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Last Thursday I attended the Culture of Enterprise event at the Cato Institute, “What Should Be a Culture of Enterprise in an Age of Globalization.” Thomas Woods gave a talk that was an absolute tour de force and, fortunately, it’s available on-line. Hear it here (MP3), or watch it here (Real video). Those [...]
Filed under: Culture, Liberty, Social criticism, economics
From Peter Viereck’s Conservatism: From John Adams to Churchill:
…[John C.] Calhoun, during the Mexican war of 1846-1848, denounced America’s messianic ambition to “spread civil and religious liberty over all the globe” and argued instead: “… There is scarcely an instance of a free constitutional government which has been the work exclusively of foresight and wisdom. [...]
Filed under: Books, Conservatism, War
I’m in three cities over the next four days so posting will be brief. Two quick things tonight (or today, whichever it is) — here is the second part of Patrick Deneen’s talk from last weekend’s Charlottesville conference on Liberty, Community, and Place in the American Tradition. Daniel Larison seemed a little surprised that [...]
Filed under: Conservatism, Liberty
Georgetown government professor Patrick Deneen was one of the speaker’s at last weekend’s “Liberty, Community, and Place in the American Tradition” shindig in Charlottesville. He made a very interesting case, drawing on Leo Strauss, for what he called America’s “alternative” tradition, of which the Anti-Federalists were the prophets. Deneen has a blog and has posted [...]
Filed under: Philosophy, Social criticism
Stephen Greenblatt on “Shakespeare and the Uses of Power,” from the New York Review of Books. The best thing in the April 12 issue, though, is Hayden Pelliccia’s “Let Virgil Be Virgil,” which reviews the new Aeneid translations by Robert Fagles and Stanley Lombardo. (Maybe I should be more circumspect about claiming that the Pelliccia [...]
The fortune cookie with my Chinese take-away yesterday (which was a very affordable $5 for white rice, pork fried rice, and an egg roll) informed me, “Your principles mean more to you than any money or success.” I prefer fortunes that actually make predictions, but I’ll settle for that.
My “daily numbers” were 007. [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized
The Onion has a rueful infographic; it’s no laughing matter when the satirical site notes, accurately, that zero percent of our casualties have come as a result of weapons of mass destruction — and 100 percent are a result of the executive decision to invade Iraq.
Filed under: War
Ahead of this weekend’s “Liberty, Community, and Place in the American Tradition” conference, I’m reading Thunder on the Right by Alan Crawford, who’ll be the lunchtime speaker. Thunder on the Right, published in 1980, is an anti-New Right book written by young conservative whose own sympathies lay somewhere between Bill Buckley and Peter Viereck. [...]
Filed under: Books
Of course not, though I’m not at all sure that Aussie journalist Guy Rundle makes much of a case to the contrary. He argues that the negative image of Australia put about by left-wing British journalists is a substitute for dealing with what a “slatternly disgrace” the British working class has become. That rings [...]
Filed under: Pop culture, Social criticism
Steven Smith, who himself has recently published on Leo Strauss, reviews two new biographies of the “skeptical friend of democracy.” Here’s a bite:
Central to Strauss’s understanding of the Medieval Enlightenment [of Farabi and Maimonides] was the claim that revelation is the medium of the moral and political life of the community. No community, not even [...]
Filed under: Books, Philosophy