Modern Age articles from January 2006

Modern Age archives from January 2006

Restoring the meaning of conservatism [Part two].
January 1, 2006... THE SUMMER 2005 ISSUE of Modern Age featured a commentary on "Restoring the Meaning of Conservatism," which makes an appeal for holding fast to those principles that best define conservatism's "moral exemplification of our conservatorship" and...

The revolutionary conservatism of Jefferson's small republics.(Thomas Jefferson)
January 1, 2006... BY THE EARLY TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, Americans had become accustomed to, even took for granted, virtually everything against which George Washington and Thomas Jefferson had warned: gigantic public and private debt, a massive national government,...

Rediscovering the heroic conservatism of Richard M. Weaver [Part two].
January 1, 2006... IN 1953, when Richard M. Weaver published The Ethics of Rhetoric, he advanced an argument with respect to the ideal conservative which has, since its original pronouncement and through the last half century, been misunderstood. The standard...

The perils of America's progress.
January 1, 2006... IN A WORLD OF ever expanding empires--the Egyptian, the Babylonian, the Assyrian, and the Macedonian--the ancient empire of Rome was territorially the largest and temporally the most enduring. From west to east it stretched over some three...

Edmund Husserl and the crisis of Europe.
January 1, 2006... I EDMUND HUSSERL (1859-1938) was the last great European rationalist, albeit a unique and even paradoxical one: the father of phenomenology but also of existentialism; the Cartesian whose researches in the end eviscerate the cogito; the...

Augustine's Confessions and Voegelin's philosophy.(Eric Voegelin)
January 1, 2006... THOUGH ERIC VOEGELIN TOOK his epigraph for Order and History from Augustine, he wrote little about the saint and published nothing about the Confessions. (1) He linked his philosophy of history to Augustine's by commenting on a text from the...

Reading the Iliad in the light of eternity.('On the Iliad', 'The Iliad, or the Poem of Force')
January 1, 2006... I PUBLISHED ORIGINALLY during the Second World War, Simone Weil's "The Iliad, or the Poem of Force" and Rachel Bespaloff's "On the Iliad" are two of the last century's finest discussions of Western literature's preeminent epic. The...

Ian Robinson and the English tradition.(RECONSIDERATION)
January 1, 2006... REVIEWING Ian Robinson's The English Prophets: A Critical Defence of English Criticism (2001) in The Cambridge Quarterly (2002), Mark Le Fanu writes: Why this truly cultivated author is so little known nationally is a mystery. In a...

Reaching for something beyond.(The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845-1961: Newman, Hopkins, Belloc, Chesterton, Greene, Waugh)(Book review)
January 1, 2006... The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845-1961: Newman, Hopkins, Belloc, Chesterton, Greene, Waugh, by Ian Ker, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003. ix + 223 pp. FATHER IAN KER, distinguished theologian, literary critic,...

The modern moral sense.(The Morality of Everyday Life: Rediscovering an Ancient Alternative to the Liberal Tradition)(Book review)
January 1, 2006... The Morality of Everyday Life: Rediscovering an Ancient Alternative to the Liberal Tradition, by Thomas Fleming, Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2004. 270 pp. EVER SINCE DESCARTES bequeathed to the Western tradition the...

Thwarting the terrorists.(Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy)(Book review)
January 1, 2006... Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy, by Susan Neiman, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002. 328 pp. FRANCISCO GOYA'S HORRIFIC "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters" adorns the dust jacket of...

Jews and American conservatism.("Commentary" in American Life)(The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy)(Book review)
January 1, 2006... "Commentary" in American Life, edited by Murray Friedman, Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 2005. 226 pp. The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy, by Murray Friedman, Cambridge, Eng.:...

The politics of fear and hatred.(Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred)(Book review)
January 1, 2006... Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred, by John Lukacs. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. 248 pp. THERE ARE FEW SCHOLARS whose intellectual achievements are so respected that their intuitions are as highly regarded as their more...

German philosophy and the ethical life.(On Germans and Other Greeks: Tragedy and Ethical Life)(Book review)
January 1, 2006... On Germans and Other Greeks: Tragedy and Ethical Life, by Dennis Schmidt, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. 337pp. AT THE VERY BEGINNING of L. P. Hartley's novel The Go-Between (1953), an elderly narrator, about to take up a...

Ernest Hemingway.
January 1, 2006... I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AMAZED at the place that Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) has achieved in American letters. To be sure, he was a celebrity and I have no argument or quarrel with those who have made him so. I simply believe that he is not a...