The ‘Woke’ History of Democracy
Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought by James T. Kloppenberg. Oxford University Press, 2016. Hardcover, 912 pages, $35. James Kloppenberg has produced an important artifact of contemporary intellectual life. Conservative...
What Exactly Do We Agree On?
“Oh, you snuck in so quietly,” she says, hurrying to help you find your name tag in a pile on a table in the hall of the University Club’s second floor. You are late, and so ascertain which door will let you in at the back and not the front by the speakers before you...
Saving What Is Lost
By Maria Grizzetti Five hundred years before Christ walked on earth Euripides was writing dramatic lines for Hecuba, Queen of Troy, in his Trojan Women. Thinking herself betrayed by the gods, she refuses them worship, yet as she grieves the death of her son, she...
The Best Classical Latin Poet You’ve Never Heard Of
The Elegies of Maximianus translated by A. M. Juster. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Hardcover, 240 pages, $65. MICHAEL FONTAINE Before he killed himself, I befriended an old man some years ago who had published several books on the right to death and the...Greenspan’s Intermezzo
The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan by Sebastian Mallaby. Penguin Books, 2016, 2017. Paperback, 781 pages, $22. Gilbert NMO Morris Biography is an interplay of perceptible and surprising cross-currents, and the life of Alan Greenspan is no...Conservative Fictions, Fictional Conservatism?
A conversation with Adam Bellow. A full transcript is below, and the unedited audio of this interview may be played or downloaded here (MP3, 27 MB, 27 minutes). Interviewed by MARK JUDGE Mark Judge: I am speaking with Adam Bellow, who is a well-known editor. He’s done...The Meiji Restoration at 150
A critical gaze falls on Meiji sloganeering. JASON MORGAN In 1853, American ships under the command of U.S. Navy Commodore Matthew Perry appeared in Uraga Bay off the coast of Japan. Their purpose was to deliver to the Japanese authorities a list of demands, couched...The Duty to Rewrite History
Schlesinger: The Imperial Historian by Richard Aldous. W.W. Norton, 2017. Hardcover, 486 pages, $30. John C. Chalberg Early on in his magisterial biography of an “imperial historian,” biographer Richard Aldous asks a question that he never really answers: Was Arthur...Hoffer and the True Believers
The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements by Eric Hoffer. Perennial Classics, 1960, 2010. Paperback, 192 pages, $15. PEDRO BLAS GONZÁLEZ The American philosopher Eric Hoffer (1902–1983) is a rare thinker. Hoffer is a philosopher in the classic sense...
Person Means Relation attempts “to find a more adequate way of speaking [about the person] that saves us from defaulting to the language of things...Someone” Walsh teaches "Is utterly different from something.” - @pricerobertg https://buff.ly/2367Eag @ubookman