After being denounced during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) as inconsistent with Marxist ideals, Confucianism has made an astonishing return to official favor in China. In 2010, I participated in the first Nishan Forum, which marked a dramatic and orchestrated confirmation that Confucian . . . . Continue Reading »
If critical theory in its demolition of the past can often degenerate into an ideological justification of ingratitude, then Marcuse was both its pioneer and its poster boy. Continue Reading »
Walter Scott once observed that although astrology, which had enjoyed almost universal credit in the middle of the seventeenth century, had become an object of ridicule by the beginning of the eighteenth, it still retained a number of devotees, even among the learned: Grave and studious men were . . . . Continue Reading »
The shenanigans of Cardinal Marx and Cardinal Ravasi suggest that Catholic Lite has decomposed into Catholic weightlessness. Continue Reading »
dark powersR. R. Reno’s “The Nazi Taboo” section in his “Public Square” (December) immediately piqued my interest, but I am still not sure where the thesis was headed. Is the sudden emergence of ISIS an example of our vulnerability to an “upsurge in primitive urges?” Certainly it has . . . . Continue Reading »
Dame Rebecca West had a theory that the history of civilization since Christ could be divided into three panels like a triptych. In the first panel, stretching roughly from the Crucifixion to the Middle Ages, the language of theology so dominated learned debate that all complaints were expressed in . . . . Continue Reading »
Alasdair MacIntyre, who is probably the greatest living philosopher, concludes his 1981 masterwork After Virtue by saying, “We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict.” In that book MacIntyre argues that a correct understanding of morality is based . . . . Continue Reading »
Karl Marx—a powerful mind, a very learned man, and a good German writer—died 119 years ago. He lived in the age of steam; never in his life did he see a car, a telephone, or an electric light, to say nothing of later technological devices. His admirers and followers used to say and some . . . . Continue Reading »
Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey by David Horowitz Free Press, 468 pages, $27.50 David Horowitz is the most prominent member of his generation to have made the political trek from left to right. He has become, no doubt because of his radical background, one of the right’s most effective . . . . Continue Reading »
For the historian, as for the philosopher, the quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns is being superseded by a quarrel between the Moderns and the Postmoderns. If the great subversive principle of modernity is historicism—a form of relativism that locates the meaning of ideas and events . . . . Continue Reading »
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