The peacock moves with pageantry,
unfolding feathered tapestry,
to hide would be disastery,
Peacock is convinced.

And which will dress our history,
bold plumes or image-shiftery?
Word, sacrament, and mystery,
or blending in, confused?

It's done. I've unraveled the thread of my fate—
I have lived. My name holds its old reputation;
Far from the snares of the clever and great,
My pen rises skyward, a new constellation.

Happy is he who never existed,
Happier he who returns to nil
As he was before, and happier still
Who sits beside Jesus—an angel enlisted,
Free from this body and predestined bond,
A spirit, no destiny but the beyond.

Of course, it offers music, too.

I'd show the bishop priestly crimes
except that he is blind.
I'd damn the Protestants to hell
if only they would mind.

George Fox rebuked our dainty tread
by kicking off his shoes,
while Cromwell called for giant steps
in tracks of antique Jews.

But we now lack the grace to sin
and boldly be forgiven:
all our neatfoot vice ensouled,
our bootless sinners shriven.

If I were fast enough afoot,
I'd let the meter run—
trumpet truth from yellow cabs,
cry witness to the sun.

But here I sit, before the fire,
with tepid wrath at heart.
I burn light verse to warm my feet
and sin my little part.

Lord, as You look on such eclectic prayer,

Such very now liturgic elegance

With its proponents all quite blind to where

It self-creates less happy circumstance,

Hold tight and tenderly within Your care

Little fat girls who won’t be asked to dance.

The recent critique of Hannah Arendt is a case in point. The most comprehensive assault to date, some thirty-five years after her death, is also the most recent. Bernard Wasserstein, professor of modern European Jewish history at the University of Chicago, comments on Arendt in the Times Literary Supplement in October 2009 under the title “Blame the Victim: Hannah Arendt Among the Nazis.” He offers not just a selective summary of “the historian and her sources” but also an umbrella of charges and allegations from other prominent figures over the past half century. One of the most infamous is that of my good friend Walter Laqueur—a significant figure in his own right. Wasserstein spares us the need to pick through the emotive rubble that has plagued Arendt’s career, stitching together a picture of her as either a gullible reader of neo-Nazi literature or a closet Jewish anti-Semite in need of intellectual detoxification. In summary, but not in any way an exaggeration, Wasserstein claims the following:

• The success of Arendt’s earlier work is owed more to the way it locked on to mid-twentieth-century Western guilt over imperialism and the continued strengthening of the Cold War than to The Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt’s conception of the dynamics of historical change is little more than a confused mishmash of the structural, the social-psychological, and the conspiratorial.

• Her works display a deep ignorance of political economy, diplomacy, and military strategy. Furthermore, she had little grasp or even interest in the mechanics of the political process in the states about which she wrote.

• Rather than examine hard evidence, she deals in trifles and inflates them into richly colored balloons of generalization. At a time when superior historians were rejecting and becoming disenchanted by the idea of totalitarianism, her work in this area did not explain the generalization.

• Her comparisons of Nazism and communism were sporadic and uneven, and she hardly dealt with Italian fascism as predecessor of these test cases of totalitarianism. The concept was incorporated into the vernacular of the 1960s and 1970s only because it served the useful ideological purposes of the Cold Warriors at the time.

• The burden of her later work is blaming Jewish victims rather than anti-Semitic perpetrators. In her inversion of victims and victimizers, her bile knew no ethnic boundaries or rationalizations.

• There was always a special edge to her criticism of her own Jewish people. She swallowed sometimes in whole cloth the poisonous anti-Semitism hatched in the Weimar period, much of which was shrouded in the Nazi literature of the age.

The ferocity of his critique blinds Wasserstein to several uncomfortable facts. The Origins of Totalitarianism, a foundation stone of Arendt’s reputation, is not a work about the origins of imperialism; it is about the origins of totalitarianism. Wasserstein conflates two different aspects of modern dictatorships in a clever way to trivialize Arendt’s formulations. By extension, this allows Wasserstein to make it appear that Arendt’s responses to Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia are simply different ways to deal with nineteenth-century European and American colonial expansions. What makes Wasserstein’s formulation eccentric is his insistence on Arendt’s tendencies to accept at face value, without explanation, neo-Nazi historical formulations of the Jewish question and plain old Leninist approaches to the imperial tradition. We shall deal with this later. For now, let me observe that it is precisely Arendt’s formulations of the totalitarian strains in the revolutionary periods of German and Russian state power that separate her work from shabby comparative linkages.

Just why Wasserstein thinks Western democratic “guilt” has much to do with the unitary features of totalitarian systems is inexplicable, much less unexplained. There is hardly a trace of causal theorizing in his critique. He fails to identify either Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia with classical Western imperialism. It could not be otherwise, unless one is to accept at face value Hitler and Lenin’s arguments that European—and, by extension, American—expansion closed off the economic possibilities of their own regimes. The dictatorial source and direction of state power had many sources in both Germany and the Soviet Union, and some of those sources doubtless derive from imperialism. That is a key point linking these regimes and their ideologies. There is no reason whatsoever to believe that Arendt saw her work as part of Cold War fever. Quite the contrary: She emphasizes the juridical basis of democracy. She blames sociologists for emphasizing massification and movement without giving proper regard to the Federalist Papers, the Founding Fathers, and the rule of law. Indeed, her constant disparagement (wrongly) of Dwight Eisenhower as a weak president indicates not so much a fear of Cold Warriors as a fear of a domestic leadership that looks to public opinion and that is unable to cope with global issues. These are not exactly issues alien to our time.

As Arendt makes clear in her original preface to The Origins of Totalitarianism, the book was written and essentially completed in 1945, just at the termination of the Nazi regime but very much at a high point of the Soviet regime. The work could not be a function of Cold War theorizing at that point in time. Beyond that simple fact, recognition of the totalitarian syndrome of the communist system did not take place during the wartime period when the book was being written; such recognition came about after the Second World War was long over. The final piece of the puzzle for Arendt was the conflation of Hitler’s vision of Jewish world domination as a cause of the animus he held for Western democracy and the Stalinist ideology of cosmopolitanism, which she tells us is the “fictitious world conspiracy that provided a more suitable background for totalitarian claims to world rule than Wall Street, capitalism, and imperialism.” In other words, not only the historical but also the theoretical organization of Arendt’s book belies Wasserstein’s claims. The need for a revised edition in 1966 was precisely the problematic status of the postwar turn in Stalinism.

