Modern Age articles from June 2003

Modern Age archives from June 2003

Ways out of the postmodern discourse.
June 22, 2003... DURING MY RECENT WORK on Russian colonialism and its consequences, I could not but immerse myself in postmodern discourse. This discourse has irregular boundaries, somewhat like a melanoma spot on the skin: it reaches toward, and identifies...

The meaning of "demonic nothingness".(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2003... ONE FAR-REACHING CONSEQUENCE of the secularizing trend of modernity has been a contraction of the mysterium tremendum of infinite transcendent Good to the much diminished degree of good in the mundanely utilitarian, a shrinking of reality that...

From symbolism to consciousness via Proust.(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2003... I. Lost Paradises and Concrete Recollections MARCEL PROUST'S three-thousand-page novel, A la recherche du temps perdu, weaves complexes of imagery and moralistic generalization with concrete personal recollection, albeit fictionally...

A prefatory note.(Reconsiderations)(Editorial)
June 22, 2003... THE FIRST "RECONSIDERATION" inaugurating an ongoing feature of Modern Age appeared exclusively in the Fall 1995 issue; it was entitled "The Case of Georges Bernanos" and written by Thomas Molnar. Since then a goodly number of reconsiderations...

The reactionary loyalties of John Lukacs.(Reconsideration I)(Critical Essay)(Biography)
June 22, 2003... IN THE DUEL, A RIVETING account of Churchill's confrontation with Hitler in the spring and summer of 1940, John Lukacs wrote that "Churchill was the opponent of Hitler, the incarnation of the reaction to Hitler, the incarnation of the...

Stanley Fish: the critic as sophist.(Reconsideration II)(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2003... "HEARKEN AND HEAR THEN," says Thrasymachus. "I affirm that the just is nothing else than the advantage of the stronger" (Republic 338C). Thus Plato, the founder of the Academy, dramatizes the political outlook of a sophist of the fourth century...

An alternative conservative.(The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry)(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry, edited and introduced by Norman Wirzba, Washington, D.C.: Counter-point, 2002. 352 pp. THE PUBLICATION OF The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry...

A neglected political thinker.(The Life and Thought of Aurel Kolnai)(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... The Life and Thought of Aurel Kolnai, by Francis Dunlop, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002. 351pp. THERE ARE CONSERVATIVES, and then there are conservatives. To separate the truly profound ones from the mere dabblers, we might employ what I...

Prophet of naked utility.(Niccolo's Smile)(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Niccolo's Smile by Maurizio Viroli; Translated from the Italian by Antony Shugaar, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000. xv + 271 pp. MANY ADJECTIVES ARE used to describe Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527). Most of them conjure...

A case in point.(Empire)(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Empire, by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001. xvii + 478 pp. OUT OF HIS EXPERIENCE with the country's political turmoil, the German artist, Gerhard Richter, has come to a keen and critical judgment:...

Lost inspiration and the fall of the Soviet Union.(Political Will & Personal Belief: The Decline and Fall of Soviet Communism)(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Political Will & Personal Belief: The Decline and Fall of Soviet Communism, by Paul Hollander, New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999. xi + 356 pp. LEGEND HAS IT that in the early 1920s one of Vladimir Lenin's fellow Bolsheviks...

The maturing of a humane economist.(Wilhelm Ropke: Swiss Localist, Global Economist)(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Wilhelm Ropke: Swiss Localist, Global Economist, by John Zmirak, Wilmington: ISI Books, 2001. 241 pp. IN GLARING CONTRAST TO the mainstream minds of his profession, free-market economist Wilhelm Ropke (1899-1966) viewed man as an embodied...

The transcendent in Tolkien.(J. R. R. Tolkien's Sanctifying Myth: Understanding Middle-earth)(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... J. R. R. Tolkien's Sanctifying Myth: Understanding Middle-earth, by Bradley J. Birzer, Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2002. xxvi + 219 pp. MUCH HAS BEEN WRITTEN of J.R.R. Tolkien's accomplishment during the past half century, with critics...

Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust: a reply to Daniel Goldhagen.(Comment)(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2003... THE LAST SEVEN YEARS have witnessed renewed interest in the controversy over Pope Pius XII's actions during World War II. His critics condemn him for his "silence" during the Holocaust and for his "collaboration" with the Nazis. By contrast,...