Support First Things by turning your adblocker off or by making a  donation. Thanks!

Pixelated Souls

From the May 2021 Print Edition

The great liberal thinkers who devised our constitutional order were responding to a seventeenth-century problem, most sharply diagnosed by Thomas Hobbes. The English, Hobbes said, were “seeing double”—divided, both personally and politically, by conflicting allegiances to Christ and King. . . . . Continue Reading »

Life Without Law

From the December 2014 Print Edition

Michel de Montaigne’s autobiographical Essays abound with aphorisms. (“We say, ‘I have done nothing today.’ What, have you not lived? That is not only the fundamental but the most illustrious of your occupations.”) Yet given how profoundly that book has shaped the modern world, these . . . . Continue Reading »