Arendt’s theoretical construct of totalitarianism united party structure and government with the brutality of modern dictatorship as such. More importantly, in Arendt’s view, totalitarianism concerns an illicit fusion of power and personality that makes political legitimacy dangerous and at times impossible. Arendt was a staunch opponent of McCarthyism and a defender of the rule of law. Her own assessment of the Cold War was to see the anticommunist crusade as an end in itself embedded in McCarthyism, which was an indicator of the growth of populist lawlessness and a breakdown of the federalist balance of powers. She saw the anticommunist crusade as a high risk. “The republic which should define the framework and the limits of democracy is being dissolved from within by democracy. The society is overwhelming the republic. This process is underway, and whether it can be stopped is very, very questionable, even if Joseph McCarthy is defeated. But his defeat is crucial, the condition sine qua non. Then at least one could start fighting for the republic again.” It was historians with a feeble grasp of the fragility of political democracy that most concerned her, not global issues or diplomatic maneuvering. To identify Arendt as giving the Cold War succor is not only wide of the mark but reveals ignorance of the legal foundations of her thinking.

Arendt’s attitude toward the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an informal gathering of anti- and ex-communists, indicates how severely critical she was of such CIA-sponsored clandestine activity in the early 1950s. She viewed this as the inversion of “good old American know-nothingness.” The ideology embraced by the Congress for Cultural Freedom went hand in hand with the ideology of Americanism that was just beginning to emerge. She was harsh with many of her friends and supposed supporters, among them Sidney Hook and Melvin Lasky, and she dissociated herself from the gatherings of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. “It is symptomatic,” she wrote, “that the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which God knows, has never lifted a finger in this country for either culture or freedom, has become a kind of collecting point for these types.” Her judgment of this focal point of intellectuals at the time hardly exemplifies a Cold War view of things. To traffic in such guilt by association between Arendt and the Cold War is ludicrous; it is forgivable in journalistic rhetoric but hardly from a respected historian such as Wasserstein. Indeed, even on this point Arendt’s touchstone was not only the mission of the Congress for Cultural Freedom but also what she perceived as its bias against those thinkers of German liberal extraction, such as Paul Tillich and herself.

On a somewhat related matter, Arendt’s near-total absence of study of Italian fascism may simply signify a lack of interest in dealing with the exceptional and idiosyncratic features of that system’s totalitarianism. Then again, the same could be said of a wide variety of totalitarianisms that were more rooted in numbers of people purged than in systemic characteristics. In point of fact, Arendt had an interesting response to the famed Huey Long quip that “if fascism comes to America it will be in the guise of democracy and it will start in Congress.” In seconding the sagacity of Long’s opinion, if not its motive, Arendt wrote to Karl Jaspers that “all of it would be brought about without violence and only through pressure.” It should be clear that she well understood that the forms of totalitarian rule varied, but the Nazi and communist maximum uses of force were fused at the top, much as Gaetano Mosca’s vision of a political class that could achieve dangerous ends occurs in a wide variety of situations and conditions. In ideological retrospect, the fierce struggle between Nazism and communism served as forms of Hegelian historicism—left, right, and both hideous.

The idea that the unitary character of totalitarianism is negated by the situation in Italy during Mussolini’s rule in Italy is absurd. The history of Italian unification—Italian fascism having more than a decade’s existence as a special place in radicalism; the role of the papacy in severely constraining manifest forms of statist rule; the cultural tradition of Italian major cities, which had autonomous forms of city development; and the weaknesses of Italy with respect to economic concentrations of power in the early twentieth century—all argue against a muscular totalitarianism. Even the well-known animosity between Hitler and Mussolini may have been a factor. Fascism did not in any way define Italy as a democratic power. Italy was guilty, belatedly, of mocking the Nazi and Soviet regimes with their racial laws, anti-Semitism, and cosmopolitanism. Italy in the 1930s searched out ways to raise its own feeble imperial claims in northern Africa. Mussolini may have modified Italian fascism, but the softening of its totalitarianism did not necessarily mean a turn to democratic rule, as a myriad of exiles and opponents of the regime revealed only too well. In one of her more unusual comments on Italian fascism, in On Revolution, Arendt says that the “greatest and somehow inexplicable shortcoming of Maurice Duverger’s work was his refusal to distinguish between party and movement.” She concludes that “the enormous differences between the Fascist and Nazi Movements and the parties of the democratic regimes were even more obvious.”

Wasserstein introduces a strange comparison between the work of Hannah Arendt and that of Jacob Talmon. The latter is a great figure of mid-twentieth–century scholarship in his own right. Having known both of these scholars and having written about Talmon at some length, I must point out that Talmon wrote expressly on the French postrevolutionary and restorationist traditions and not about the later period that concerned The Origins of Totalitarianism. While they held sentiments in common, Arendt and Talmon arrived at them by different routes. Talmon’s work laid the groundwork for understanding what took place under the Soviet and Nazi periods of power. But the structural overlaps between the work of the two were never made transparent. The point of contact between them came much later, when Arendt wrote of the differences between the French and American revolutions. She contrasts the unbridled, “passionate” French approach to change, with its apocalyptic reliance on violence and political assassination, with the “compassionate” approach of the American Revolution, with its uses of persuasion and legal mechanisms to achieve radical ends. The idea that she was making invidious comparisons between her work and Talmon’s is ludicrous on the face of it. The sly implication that this was the case has the same intellectual worth as a comparison of apples and oranges.

In all areas of social, political, and military affairs, Arendt is so ignorant—at least according to Wasserstein—that the great wonder is that anyone, past or present, has paid attention to her. Perhaps the best answer to the charge that she failed to credit Alfred Kazin for his editorial work on The Origins of Totalitarianism is in Kazin’s own words. In Harper’s, Kazin identifies “Arendt as a scholar who writes with deeply moving personal urgency about politics in its classic signification—when it meant no context for office or administration but the public realm in which alone, through action, man knew freedom.” Then again, Kazin was not exactly Carl von Clausewitz either! To recite areas of research in which an author is ignorant is surely no worse, perhaps less so, than to charge an author with knowledge of which she pretends but in fact does not possess. The emotive quality of Wasserstein’s charges is indicative of his problems, not Arendt’s, with the Jewish condition under Nazi rule.

