thoughts in and out of season
Someone suggested in connection with my dialogue on liberalism, citing Norberto Bobbio, that the summum bonum liberalism proposes is validated by universal consent in the form of international human rights conventions. My response:
… More ...I can’t see international human rights law as a universal consensus on the highest good. The people who determine the policies
Freedom—the liberation of desire from restraint by other people’s understanding of the good—is central to liberalism. It follows that liberalism is incoherent. The problem is that freedom has to be freedom to do something in particular, and goals conflict. As a result some particular goals, and thus some freedoms, have to be chosen over … More ...
Can Christendom be restored?
Every society is based on some understanding of man and the world that is comprehensive enough to define good and evil, moral obligation, the nature of the good life and so on. But that is just to say that every society is based on a religious understanding.
The issue then is … More ...
Communism, in its concrete sense as a political movement based on the writings of Karl Marx, has been one of the three main variants of political modernity. The others have been liberalism and fascism. As such it combined liberal goals (emancipation of the individual from restraint) with fascist means (struggle in solidarity against an enemy … More ...
Europe refers to a geographical area and a civilization. In the former sense it stretches in the West from Gibraltar to the British Isles, in the East to the Urals, and on the South to the Mediterranean, Black Sea, Caucasus and Caspian Sea. In the latter sense it has usually been more restricted. Napoleon said … More ...
The question regarding man today is whether man is simply a natural object like any other, the qualities of which can be explained in the same way as those of a maple tree or computer program, and if not, whether he has a particular substantive essence—a necessary character that makes him what he is—or whether … More ...
Christendom is the part of the world inhabited by Christians, understood as a polity ordered toward Christ though recognition of the authority of the Church. The ordering of course has never been perfect, but Christ was nonetheless once understood as the principle of unity and the highest possible authority. As such, Christendom endured until the … More ...
The West is a sort of abstract version of “Europe”, which in turn is a secularized version of [Christendom]. As such it is not completely clear what it is or was, except that it wasn’t the “East” (thecommunist world) or the “South” (the Third World). It included New Zealand but not Argentina, for example, and … More ...
Tradition is a collective term for the beliefs, habits, attitudes, institutions, stories and so on that grow up among a people living together and give them a common mind and spirit that enables them to make a life together. Tradition is also the knowledge of things that can’t easily be put into words, diffused and … More ...
What kind of moral life is possible depends on what the world is like. The view educated men in the modern West take seriously is that what exists is (1) the world described by modern physics, and (2) sensation and desire. Those things are somehow just there, and no one understands or agrees on their … More ...