Modern Age articles from January 2004

Modern Age archives from January 2004

Dr. Robert Coles, children, and the sacred.(A Quarterly Review)(Biography)
January 1, 2004... I CHILDREN, IT IS SAID, are the future of the human race on whom we project our own hopes and fears. We are amused by the spectacle of the father who transfers his unfulfilled athletic ambitions to his son, or of the mother who is...

Socialist man: a psychological profile.(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2004... SOCIALISM IS A COHERENT philosophical doctrine, but more than that it is a political program to be achieved. Its philosophical roots, identifiable in their own right, must be distinguished from its social and cultural aspirations and, further,...

The two and the many: or, lovers and politics.
January 1, 2004... POLITICS IS THE WAY of organizing humans living-together. It is not a good, but the process for arriving at it. Politics overcomes a natural disorder, Thomas Hobbes's "war of all against all." Politics is, then, ignominious gathering, because...

Politics and the intellectual world: changes in Europe.
January 1, 2004... I EUROPE IS NOW FREE of the "classical" totalitarian/utopian systems that dominated it through much of the twentieth century. The collapse of the Fascist/Nazi system left few and insignificant remnants after it. The sturdier and in some...

The next area of unrest: East-Central Europe.
January 1, 2004... THE END OF YUGOSLAVIA as a power in the Balkans might be signalling a temporary lull, but by no means a quiet future in the area. Communism and Marxist thinking are no longer ruling over lands and minds, yet they have left behind them signs of...

Conservatism, centralization, and constitutional federalism.(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2004... MY PURPOSE IS TO SET FORTH and explore the ramifications of two different conceptions or paradigms of American federalism whose roots can be traced to The Federalist essays of both Hamilton and Madison. Certain conclusions flow from this...

Reality and contemplation.(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2004... ONE CHARACTERISTIC of American civilization--notably in the present era--is the unqualified respect for reality. Reality--things as they are, actual occurrences--contrast with ideas, dreams, illusions, intangible values and experiences....

Loyalty in the modern world.(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2004... WHAT IS LOYALTY? What is its quintessence, its fundamental nature? What rank does loyalty have in the realm of values and virtues? How important is it to a life well lived? The question of loyalty is of considerable interest, because...

George Grant: intimations of deprival, intimations of beauty.(Biography)
January 1, 2004... GEORGE GRANT (1918-1988) was incontestably the most important Canadian conservative thinker of the twentieth century, and it is perhaps his distinctively Canadian approach to conservatism that has made his writings less well-known in the United...

Nature's end: the theological meaning of the new genetics.
January 1, 2004... EVER SINCE THE ANCIENT GREEKS, the ethical tradition of the West has been powerfully dominated by claims about human nature. Such an intellectual orientation has an eminently practical value. If we can indicate features common to all humanity...

The poet's room.(Poem)
January 1, 2004... Once it had walls. Now, between the pictures and the books, the walls have disappeared behind frames of color, behind the smooth, hard spines of knowledge, delicate with effrontery. Unseen, the walls keep up their work, their...

A prefatory note.(Great Teachers in Our Lives)(Editorial)
January 1, 2004... WITH THE PUBLICATION below of Professor Irving Louis Horowitz's essay on "Aaron Wildavsky: Facts, Policies, Morals," the editors of Modern Age are pleased to introduce a new series of essays, "Great Teachers in Our Lives." The addition of this...

Aaron Wildavsky: facts, policies, morals.(Great Teachers in Our Lives)(The Revolt Against the Masses)(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... I I HAVE BEEN AN ADMIRER of Aaron Wildavsky for so long that when he died, a decade ago, I felt a personal injury--something akin to losing a limb. Just who would take up leadership of the intellectual defense of the common culture? I am...

To see, or not to see ....(Not Seeing Red: American Librarianship and the Soviet Union, 1917-1960)(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... Not Seeing Red: American Librarianship and the Soviet Union, 1917-1960, by Stephen Karetzky, Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2002. xi + 504 pp. "A GOOD BOOK is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up...

The decline and fall of communist systems.(Rotten Foundations: The Conceptual Basis of the Marxist-Leninist Regimes of East Germany and Other Countries of the Soviet Bloc)(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... Rotten Foundations: The Conceptual Basis of the Marxist-Leninist Regimes of East Germany and Other Countries of the Soviet Bloc, by Peter W. Sperlich, Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2002, xii + 244 pp. THIS IMPORTANT BOOK is not likely to...

Resisting the ideological Lie.(Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Ascent from Ideology)(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Ascent from Ideology by Daniel J. Mahoney, Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2001. 181 pp. WHEN THE QUESTION "What is evil?" is posed to a class of undergraduates, it invariably elicits mention of...