I will avoid Wasserstein’s transparent bias and animus toward Arendt as a stylist; he criticizes matters that range from her “Teutonic style” to her “oracular prose” to her “half acknowledgment” or presumed duplicitous laundering of the efforts of Alfred Kazin. Add to that Wasserstein’s criticism of her attempts at humor, “nearly always poor and directed at the Jews and their history.” Add further Arendt’s “self-contradictory” statements on major themes, and what one ends up with is an assertion that Arendt is guilty not only of empirical error but also rhetorical calamity. Wasserstein cites almost all historians of European thought who are critical of Arendt, but he cites no political scientist or social scientist who responded to her work in a positive way. The final irony is that this advanced critic of Arendt speaks disparagingly of her “lack of several of the essential qualities of the historian: sympathetic imaginative insight, open mindedness, compassion, balanced judgment and the capacity to sift and weigh evidence.”

Perhaps the final straw in Wasserstein’s accusatory judgments against Arendt is her presumed perverse reliance on Nazi historians as authorities on modern Jewish history. She shares the collective contempt and stigmatization that characterized Nazi ideologists and propagandists. As someone bearing the name of Hannah Arendt as part of a named chair, I cannot be unaffected by such allegations and condemnations. It might well be that my response could be termed a defense—part of the syndrome of loyalties and disloyalties that one comes to take on from bearing that appellation for more than thirty-two years. That said, I want to put forth a rebuttal to what amounts to unmitigated, if ingenuous, slander.

After reading, reviewing, and writing on Hannah Arendt, I have come to think of her, fairly or otherwise, as a special voice, one of many—they range from Thomas Mann to Karl Jaspers to Marlene Dietrich—who came through the fires of hell called Nazi Germany with their consciences intact. An entire people was mesmerized by the rupture of a culture and a tradition that were entitled to be called the best in Western civilization but that ended up as the worst ever in Western civilization. The German nation began as a metaphor of Schiller’s ode to the spirit of human freedom and concluded with Hitler’s spirit of life taking on a scale of unparalleled horror.

Each person who made the trek from Germany to seek survival and liberation carried the scars of that period writ large. Each person who made the journey, each person who tacitly or actively acquiesced to the Nazi slaughter of the innocents as well those who opposed it, had to define and redefine the meaning of his or her career and life in improbable conditions of place, language, and tradition. In that sense, Hannah Arendt was one of many Jewish, Christian, and nonreligious intellectuals—of whom there were many, if not a majority, in Germany—as well as working people, whose spirit was dulled by memories of a deeply flawed national ambition and shattered personal expectations. Little wonder that the major European powers, and not Germany alone, preferred to fasten onto anything but the Holocaust at the end of the Second World War. It was not banality as such but the quotidian nature of the Nazi dictatorship that made coming to terms with Nazism so difficult after as well as between 1933 and 1945.

Arendt in no shape or form “blames the victim” for the terrible punishment inflicted by the Nazis. What she does do—in my opinion, correctly—is identify the extraordinary depth to which the Nazis went to exterminate a people. Sadly, a large bloc of German Jews felt that, if the Nazis could not be turned back at the gates of genocide, they could at least be prevented from carrying out their worst ambitions. An equally large bloc felt that that was not possible once the machinery of terror and the political order were enshrined in jurisprudence. The end result was a disaster for the survivors. Arendt’s bitterness was indeed focused on Jews who urged and even advocated compromise. In light of historical events, one might argue against her views on the Eichmann trial but most certainly not that the theme of banality reflected anything other than despair over the German Jewish community’s failure to recognize the pervasiveness of the system and the corrosion of the legal groundwork of its Nazi-infected mass movements.

Issues with Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem keep turning up. The theme of the banality of evil did not win favor with Arendt’s critics; psychological explanations of human behavior rarely settle matters. But Wasserstein has raised criticism of a possible loophole for disquieting personal behavior—a criticism introduced by Walter Laqueur many years ago—to a much higher level. Wasserstein condemns Arendt’s views as little more than using the Holocaust to “blame the victim.” The idea that such a grotesque reading can pass without evidence is difficult to entertain. Arendt, echoed by many in the German Jewish communities of the Nazi era, did not blame anyone but the Nazi state (at one level) and the German people as a whole for the Holocaust. What Arendt may have failed to appreciate was the enormity and the gravity of the situation, that she as well as others see as a failure of nerve and verve alike and to take appropriate measures and safeguards.

Reinhard Bendix’s fine work From Berlin to Berkeley tells us that, even within his own family and as late as 1939, Jewish people decided to return to Germany to resume their occupational roles. Others, like Arendt, opted for migration, escape—call it what you will—to Paris, London, and New York. (As I have written elsewhere, very few saw the trip to Moscow as an escape route from Nazism.) In his charming memoir, Frederic Warburg says that the prominent Jewish community in Berlin appeared to be split down the middle between those hundreds of thousands of Jews who elected to stay and seek a restoration of judicial norms for both the Jews and citizens in general and the equally large numbers of Jews who chose the hard road of migration and a loss of what seemed to be personal security as well as homes and possessions. These were difficult decisions and often impossible to make with comfort in either direction. Factors included the health and ages of family members, the pain of being separated from loved ones, and the comforts of private homes. Such decisions went far beyond the love of country and culture.

What afflicted Jews on all sides was no easy moral battle. It was a battle fought in home and hearth, in each family. The victims were the Jewish people as a whole—believers and nonbelievers, nationalists and internationalists, conservatives and liberals. To use these facts to level charges against Arendt is a simplistic way to blame the author while exonerating the victim. In such circumstances, the choice between remaining in opposition, in somber silence, or leaving shattered families and dreams to migrate to foreign lands was not inviting. It was itself a challenge. Few people fared better in the intellectual life of the democratic West than Arendt. But to expect perfect creatures to emerge unscathed from such wrenching decisions is simply implausible. All human beings face contradictions and sharp differences within their souls, but few have the conflicts in their souls put on display as a national tragedy no less than a personal contradiction. As revealed in her correspondence, Arendt gave representation to the best of what Germany was and the worst of what it became. In a deeply candid 1953 letter to Jaspers, Arendt put the pain plainly: “I will never cease to be a German in your sense of the word, that is, that I will not deny anything. Not your Germany and Heinrich’s her husband, Heinrich Bluecher, not the tradition I grew in or the language in which I think and in which the poems I love best were written. I won’t lay false claims to either a Jewish or an American past.”

