In the following two passages, with a nod to Tocqueville, Mill makes two strong claims. First he praises American culture: “Almost all travellers are struck by the fact that every American is in some sense both a patriot, and a person of cultivated intelligence. … No such wide diffusion of the ideas, tastes, and sentiments […]
J.S. Mill on American culture and politics Read More »
Tim Black, a senior writer at spiked, has a good review discussion of “Why they’re really scared of Heidegger.” The “they’re” refers to many contemporary academics, and Black’s review is of Emmanuel Faye’s wave-making Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935 (Yale, 2009). Some key quotations from
Heidegger’s anti-humanism and the Left Read More »
Bulletin: Sex and Economics — A Modest Proposal Fellow citizens: Our nation’s sex life is in peril. Surveys show widespread sexual discontent. Market failure is everywhere. Many males complain of not getting enough sex and many females object to constant male looks and advances. Other males are dissatisfied with the options available in their local
From the Office of the Reproducer-General Read More »
The satirist, poet, and radical Heinrich Heine described poet Alfred de Musset as “a young man with a great future behind him.” Ouch. Musset never forgave him. Heine is known to have fought in at least ten duels in his life. One wonders why. Heine also said this of Kant, describing his clockwork walks along
The Department of Great Putdowns: Heine on de Musset and Kant Read More »
The Peruvian guerrilla and terrorist group Shining Path was founded by a professor of philosophy: Abimael Guzmán, who died in 2021. Shining Path is a Maoist version of Marxism, believing in the inevitability of revolution and the bloody process necessary to see it through. Shining Path is estimated to have killed 11,000 civilians along the
Shining Path terrorism and Marxist Guzmán’s Kantian philosophy Read More »
Via Edward Fox, a quotation from Paul Berman’s (recommended) Terror and Liberalism: “In the years around 1950, writers from several parts of the world set out to produce a new literature of political analysis, different from any political literature of the past, with the goal of describing and analyzing the totalitarian political passions of the
Berman: From what ghastly depths come fascism and communism? Read More »
The Enlightenment of the long 18th century was an era of awesome intellectual and cultural transformation. My Enlightenment Vision flowchart [pdf] is pitched at a high level of abstraction, showing schematically how the philosophical revolution of the 17th century led to the 18th-century revolutions in science, technology, politics, and economics — which in turn led
The Enlightenment Vision — Flowchart Read More »
Mao Zedong on the ethical requirements of communism: “A Communist should have largeness of mind and he should be staunch and active, looking upon the interests of the revolution as his very life and subordinating his personal interests to those of the revolution; always and everywhere he should adhere to principle and wage a tireless
Mao on selflessness, altruism, and collectivism Read More »