The pragmatic and polymathic Posner.(Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline)(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline, by Richard A. Posner, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001. 408 pp. FEW WILL DENY that Judge Richard A. Posner is a person of immense influence: as a judge in the Seventh Circuit Court...

Not in time.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... Time Passing: Modernity and Nostalgia, by Sylvaine Agacinski; translated by Jody Gladding, New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. 212 pp. ACCORDING TO T.S. ELIOT, "To apprehend / The point of intersection of the timeless / With time is...

Music in the Modern Age.(Surprised by Beauty: A Listener's Guide to the Recovery of Modern Music)(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... Surprised by Beauty: A Listener's Guide to the Recovery of Modern Music, by Robert R. Reilly, Washington, D.C.: Morley Books, 2002. 351 pp. IN HIS GENEROUS AND beautifully written book, Robert Reilly leads us through the vast, largely...

A utopian radical.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... John Stuart Mill On Liberty and Control, by Joseph Hamburger, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1999. xviii + 239 pp. JOSEPH HAMBURGER, the Pelatiah Perit Professor of Political and Social Science at Yale University at the...

Appropriating Heidegger.(Heidegger's Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks)(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... Heidegger's Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks, by Charles Bambach, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003. 400 pp. IN 1922 MARTIN HEIDEGGER wrote a rather brief, yet particularly signal essay entitled...

Christian political discourse.(Christian Faith and Modern Democracy: God and Politics in the Fallen World)(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... Christian Faith and Modern Democracy: God and Politics in the Fallen World, by Robert P. Kraynak, Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001. 334 pp. FIFTY YEARS AGO, Jacques Maritain, Yves Simon, and John Courtney Murray had...

Voices in the wilderness.(The New Agrarian Mind: The Movement Toward Decentralist Thought in Twentieth-Century America)(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... The New Agrarian Mind: The Movement Toward Decentralist Thought in Twentieth-Century America, by Allan Carlson, New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2000. 224 pp. AGRARIANISM HAS ALWAYS FOUND a sympathetic place in the hearts of true American...

Trivializing American conservatism.(A Time for Choosing: The Rise of Modern American Conservatism)(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... A Time for Choosing: The Rise of Modern American Conservatism, by Jonathan M. Schoenwald, Oxford, Eng.: Oxford University Press, 2001. 338 pp. UNTIL QUITE RECENTLY conservatism was the orphan of American historiography. Thus for every work...

The Country of Objective Truth.(Return to Good and Evil: Flannery O'Connor's Response to Nihilism)(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... Return to Good and Evil: Flannery O'Connor's Response to Nihilism, by Henry T. Edmondson, Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2002, 240 pp. HENRY EDMONDSON'S BOOK ON the fiction of Flannery O'Connor makes a persuasive case for the profundity and...

The Novelist's Left Hand.(The War Against Cliche: Essays and Reviews, 1971-2000)(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... The War Against Cliche: Essays and Reviews, 1971-2000, by Martin Amis, New York: Talk Miramax Books, 2001. xv +506 pp. KINGSLEY AMIS, MARTIN AMIS: one can scarcely say at this point who is the more illustrious, father or son. It is clear,...

The Metropolis of Ancient Egypt.(Alexandria: City of the Western Mind)(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... Alexandria: City of the Western Mind, by Theodore Vrettos, New York: Free Press, 2001. xx + 249 pp. IN ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA, William Shakespeare immortalized the ancient Egyptian metropolis, Alexandria. For most contemporary Americans, if...

Current American polity.(Comments)
January 1, 2004... INRECENT YEARS a heated debate has erupted about American foreign policy and about what moral purpose should inform our conduct of international relations. While analysts Robert Kagan, Michael Mandelbaum, and Stephen Schwartz insist the United...

Satanic arrogance.(Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million)(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... MARTIN AMIS, WHO BEGAN as a journalist with The New Statesman in the early 1970s and then moved to the writing of novels, quickly established his reputation as keen observer of contemporary social and moral decay. His analyses were never...

The decline & fall of the Anglican regime.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... MAURICE COWLING HAS NOW brought to a close his monumental Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England, delivering after fifteen years a weighty final volume in his trilogy--a 700-page description of the changing character since the early...

Deep time: the realms of discovery.(Critical Essay)
January 1, 2004... STEPHEN JAY GOULD, writing in An Urchin in the Storm (1987), used the term "deep time" to describe the vastness of geologic time. But the term is applicable to other depths of time experienced by human beings. The human mind envisions time at...