Arendt’s life was a testimonial to the open transparencies of the Jewish and American traditions and to the disastrous fall from grace of German liberalism. To have that life besmirched by Wasserstein serves no useful purpose in truth or tradition. It was Arendt’s remarkable ability to face the double tradition from which she emerged with a sharp-eyed focus that characterizes much of her work: its generosity for the practice of democracy and her fierce determination to explain for herself as well as for others the failure of her former culture to endure despite its qualities. I would say that Hannah Arendt’s work, along with that of Primo Levi, brought to the surface the silence and even suppression of the Holocaust that gripped postwar Europe.

Having had the pleasure of knowing Hannah Arendt, albeit much too slightly, and moreover of having known more closely Heinrich Bluecher when I was his assistant in the World Civilizations program at Bard College in 1958–1959, I can say there are few people who, in their writings and their persons, could face with such clear determination the heights and the depths of European civilization in the last century. Hannah Arendt’s work serves as a metaphor for all of that. Even if she would be uncomfortable with such symbolic meaning, she is entitled to the respect of the countless others who have faced similar problems of migration and wandering and those who might once again be faced with similar macroscopic challenges. That it should be the Jews who, uniquely, are subjected by the self-righteous to such charges of “blaming the victim” is perhaps the price of so much migration and so little appreciation of the Jews’ dangerous situation. This is the consequence of confronting the tyrants of this world and the world’s torrent of critics from within. Tony Judt put it best in his book Post War: “If Europe’s past is to continue to furnish Europe’s present with admonitory meaning, and with moral purpose—then it will have to be taught afresh with each passing generation.” Arendt was one such special teacher.

IRVING LOUIS HOROWITZ is Hannah Arendt Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Sociology at Rutgers University. He is author of Behemoth: Main Currents in the History and Theory of Political Sociology; Radicalism and the Revolt against Reason; and Ideology and Utopia in the United States: 1956–1976 .

Notes:

1. Bernard Wasserstein, "Blame the Victim: Hannah Arendt among the Nazis: The Historian and Her Sources," Times Literary Supplement. October 9, 2009. pp. 13-15.

2. Walter Laqueur, Generation Exodus: The Fate of Young Jewish Refugees from Nazi Germany. University Press of New England. 2001. 345 pp. For his strong critique see "The Arendt Cult," Journal of of Contemporary History. Volume 33, Issue Number 4, October, 1988. pp. 483-496. Laqueur charges Arendt with being "arrogant" and touched by "paranoia". The most recent attack on on Arendt, linking her directly not only to a romantic but an ideological affiliation with Martin Heidegger and Nazism is contained in Ron Rosenbaum, "The Evil of Banality: Troubling New Revelations about Arendt and Heidegger." Slate Friday, Oct. 30, 2009.

3. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951. 477 pp. Revised edition in 1966. pp. 526.

4. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution. New York: The Viking Press, 1963. 343 pp.

5. Jacob L. Talmon, Origins of Totalitarian Democracy. London: Secker & Warburg, 1955. 366 pp. In this case, it should be noted that Wasserstein‚s notion that Talmon was somehow ignored or forgotten as a result of Arendt's work is completely off-base. The convocation of an international colloquium of his work on Totalitarian Democracy and After demonstrates as much. Jerusalem, Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Magnes Press, 412 pp. 1984.

6. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banalty of Evil. New York: The Viking Press, 1963. 275 pp.

7. Reinhard Bendix, From Berlin to Berkeley: German-Jewish Identities. New York and London: Transaction Publishers. 1986. 300 pp.

Maybe you didn’t know the Constitution was dead; hence, this timely announcement from these two authors: “It died a long time ago.” And they are unsparing of those who killed it—on the left, on the right, and everywhere in between. Congress, the courts, and the presidency have put it to rest. Woods and Gutzman—a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and an associate professor of American history at Western Connecticut State University, respectively—should know. Individually, they wrote The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History (Woods) and The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution (Gutzman). In this book they examine what they call the “dirty dozen,” twelve major instances where the federal government has crossed constitutional lines without restraint. So, of what good is the Constitution now? Not much, except as “a useful bludgeon to employ against government power grabs.” What’s to be done? Again, not much, but “by calling attention to what the Constitution really says, we can alert people to just how consistently and dramatically their fundamental law has been betrayed.”

—Russell E. Saltzman

Jay W. Richards channels the spirit of Michael Novak and provides a basic introduction to how and why a Christian can be a capitalist. Because man is made in the image of a creative God, he has the potential to create and multiply wealth. The core components of capitalism—free exchange, limited government, private property—allow this potential better than any alternative system. Although he shows that self-interest is not necessarily selfish, Richards also explains that the market can, in fact, channel selfish actions into positive outcomes. Responding to such critics as Ron Sider and Jim Wallis, Richards argues that the creation of wealth helped by economic freedom and the rule of law provides the best means of raising the poor out of poverty, in contrast to government-based redistribution of wealth or regulations of minimum wage.

Richards also offers critiques of communism, developmental aid to impoverished countries, and global warming, along with an extended argument against the notion that capitalism allows the unchecked depletion of natural resources. Because human beings are creative, Richards reminds us, they are not mere consumers but active producers. In response to charges of consumerism, Richards notes that consumerism comes from gluttony, not from free enterprise itself. The book concludes with a chapter on the workings of the free market as a sign of God’s provident care for sinful man. For those looking to wed faith and economics, the book provides a welcome challenge to reigning orthodoxies.

—Nathaniel Peters

Across the lines of planted vines, in early spring; their dry
And lightening bark like chicken feet clutching at the sky.

The gravel spread about their husks reflects in crystaled gray
The inchoate heat the season brings educing each new spray;

And sour tar pearls dulled with dust bud on their fragile tendrils.
This is a time of promise and terror, an age that snares men’s wills,

And holds their eyes upon the living leaf, whose veined underside
Is death, and on these mildewed stakes, where fruit to rot is tied.

