Man, Proud Man

by | Mar 25, 2012

Liberalism: A Counter-History by Domenico Losurdo, translated by Gregory Elliott. London and New York: Verso Books, 2011. Pages viii+375. $35. Paradox and irony immediately confront the historian of liberalism. Commonly understood as the tradition of political thought...

On Being a Basel Professor

by | Mar 25, 2012

On Essays and LettersIn Walter Kaufmann’s chronology of Nietzsche’s life, under 1889, it states briefly, that “Nietzsche becomes insane early in January in Turin.” Insanity, evidently, is no impediment to writing letters. Chesterton said that the maniac was the man...

Defining the Middle East

by | Mar 18, 2012

The Coming Revolution: Struggle for Freedom in the Middle East. By Walid Phares. Threshold Editions, 2010. Cloth, 400 pages, $26“Revolution is coming to Middle Earth.” So wrote Dr. Walid Phares prophetically and appropriately on July 4, 2010, in the afterword of his...

The Art of Intimacy

by | Mar 18, 2012

The Literary Correspondence of Donald Davidson and Allen Tate edited by John Tyree Fain and Thomas Daniel Young. Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1974. $15.00 Of those sources ordinarily consulted by literary historians and critics, letters are surely among...

Undoing the Ties that Bind

by | Mar 11, 2012

Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 by Charles Murray. New York: Crown Forum, 2012, 416 pp., hardcover, $27. In America, it is currently difficult to define what it means to be an American. Not anecdotally, as in “what does it mean to you?” or “what...