Archive
More than thirty years of First Things articles at your fingertips.
Articles
Roger Scruton’s The Disappeared, Revisited
“It was inconceivable that in a town dedicated to prosperity, comfort and English order, a girl might simply disappear, smuggled into slavery under far distant skies. But the inconceivable...
The Art of Admiration
Not Forgotten:Elegies for, and Reminiscences of, a Diverse Cast of Characters, Most of Them Admirableby george weigelignatius, 221 pages, $17.95 More than two and a half centuries ago, Montesquieu...
Aurel Kolnai and the Assault on Creation
As the culture of repudiation takes on pathological forms, aiming to replace Western civilization and American republicanism with a project of pure negation, those who wish to preserve our...
Cosmopolitan Dream
The Lure of Technocracyby jürgen habermastranslated by ciaran croninpolity, 200 pages, $22.95 The European project, as it is called, is marked by great promise and great peril. No less...
Solzhenitsyn’s Red Wheel
n It is not uncommon for readers of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s final novel, The Red Wheel, to draw comparisons with another Russian masterpiece, Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Like its...
The Art of Liberty
The following is a response to Patrick J. Deneen’s “Unsustainable Liberalism.” The other response, by Paul J. Griffiths, can be found here . Patrick Deneen has written a thoughtful...
Clarifying War
Moral Combat: Good and Evil in World War II by michael burleigh harper, 672 pages, $29.99 World War II—the bloody denouement of the “Thirty Years War” of the first half...
The Moral Witness of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
With his passing a year ago—on August 3, 2008, at the age of eighty-nine—the world was obliged to come to terms once again with Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn. It was...
Zinovy Zinik and “The Solzhenitsyn Reader”
In May 1982, the Russian Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn took time off from his work on The Red Wheel , his magisterial literary-historical account of the origins of the...
Tsars & Commissars
Russian Conservatism and Its Critics: A Study in Political Cultureby Richard Pipes.Yale University Press, 216 pages, $30. The Soviet Union was the world’s first experiment in totalitarianism, the twentieth...
Traducing Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is one of the great souls of the age. He is also among its most maligned and misunderstood figures. It is hard to think of another prominent...
A Noble Failure
Skepticism and Freedom: A Modern Case For Classical Liberalismby Richard A. Epstein.University of Chicago Press. 311 pp. $35 We do not lack theoretical “defenses” of liberalism. Indeed, academic political...
Tocqueville Between Two Worlds: The Making of a Theoretical and Political Life
Alexis de Tocqueville is an ines capable presence in the contemporary debate about the nature of the democratic dispensation. His work is used to validate almost every theoretical and...
State vs. Society
Behemoth: Main Currents in the History and Theory of Political Sociology.By Irving Louis Horowitz.Transaction. 474 pp. $29.95 The modern world’s landscape is marked by two seemingly inexorable and contradictory...
Right Thinking
Conservatism: An Anthology of Social and Political Thought Edited by Jerry Z. Muller Princeton University Press. 450 pp. $44.95 Conservatism has undoubtedly established its presence on the American political...