I too am here, it blurts in mud, it hums along the wires
Strung with notes of pinot noir, and gargles in the fire.

The cold wind cuts in from the lake. The season soon will turn
And, in its humid forgetfulness, prepare a darker turn.

Mix is an Episcopal priest with a Ph.D. in biology from Harvard, and the new chaplain at Arizona State University. His religious credentials are secure. Equally so is his scientific work. The origins of life touch on matters of religion, inevitably. “As a Christian,” he writes, “I think of astrobiology as a way to better understand how God created the world.” In this book, then, he sticks to epistemology—what science believes it knows and why it believes it. He asks more than he answers: What is life, what does it mean, and what is our place in it all? This is very satisfying reading.

—Russell E. Saltzman

This scholarly study relates Hannah Arendt’s early dissertation on St. Augustine to her mature thought. Stephen Kampowski, professor at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute in Rome, exposes the prevalence of two pervading themes: human temporality and human conditionedness. These motifs, he shows, are fundamental for understanding Arendt’s action theory and moral thought. Action can be a new beginning in time, breaking the eternal chain of cause and effect, only because the human creature is a temporal being who lives his life from some beginning to some end. At this juncture in the book emerges the importance of the term natality by which Arendt refers to our birth as the origin of our spontaneity. The fact of human conditionedness, in turn, confronts the human creature with an alternative: choosing between grateful acceptance and resentful refusal. For Arendt, to be able to choose the former, it is essential for the human creature to be a thinking, and hence remembering, being who is reconciled both with his past and with the fundamental conditions of the life given to him.

—Romanus Cessario, O.P.

An inquisitive reader wanting to learn the history of Chartres Cathedral might pick out the classic Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres as the place to start. Henry Adams’ book, however, tells us more about Adams’ own view of the Middle Ages than how and why groined vaults were built. For that, turn to Philip Ball’s Universe of Stone: A Biography of Chartres Cathedral. Cathedrals are not Ball’s usual subject; he is the author of numerous popular science books and a consulting editor for Nature. But Ball has immersed himself in the necessary literature and produced an enjoyable, readable guide to the age of Chartres.

That is no small feat. To begin, the description of Gothic cathedrals requires a large and confusing vocabulary—what is the difference between the tribune and the triforium, for instance, and why should we care? Ball makes the cathedral’s design clear both in his writing and in numerous helpful diagrams. With care and precision, he tries to tease out the past from historical records, works of philosophy and theology, and architectural plans. Was Chartres a monument of numerology and pagan symbols? Not likely. In its walls we see a mix of forces. The stone and glass tell stories and show the architectural limits of the time and place, as well as the ambition of the cathedral’s canons. Artists etched details invisible to the unaided eye out of love for God, but they also looked for payment worthy of their work. And what work they left us. In one portal angels and saints hover near a peasant warming his feet by a winter fire. In brilliant colors overhead, God pulls Eve—both with those wide, medieval eyes—out of Adam’s side. Joachim’s sheep, with delightful waves of wool along their backs, graze high over a doorway.

Ball is at his best when describing how the cathedral’s sculptures, glass, and walls were made. His chapter on the metaphysics of light—in which light and translucent objects served as anagogical means of contemplation of God—is beautiful. But he makes no effort to mask his hatred of Bernard of Clairvaux and Augustine. He calls original sin “a doctrine of despair, which is nowhere afforded clear support in the Bible . . . [and is] surely Augustine’s most insidious legacy.” Part of the problem is that Ball can describe particular doctrines and ideas, but he lacks the religious sensibility and sympathy necessary to understand them fully. For him, Chartres is a monument to the beginnings of scholastic reasoning, which eventually lead to modern science and the modern rivalry between faith and reason. That assessment is a bit simplistic, but it does not keep Universe of Stone from being a lucid introduction to one of the world’s marvels.

— Nathaniel Peters

“What a shrill, pointless decade,” said The Simpson’s fictional news anchor Kent Brockman . He was describing the 1960s, of course, and his summary neatly captures the attitude of most American conservatives and moderates, who treat that decade’s name like the name of Amalek, ritualistically abominating its infamous excesses. Free love, drug abuse, cacophonic music, fashionable anti-Americanism, narcissistic student radicals, massive government spending on entitlement programs . . . there seems nothing to do but curse the 1960s and all its works, and all its pomps. Playwright and social critic Jonathan Leaf is therefore sure to startle many by arguing that the 1960s really weren’t so bad.

To be sure, Leaf agrees that the trends and events most strongly associated with the 1960s are deplorable, and he attacks the liberal interpretations that justify or celebrate them. He paints a picture of antidemocratic, irresponsible, destructive, cowardly, and generally stupid egoists pushing Americans to adopt vicious lifestyles, conduct class and race war, hate their own civilization, abandon personal responsibility, participate in a culture of subhuman sensualism, and to snatch “defeat from the jaws of victory” in Vietnam. But, while the book is a syllabus of errors rather than a single, sustained argument, Leaf seems especially concerned to show that the counterculture really was a counterculture. The 1960s was, he insists, “a conservative decade.” He shows that the most popular music was not rock and roll, that sexual behavior was basically as it had been in the 1950s, that the majority of college students were not radicals, that most Americans supported Vietnam, and so on.

The point is accurate, but the reason for emphasizing it is obscure. Those who celebrate the 1960s are generally happy to grant that its social and political “achievements” were the work of an influential minority. It is always more glorious to be part of a heroic vanguard than a representative of the status quo. As Leaf himself notes, the counterculture eventually did win lasting victories (as is evident in contemporary mores and tastes)—so why not treat its first emergence as more significant than the continued predominance of the “squares”?

This book might make a good gift for someone who has bought into the romantic leftist image of the 1960s, but readers should be warned that it is far from scrupulously fair to its targets and is as uplifting as bitter litanies generally are. The book is packed with interesting trivia (for instance, women’s fashion was more sexual in the 1950s than in the 1960s), but very few of Leaf’s major claims will be new to experienced participants on either side of the culture wars. The only points likely to be truly provocative are his totally unexpected attacks on Bob Dylan and the Apollo 11 mission to the moon.

