George Weigel

Campaigning for the French presidency last year, Nicolas Sarkozy ran hard against what Europeans still refer to as 1968 , describing the post-1968 New Left as “immoral” and “cynical” and defining the choice before the French electorate in stark terms: “In this election, the question is . . . . Continue Reading »

In September 1984, I had a sabbatical year at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. One day—while I was having lunch with a Seattle congressman, Joel Pritchard, then in the midst of a bout of chemotherapy—a portly gentleman came up to our table to ask Joel how he was feeling. . . . . Continue Reading »

In the early 1950s, or so I’m told, two young men who would later come to world prominence attended some of the same political science lectures at the Sorbonne. One was the son of Polish-Jewish parents who had emigrated to France; the other was from Cambodia. One had lost his mother to the . . . . Continue Reading »

The first phase of the Iraq Wars came to a dramatic”and ominously prophetic”denouement on that heady day in April 2003 when U.S. Marines stormed into central Baghdad and pulled down a statue of Saddam Hussein that the local citizenry couldn’t quite manage to topple. Several months . . . . Continue Reading »

Even as history continues to unfold”and explode”in ancient Mesopotamia, the Iraq War has already proven itself the most consequential international political event of the post-Cold War period. It changed, and continues to change, the political, psychological, and perhaps even . . . . Continue Reading »

Paul J. Griffiths The intense debate in the United States since September 11 about the meaning, history, and contemporary applicability of just war theory”much of it conducted in the pages of First Things”has been instructive and for the most part at a high level of conceptual and ethical . . . . Continue Reading »

It is no secret that late 2002 and early 2003”the months just before an American-led coalition deposed the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq”were a difficult moment in the dialogue between the Holy See and the United States government, and between the leaders of the Church in Rome and many . . . . Continue Reading »

Go back in your mind’s eye to the fall of 1940, the fateful period that Winston Churchill called Britain’s “finest hour.” Having subdued the Low Countries and France, Adolf Hitler now turned his attention to the last remaining democratic power in Europe. Hermann Göring convinced Hitler . . . . Continue Reading »

In Book Three of Tolstoy’s epic, War and Peace, the hero, Pierre Bezukhov, arrives at the battlefield of Borodino to find that the fog of war has descended, obscuring everything he had expected to be clear. There is no order, there are no familiar patterns of action, all is contingency. He . . . . Continue Reading »

On October 31, 1958, Isaiah Berlin gave his inaugural lecture as Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford. Entitled “Two Concepts of Liberty,” it was, according to Michael Ignatieff, Berlin’s authorized biographer, “the most influential lecture he ever delivered.” . . . . Continue Reading »