thoughts in and out of season
Shortly before dawn on April 19, 1993, FBI tanks equipped to dispense tear gas crashed through the walls of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. Over the course of the next six hours the tanks repeatedly rammed the ramshackle frame building inside the compound occupied by members of the sect, pumping in tear gas … More ...
A slightly edited version of the preceding essay, originally entitled “Liberalism, the Transcendent, and Restoration,” appeared in the Summer 2000 issue of Modern Age. It is also available in German and Czech.
The disappearance of the radical left is a sign that in principle it has reached its attainable goals. While no one … More ...
A slightly edited version of the following essay appeared in the Winter 2002 issue of Telos.
Why does liberalism—the tradition that makes equal freedom the political touchstone—combine such strength with such incoherence? The attempt to make freedom dominant leads to contradiction. Liberalism is triumphant almost everywhere, but its victory reverses the meaning of its … More ...
A slightly edited version of the following essay appeared in issue 20 of The Scorpion.
Political thinkers engage our attention by their presentation of the particular features of their own time and place as well as the permanent qualities of man in society. We can read Aristotle and Hobbes for general lessons, or for … More ...
The relation among individual, society and state is a confused one in our time. Is the individual everything and society nothing, or the other way around? Why should one care about the other? Can the state treat the whole social world as the theater for its meddling? If not, what are the limits? Such questions … More ...
The disappearance of politics in today’s world reflects the disappearance of resistance to rational hedonism. “Give ’em what they want” has become the grand principle of what passes for public life. To put it formally, only a few crazies now dispute that the final goal of … More ...
The following review of Paul Gottfried’s After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State (Princeton 1999) appeared in the Summer 2001 issue of Telos.
The title of this book refers to the practice and ideology of contemporary Western government, which, in Gottfried’s view, bears little resemblance to historical liberalism and in many ways is … More ...
A slightly edited version of the following essay appeared in the Winter 2002 issue of Modern Age.
Emerson tells us that truth is “such a flyaway, such a slyboots, so untransportable and unbarrelable a commodity, that it is as bad to catch as light.”[1] However things may be with truth, it is so with … More ...
A slightly edited version of the following essay appeared in the Fall 1995 issue of Modern Age. The essay is also available in Dutch.
Confucius has had distinguished individual admirers[1] in America but otherwise no perceptible influence on our political thought. We have lost by our failure to attend to him. … More ...
A Swedish translation of the following essay appeared in the Swedish mainstream conservative quarterly Contextus (no. 4, 1998). Bracketed language did not appear in the essay as published.
The American Founding was the first of the liberal revolutions; nonetheless, America is in many ways the most conservative of Western countries. It is the most anticommunist, … More ...