—Stefan McDaniel

Some may dismiss James K.A. Smith’s polemics against mainstream conservative ideas and sentiments (especially celebration of American power, wealth, and cultural predominance) as the bromidic ranting of a mere muddle-headed “leftist,” but this judgment would be very unfair. This new collection of essays provides abundant evidence that Smith has a strong, lively mind and, more important, good faith. Still, this book is unlikely to establish him as a major contemporary thinker.

One problem is style. Smith, a trained philosopher, has not quite mastered the popularizer’s delicate art of simplifying as much as necessary, but not more so, in order to show confidence in his audience’s intelligence and breadth of knowledge. For instance, while arguing that Christian churches’ attitudes toward sex reflect a low view of the created world, he says “we have adopted a version of Platonism (forgive me, I’m a philosopher) . . .” Many readers will be annoyed by such frequent touches of what could be mistaken for condescension.

To his credit, Smith is aware of the challenges faced by the intellectual attempting to serve the Church with his learning. In his introduction—arguably the strongest essay in the book—he identifies the temptation to elite smugness and exasperation with unsophisticated brethren. To explain how this difficult vocation should be lived, Smith makes almost miraculously constructive use of a catastrophically depressing portrait of dysfunction and perversity, the film Little Miss Sunshine.

But the main trouble with The Devil Reads Derrida is one that afflicts many compilations of occasional essays: The essays are too short and conversational to constitute important interventions in any debate. They are therefore amplificatory or illustrative at best and platitudinous at worst. This is not a bad book, but it is very dispensable.

—Stefan McDaniel

Profane, urbane, jocose and headlong, Ariosto’s poem Orlando Furioso is the artistic and temperamental opposite of the other Tuscan epic, The Divine Comedy. In one hundred cantos constructed of threefold rhymes, traversing three worlds with four levels of interpretation, and following first Virgil, then Statius, then Beatrice, step by step, Dante passes from the Dark Wood to the source of light. Orlando Furioso rocks on horseback—sometimes flying-horseback—or wanders crazed through a landscape peopled with knights and enchanters, churls and maidens, monsters and saints. Ariosto’s ottava rima verses, like the musical octave, venture far afield yet magically return, resolved.

Every epic poet uses all that’s been written or otherwise known to his time. But Ariosto’s sources and learning fuel a comic invention akin to the greatest Hollywood sword-and-sorcery movie yet to be produced; it’s a far cry from the opera seria of Dante Alighieri and his guides. Like Ovid, another antic eclectic, Ariosto takes pleasure in profusion, love, and change. If Dante is law, Ariosto is legend. Where Dante frowns, Ariosto smiles.

Since the late eighteenth century, there have been multiple translations of The Divine Comedy in every generation. The same can’t be said for Orlando Furioso. In the introduction to his 1999 complete prose translation of Ariosto’s epic, Guido Waldman notes that, despite three eighteenth-century verse attempts, Harington’s 1591 edition wasn’t superseded until Sir Walter Scott’s friend William Stuart Rose published his English ottava rima rendition in 1831. Scott recorded in his Journal that Rose’s poem should be issued with the Italian printed on facing pages, to assist the reader in understanding the English. In 1968, just such a bilingual edition was published, edited by Stewart Baker and A. Bartlett Giamatti, the future commissioner of baseball.

Though Orlando Furioso lacks for translators, it is more than acknowledged by what T.S. Eliot might call acts of theft. Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene was written explicitly to surpass the Italian epic, which celebrates the founding of Ferrara’s House of Este, much as Virgil’s Aeneid celebrates the reign of Augustus Caesar.

William Shakespeare lifted from Orlando. Don Quixote tried to live the poem. Byron, first in Beppo and then in Don Juan, found in Ariosto’s stance and stanza the perfect model for his own comic epic of state and manners, morals and emotions. Xena the Warrior Princess owes a debt to Ariosto’s casting and plotting. George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, Sir Walter Scott and Jules Verne all have a common ancestor in the Este’s court poet. John Milton concludes the first sentence of Paradise Lost with his intention to pursue “things unattempted yet in prose or rime.” Milton’s vaunt is a literal translation of Orlando Furioso, canto 1, second stanza, second line: cosa non detta in prosa mai né in rima.

The Furioso is also the ultimate chivalric romance. It recounts the deeds of knights and ladies at the court of a hard-put Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne, who is beset by North African Islamic armies in Spain and Provence. The poem travels as well to the British Isles and the Holy Land, to Hell, to Paradise, and to the Moon. In pastoral mode, Orlando Furioso elegizes a vanished aristocracy, satirizes the leveling tendencies of gunpowder warfare, and sings the power of erotic love that brooks no distinctions. Ariosto’s two-edged dream of a resurgent Western European empire, written in a time of warring city-states, takes a science-fiction romp through the natural and supernatural.

It’s a proto-feminist, aristocratic tract, antimonastic and ambivalently heroic, caroling traffic between heaven and earth if not between God and man. The poem ends with a dagger plunged into the forehead of Saracen Rodomont, whose spirit flees, cursing to the shores of Acheron.

In my second year of college, my classmate Billy Schwartz invited me to dinner at his aunt and uncle Diane and Lionel Trilling’s apartment. Waiting for the meat loaf to be done, Trilling asked me if I’d ever heard of Henry Sutton and, chuckling, handed me a small plastic viewer, a kind of one-shot peep show. I peered: A naked woman’s back, swathed in 1960s psychedelic light, captioned The Exhibitionist, by Henry Sutton. “I got this from the publisher,” Professor Trilling said. “Take it.”

The Exhibitionist and its sequel, The Voyeur, were soft-core pornographic novels written under a pseudonym by a Yale whiz kid, David Slavitt. As a marketing talking point, the slumming academic studded his steamy tale with lots of what he called “nuggets,” meaning literary phrases—not like Mickey Spillane’s “Therein lies the rub” but highbrow and otherwise undetectable-to-the-unknowing gems.

In this version of Orlando Furioso, translator David Slavitt goes the other way. There’s no pseudonym to hide behind, but of course he’s playing with another person’s work.

Consider Ariosto’s canto 1, stanza 2, the one Milton mined:

Dirò d’Orlando in un medesmo tratto
cosa non detta in prosa mai né in rima:
che per amor venne in furore e matto,
d’uom che sì saggio era stimato prima;
se da colei che tal quasi m’ha fatto,
che ‘l poco ingegno ad or mi lima,
me ne sarà però tanto concesso,
che mi basti a finir quanto ho promesso.

