Humanitas articles from March 22 2007

Humanitas archives from March 22 2007

Imperialism destroys the constitutional republic.
March 22, 2007... Because of its sober and realistic assuptions about human nature and the human condition, the American republic of the Constitutuion of 1789 is not designed to do the big things typical of empires. It is especially not designed to do that which...

'The last and brightest empire of time': Timothy Dwight and America as Voegelin's 'authoritative present,' 1771-1787.(Essay)
March 22, 2007... Timothy Dwight (1752-1817) aspired to write epic poetry worthy of a great empire. At Yale College, he and his fellow "Connecticut Wits" intended, in historian Henry May's words, "to provide America and New England with a national literature,...

On loving thy neighbor.(Poem)
March 22, 2007... Loving thy neighbor is hard to do: that dirty, ignorant, stinking fellow Black or white, Hindu or Jew, requires you to be somewhat mellow. But if you don't do it, who will? It's really a question of love or kill. Rage is a...

Burke's historical morality.(Edmund Burke)(Essay)
March 22, 2007... The precise meaning of the terms "historical understanding," "historical sense," or "historical consciousness" can vary greatly, but they are generally understood as referring to an awareness of the dependence of human existence on the...

History for life: simms and Nietzsche compared.(William Gilmore Simms and Friedrich Nietzsche)(Essay)
March 22, 2007... In his biography of William Gilmore Simms John C. Guilds says of his subject that he had "a special fondness for history" and was, in Guilds's view at least, "the only American author of the nineteenth century to envision, design, initiate, and...

Lyric poetry, the novel, and revolution: Milan Kundera's life is elsewhere.(Essay)
March 22, 2007... Do novels or poems of high literary merit provide any particular guidance about the idea of revolution, or can we say only that different novels and poems express different points of view? Part of the issue, certainly, depends on how and where...

Homer's humor: laughter in the Iliad.(Essay)
March 22, 2007... Mockery and Mirth --"if anyone examines more closely the lives of those sober gods in Homer...he will find them all full of folly"--Erasmus. (1) The very subject of humor in Homer's Iliad might seem to be a bad joke. "Deep-browed...

How the right's gone wrong.(Conservatism in America: Making Sense of the American Right)(Critical essay)
March 22, 2007... Conservatism in America: Making Sense of the American Right, by Paul Gottfried. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007. 208 pp. $39.95. Former presidential speechwriter David Frum wrote an infamous piece in National Review, titled "Unpatriotic...

'The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor': the utopian as sadist.(Fyodor Dostoevsky)(Critical essay)
March 22, 2007... Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent. --George Orwell, "Reflections on Gandhi" The argument of Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor is simple: man is a weak, pitiful creature unable to achieve peace or...

Goethe's Faust: poetry and philosophy at the crossroads.(Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)(Critical essay)
March 22, 2007... 1. Philosophical Poets In lectures from 1910, subsequently published as Three Philosophical Poets, George Santayana provisionally placed Goethe among the philosophical poets. He had no reservation including Dante and Lucretius in this...

Political theology and the theology of politics: Carl Schmitt and medieval Christian political thought (1).
March 22, 2007... In societies where religion plays a strong and important role, the institutions of the society reflect the religion. Yet in societies where religion plays a more secondary role to say that all political concepts are secularized theological...