thoughts in and out of season
James Kalb Important thinkers responsible for liberalism and political modernism generally include Machiavelli, Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, Kant, Sade, and Nietzsche. The succession of their views set forth the self-destruction of the liberal and modern tradition. That tradition started by rejecting the transcendent and accepting sole concern for the things of this world for the sake of … More ...
The great figures of conservatism include Confucius, Pascal, Burke, Maistre, and Newman. Pascal and Newman are not usually thought of as conservative thinkers, Newman in particular is often considered a liberal, but both are major theorists of antimodernist epistemology and therefore fundamental to the struggle against liberalism.
Other major figures relevant to conservatism include Hayek, … More ...
LewRockwell.com has republished a denunciation of fusionism, and (a fortiori) conservatism, by the intelligent but extremely contentious Murray Rothbard.
“Fusionism” has always seemed necessary to American right-wingers. America’s traditions include a great deal that is liberal, so traditionally-minded Americans have always had a strong libertarian streak. Also, for liberty to be something other … More ...
There’s an article by a couple of social scientists in the May First Things on the aggressive secularist dominance of the Democratic Party that’s worth reading. It doesn’t say anything new or surprising (we’ve discussed this before) but when obvious issues are routinely ignored or denied a statement of the obvious helps us … More ...
How are things now and what do we do about them?
In Pro and Contra Will S. asked about political crusades being called “wars” in America. William James’s 1906 essay on The Moral Equivalent of War shows the idea’s been around for a while.
I suppose another topic would be political wars being called “crusades”—Eisenhower’s book Crusade in Europe would be an example.
Sex is a basic principle of personal identity and social organization, continuity and cohesion. Those who say sexual love is “bigger than both of us” are more right than they know. Since sex helps constitute our world and make us what we are, we cannot reduce it to something we define for ourselves as we … More ...
Modernity is not adequate to reality. In the manner of Descartes, it insists on building larger truths from smaller propositions already known to be true. It extends that insistence from questions of truth to questions of existence, and insists that there can be “cranes” but no “skyhooks”—atoms but no God—and so in effect that convenience … More ...
Liberalism is the victorious form of political modernity. As a modern tendency, it treats human will as the source of value and tries to rationalize all things by reference to it as the standard. What distinguishes it from other modern tendencies is that it treats every will as equal. Its ultimate goal, therefore, is to … More ...
Modernity is based on a system of knowledge that starts with logic and clear and unquestionable truths and out of those things claims to construct all we can know. Such an approach to knowledge severely limits what we can recognize as real, and thus profoundly affects our view of what there is and what we … More ...