‘Spoken with Sufficient Seriousness’

by | Jun 29, 2015

On April 12, 1656, Pascal began his XI Provincial Letter “To the Reverend Fathers, the Jesuits,” in this manner: “Reverend Fathers, I have seen the letters which you are circulating in opposition to those which I wrote to one of my friends on your morality; and I...

Churchill Defends the Gallipoli Campaign

by | Jun 29, 2015

Winston Churchill reportedly once remarked that history would treat him kindly because he intended to write it. Churchill’s efforts to do so failed with respect to the Gallipoli Campaign—the allied attempt during the First World War to force the Dardanelles Strait,...

Ethnicity Matters

by | Jun 21, 2015

Pandaemonium: Ethnicity in International Politics by Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Oxford University Press, 1993. Hardcover, 221 pages, $110. In 1947, Solomon Bloom, a student of Marxism and nationalism, published an article in Commentary entitled “The Peoples of my Home...

Norman Lear, Conservative?

by | Jun 21, 2015

Even This I Get to Experience by Norman Lear. Penguin Press, 2014. Hardcover, 448 pages, $33.British comic novelist and television writer Douglas Adams was once asked to explain the difference between a comic writer and a wit. “A wit will think of a funny response at...

The Whig Theory of Christianity

by | Jun 14, 2015

Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism by Larry Siedentop. Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2014. Hardcover, 448 pages, $35. In its basic assumptions, liberal thought is the offspring of Christianity. It emerged as the moral institutions...