A. E. Housman knew what he was talking about when he praised athletes dying young before they “wore their honours out” and had to watch their bodies age and the mementos of their former glory collecting dust on the mantle piece or window sill. Recently another Major League Baseball player, Carlos Ruiz, the talented and [...]
F.A .Hayek Following the Second World War, Hayek tried in vain to warn Western capitalists that they had set themselves on the “road to serfdom” at the very moment when the West stood on the threshold of unprecedented economic affluence, which would have been impossible without the intervention of government. At the turn [...]