First Things RSS Feed - James Hankins

Rehumanizing the Humanities

Tue, 10 Sep 2024 07:00:00 -0400

I have to admit to a tendency for my eyes to glaze over when people talk about a crisis in the humanities. I’ve been hearing about their imminent collapse my entire professional life. I was already being told forty-five years ago, when I was a graduate student in history at Columbia, that I was joining a dying profession.

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The Difference Between Belief and Observance

Tue, 09 Apr 2024 09:55:00 -0400

When I was at All Souls College at Oxford some years ago I had a conversation during a Saturday evening dinner that has stayed in my mind ever since. Saturday dinners were poorly attended, and so we did not dine in the Great Hall, as usual, but in the smaller “dessert room.” This was my favorite room in All Souls. It had beautiful oak paneling and through its great glass windows there was a breathtaking view of the Hawksmoor Quadrangle and, looming beyond it, the Radcliffe Camera bathed in golden light. On a Saturday evening, with candlelight glinting off the eighteenth-century college silver, one felt one was in Very Oxford.

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Classical Education Is Not a Right-Wing Project

Wed, 15 Nov 2023 06:00:00 -0500

Recently a book of mine underwent a perplexing treatment in the New York Review of Books . Normally one is pleased to have one’s book reviewed there (my editor was ecstatic) as the journal has a circulation of over 135,000 and boasts of being “the premier literary-intellectual magazine in the English language.” This review , however, written by Dr. Erin Maglaque, combined a highly complimentary and (what is more rare) mostly accurate account of the contents of the book with, at the end, sharp disagreement with my presumed political beliefs, as though to warn readers against considering the book’s contemporary relevance. I have never had a scholarly book of mine placed in a partisan political frame before, hence my perplexity.

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Augustus and the Salvation of Rome

Tue, 07 Nov 2023 06:00:00 -0500

With the victory of Octavian Caesar, the heir of Julius Caesar, over Antony and Cleopatra at the battle of Actium in 31 B.C., the greatest of Rome’s civil wars came to an end. Indeed, the whole era of civil war, which had torn apart late republican Rome for over half a century, was now over. After decades of reckless violence, political instability, economic misery, betrayals, cruelty, and staggering levels of corruption, what happened next in Roman history comes to the historian as almost a complete surprise. Rome was hated from Spain to Syria, the fragility of Roman power was obvious, and astrologers had long been predicting the empire's imminent collapse. The wonder is that, instead of collapsing, the Roman empire entered what historians, ever since antiquity, have celebrated as its Golden Age. The story gives us hope in our own day: Times of political collapse will pass, and can also bring forth unexpected greatness.

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The Greatness of Alexander

Fri, 12 May 2023 06:00:00 -0400

This biographical essay is excerpted from The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition, by Allen C. Guelzo and James Hankins, forthcoming from Encounter Books in 2024.

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Among the Infidels

Wed, 14 Dec 2022 06:00:00 -0500

Resist junk food journalism. Support journalism that nourishes the mind and soul by contributing to our year-end campaign today.

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Put Down the Woke Man's Burden

Thu, 25 Aug 2022 06:00:00 -0400

I was profiled recently in the Wall Street Journal , which was an interesting experience for a mild-mannered, retiring professor. It illustrated for me how things I’ve written about the Renaissance get filtered through current political passions. Quidquid recipitur, recipitur ad modum recipientis , as Aquinas used to say: People receive what they are prepared to receive. (I knew enough not to read the comments section. It's not good for faith, hope, or charity. Or sleep.)

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The Renaissance of the Classical School

Tue, 26 Apr 2022 06:00:00 -0400

We have been hearing a lot in recent months about a staffing crisis in district public schools, teacher burnout, and the large numbers of teachers planning to leave the profession sooner rather than later. The National Education Association, a union representing nearly 3 million public school teachers, published a document in February with some eyebrow-raising statistics: 90 percent of members say they feel that burnout is a serious problem (67 percent say very serious), and more than half, regardless of age, say they plan to leave the profession sooner than expected because of the pandemic. Of course, this being the NEA, the document ignored the teachers union’s own responsibility for the costly mistakes of public schools in the pandemic era. It segued immediately into the usual tone-deaf demands for more taxpayer funding, higher salaries, fewer hours, more protections from COVID, and so on and so on. Other recent reports describe the rapidly accelerating flight of students and teachers from district public schools. The cat is finally out of the bag about what is being taught in the public schools: politicized history, radical gender ideology, and racialized and decolonized everything else. Meanwhile, math and reading scores continue their decades-long slide.

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The Honor Deficit

Fri, 04 Mar 2022 06:00:00 -0500

Historians who write about merchant republics during the Renaissance often speak of an “honor deficit,” an inability on the part of city governments to command the respect of other governments and of their own peoples. In Florence and Siena, the ignoble popolo had long ago defeated the old civic nobility, and to carry a noble name—the prime hallmark of honor elsewhere in European society—was often a political liability in those cities. Equality, as a political value, trumped dignitas or personal prestige. Lacking princely courts to recognize honor, lacking armies of their own or a knightly ethos, republican city-states were governed by nobodies—names picked randomly out of leather bags: butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers. Behind the scenes, oligarchs and merchant bankers like the Medici called the tune, governing the state in the interests of their own family and party. To outside observers, republican cities seemed vulgar, unstable, rent by violence, unreliable in alliances, manipulated by commercial interests, and therefore deficient in honor and piety. A Portuguese visitor to Siena was fined in 1451 for insulting the city; he had declared that it was ruled by “grocers, tanners, shoemakers and rustics,” who constituted un reggimento di merda , a shitty regime. That attitude to popular republics was widespread. How could you trust a city governed by a rabble of tradesmen who cycled in and out of office every two or three months? Trying to negotiate with republics, wrote one disgruntled diplomat, was like chasing hares and rabbits.

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Intellectual Freedom in Medieval Universities

Fri, 04 Feb 2022 06:00:00 -0500

Many academics today are dismayed by the growing intolerance of heterodox thinking in contemporary universities, but those aware of the university’s longer history are less surprised at this turn of events. The idea that university teachers should pursue free, open-ended research is a rather recent notion, after all. It has been around only for about two centuries, and for less than that in America. The idea that professors should be leading undergraduates on voyages of intellectual self-discovery is even more recent. When I was a young instructor in Columbia University’s “great books” program in the 1980s, we believed we were freeing minds from their unexamined prepossessions, pressing students to face fundamental life questions, helping them to form their own worldviews. Historically speaking, however, this libertarian ideal of what a college education should do is mostly American and mostly a product of the postwar era. Universities would have regarded it with suspicion for at least seven hundred of the eight hundred years they have been in existence. The traditional job of a university was to transmit learning, not to encourage free thought.

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