This is Harington’s account of the same:
I will no lesse Orlandos acts declare,
(A tale in prose ne verse yet sung or said)
Who fell bestraught with love, a hap most rare,
To one that erst was counted wise and stayd:
If my sweet Saint that causeth my like care,
My slender muse affoord some gracious ayd,
I make no doubt but I shall have the skill,
As much as I have promist to fulfill.

Assisted by the Italian, here’s Rose’s rendering:

In the same strain of Roland will I tell
Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme,
On whom strange madness and rank fury fell,
A man esteemed so wise in former time;
If she, who to like cruel pass has well
Nigh brought my feeble wit which fain would climb
And hourly wastes my sense, concede me skill
And strength my daring promise to fulfil.

And, finally, the Slavitt:

Orlando, as well, I’ll celebrate, setting down
what has not yet been told in verse or prose—
how love drove him insane, who had been known
before as wise and prudent (like me, God knows,
until I, too, went half mad with my own
love-folly that makes it so hard to compose
in ottava rima. I pray I find the strength
to write this story in detail and at length).

Ariosto’s stanza, one long sentence, doesn’t pause until the second line; it measures out the balance of its declaration with six rhymed, end-stopped lines. Harington hangs fire at line two, then pushes forward. Rose follows Ariosto for half the stanza, only to lose himself, and me, in a confused avowal of erotomania.

Slavitt makes of Ariosto’s one sentence two and pours on the enjambment. The first, a run-on, ends with the declaration that the speaker’s “love-folly” makes it hard to compose in ottava rima. Try reading that as prose, which, as poetry, is supposed to be at least as well written. And what to make of the lines as a declaration of feeling? Awkward, at the very least. And maybe less than heartfelt? The stanza closes with a padded couplet, where Slavitt (oddly) asks for strength, not skill.

Now, Ariosto had no problem writing ottava rima. His invocation-cum-prayer-for-inspiration acknowledges that the world can be distracting, that it’s difficult to keep going to the end, and that, while the stories he tells may be fantastic, the emotions they engage are authentic. Ariosto’s manner, like Lord Byron’s, is sincere. Were the poet not so poised and musical, the poem’s matter would be too painful to bear. So who is this narrator, the “I,” of Slavitt’s verse translation? And what’s this peek-a-boo?

Whoever is telling this tale, he is not willing to be ignored. Mayhap a learned translator, he’s also a present-tense conversationalist, a regular, easy-going guy:

The knight once more falls silent. You remember the knight
is talking to Bradamante. Those quotation
marks were reminders of this. But his story was quite
long, and during the course of his narration,
you may have forgotten the frame. But that’s all right.

Canto 2, stanza 58

I tried tilting my head to one side and squinting, to see if I could get past the lame rhymes and screaming mimis. But how to ignore this kind of clunkiness?

What can be sadder in life or in literature
than the death of a beautiful woman? What can be worse
than the sacrifice of such a lovely and pure
creature? Therefore in prose as well as verse
it comes up a lot. It’s difficult to endure
even the thought, but some of the tales we rehearse
will provide at the last minute a hero who may
deliver her from danger and save the day.

Canto 10, stanza 94

Or this mugger, doing an Eric Idle impression:

And what do you think happened that night between
Doralice and Agrican’s son? Do you
Think. . . ? (Wink, wink! Nudge, nudge! Know what I mean?)

Canto 14, stanza 63

Slavitt’s academic presenter, Charles Ross, professor of English at Purdue, describes this Orlando Furioso stanza form as “an elastic version of iambic pentameter that suits modern reading habits.” This is a strong second to the translator’s introduction, where Slavitt asserts that English ottava rima is more startling and impish than Italian (“as Byron shows us”). He states that students don’t know that poetry can be fun.

Ah, those who do not know.

There’s more to ottava rima than eight lines, as Byron, speaking of the harem, shows:

No solemn, antique gentleman of rhyme,
Who having angled all his life for fame,
And getting but a nibble at a time,
Still fussily keeps fishing on, the same
Small ‘Triton of the minnows’, the sublime
Of mediocrity, the furious tame,
The echo’s echo, usher of the school
Of female wits, boy bards—in short, a fool!

Slavitt further justifies his enterprise on the grounds that other translations are “too Elizabethan” (Harington), too “romantic and respectful” (Rose), “handy only as a trot” (Waldman), or “not funny enough” (a recent verse version by Barbara Reynolds).

All these beneficiaries of Slavitt’s contumely, living and dead, share one attribute: completeness. It may seem an odd quibble, but finishing the job might have rescued this sorry enterprise. Pleading production costs, this self-proclaimed broadener of what he calls Ariosto’s Anglophone audience defaces even the poem’s architecture. Translation stops at canto 34.

Laurance Wieder is a poet and author of Words to God’s Music: A New Book of Psalms.

Conservatism in the United States begins at a rhetorical disadvantage. Conservatives believe in preserving tradition, but in America the distinctive national tradition is liberal. A great many liberals have seized on that fact to insist that America is only truly, authentically itself when it functions in a way congenial to those who claim the liberal heritage. That is a tendentious argument, of course: Modern liberalism is a far cry from what existed in the eighteenth century, and conservatives can plausibly claim that their beliefs are closer to the classical Lockean liberalism that prevailed at the founding than those of the contemporary left.

But, until fairly recently, conservatism in America has been a hard sell. President Dwight Eisenhower was considered politically daring when he admonished Republicans not to be afraid of the term. Indeed, as George H. Nash points out in Reappraising the Right: The Past and Future of American Conservatism, prior to the 1950s “no articulate, coordinated conservative intellectual force existed in the United States.”

Things have improved considerably since then, especially following the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, but conservatism remains a suspect political commodity. The political disaster of George W. Bush’s second term and Barack Obama’s sweeping electoral victory in 2008 set off the latest in a recurring wave of predictions concerning the imminent demise of the conservative movement. That’s to be expected from Democrats and liberals, but a number of those ominous sightings have come from the right as well. As after the Barry Goldwater debacle in the presidential campaign of 1964 and Richard Nixon’s resignation over Watergate a decade later, critics from all over the political spectrum have brought the future of conservatism into serious question.

George Nash is a good candidate to make sense of all this. His The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, published in 1976 and revised and updated twice since then, is the standard work on the subject. He has impeccable scholarly credentials: His three-volume biography of Herbert Hoover, twenty years in the making, is considered definitive for the years it covers.

Nash brings to the current subject a historian’s perspective and an unwaveringly irenic temper. He writes fairly, accurately, and sympathetically of conservatives of all persuasions. While unabashedly a man of the right, he carefully avoids taking sides in disputes among conservatives. Nash is, if anything, ecumenical to a fault. There are certain episodes in conservative history, such as the political thuggery of Senator Joe McCarthy, where immaculate evenhandedness really ought to have given way to frank judgment. But that is not Nash’s way, and, all in all, his disinclination to reveal his preferences serves his purposes admirably.

It is surprising that Reappraising the Right works as well as it does. It is not a sustained argument, but rather a greatly varied collection of thirty-two essays, reviews, scholarly articles, and lectures dating from the 1980s to the present. But Nash’s interest in things conservative is so catholic and comprehensive that very little of what needs to be said about modern conservatism is left out. There are only scattered mentions of Eric Voegelin and Leo Strauss, but those two rather esoteric figures aside, virtually all major (and a great many minor) conservative thinkers, institutions, journals, and points of view get their due. The book is more about conservative ideas than conservative politics, but what’s said about politics is shrewd and instructive. The only really eccentric portion of the volume is the four chapters devoted to rescuing Herbert Hoover from the (well-deserved) neglect conservatives have visited on him, and one grants the author that idiosyncrasy.

Modern conservatism began with William F. Buckley Jr. and National Review in 1955, and Nash shows in a series of essays how Buckley transformed an initially cult operation on the far edge of intellectual respectability into the most politically influential journal of opinion in American history. NR’s original editors and contributors were a notably difficult and contentious lot, many of them converts to the hard right from the radical left, many also members or fellow travelers of the pre–Vatican II Catholic Church.

Buckley, who, as Nash notes, was more a controversialist than a theorist, skillfully presided over his uneasy coalition of free-market libertarians, antimodernist traditionalists, and hardcore anticommunists. He patrolled the movement’s borders with care, inclining to a firm “maintain the paradigm” adherence to correct doctrine while firmly resisting heretical intrusions from Birchers, Randians, and anti-Semites. What united the early conservatives was opposition to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and, by extension, all forms of collectivism. (In their general opposition to the left, it must be said, they sometimes failed to note important distinctions among liberals, socialists, and communists.)

If the early conservatives were rebels against the ’30s, their later neoconservative allies were rebels against the ’60s. The neocons, exemplified for Nash by Norman Podhoretz and Commentary magazine, began as liberal dissidents appalled by the anti-American radicalism of the New Left, which developed in the wake of the Vietnam war and the civil-rights protests. The acquiescence of New Politics liberals in the adversary culture gradually persuaded Podhoretz and his friends—against all their instincts—that their natural political home was now on the right.

Working (mostly) together, the traditional right and the neocons, joined by a religious right galvanized by cultural antinomianism in general and Roe v. Wade in particular, slowly edged from minority status into something like the silent majority originally dreamed of by Nixon. What put them over the top, what made them for a generation the ruling coalition in American politics, was the extraordinary and, for conservatives, unfortunately unreproducible figure of Ronald Reagan.

Nash indicates that, while Reagan’s policy victories were limited, his ideological impact was profound. Put simply, Reagan changed the terms of debate of American politics. He placed liberalism on the defensive, breaking the spell that had made the received story line of America a seemingly inexorable march toward an encompassing social democracy. After Reagan, successful liberal politicians learned the wisdom of proclaiming, like Bill Clinton, that the era of big government was over. They didn’t mean it, but they had to say it.

No political season lasts forever, and the departure of Reagan and collapse of communism meant the loss of major unifying forces on the right. Still, conservatives did better than might have been expected in the post-Reagan era, both at the presidential level and, perhaps more significantly, in the struggle for control of Congress. Until, that is, the off-year elections of 2006, when things went badly downhill politically and revealed both something of a liberal revival and increasingly troublesome divisions in conservative ranks.

Traditionalists on the right rebelled against Bush’s compassionate conservatism at home and aggressive pro-democracy initiatives abroad. Most people, right and left, wearied of the war in Iraq, and the collapse of the financial system in late 2008 paved the way for the Democrats’ easy victories in November. Given the left’s adulatory enthusiasm for Obama and a divided right’s skepticism concerning John McCain’s conservative credentials, it is hardly surprising that things turned out as they did.

Nash’s concluding essays on the conservative future do not minimize the right’s current discontents or disagreements, but his scholarly temper protects him from confusing the conventional wisdom of the news cycle with the judgments of history. (It was, as many of us can recall, the common conviction of liberals in 1980 that the nomination of Reagan for president was definitive evidence of a Republican death wish.) Nash avoids prediction, but he gives reasons for supposing the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy is not yet in its death throes.

Begin with Barack Obama and his startlingly ambitious program for extending the reach and influence of the federal government. Nothing unifies political parties like the presence of a formidable enemy, and Republicans, whatever their internal differences, can agree that the most expansive liberal agenda since the New Deal and the Great Society must be opposed without reservation. Republicans are not terribly popular these days, but conservatives still are (twice as many Americans call themselves conservatives as call themselves liberals), and there remains among Americans a bedrock conservative suspicion of a government too big for the individual liberty they cherish.

There are, of course, limits to a merely oppositionist stance. The antimodernist strain of American conservatism—the conservatism of the Tory harrumph—remains a dead end, even if Nash is too polite to say so. Similarly, opposition to the redistributive state need not imply unqualified rejection of the welfare state, a distinction that Nash appears to elide.

But Nash is right to suggest the enduring political attractions of an American exceptionalism that defines itself over against the transnational universalism to which liberals have attached themselves. Americans are democratic capitalists, not social democrats. They are also open to a religiously informed public philosophy in a way that leaves liberal secularists baffled and dismayed.

Nash avoids prescription, but his implied lesson seems clear enough. If conservatives can manage to explain themselves engagingly to what is still a center-right society, they can put to rest, at least for the near future, intimations of their political mortality.

JAMES NUECHTERLEIN is senior editor at First Things.