Brian C. Anderson

The Roots of Evilby john kekescornell university press, 261 pages, $29.95 Prowling Washington’s poorer neighborhoods some years back, John Allen raped, stole, mugged, assaulted, pimped, and dealt narcotics, until a bullet in the spine, received during a botched robbery, crippled him. Confined to a . . . . Continue Reading »

The far left’s disgraceful response to September 11”it has temporized about terror, embraced moral equivalence between the Islamist fanatics who killed thousands of innocent Americans and the military actions of the democratically elected U.S. government, and even blamed the U.S. for . . . . Continue Reading »

French philosopher Alain Finkiel­ kraut’s subtle essay on humanism and its discontents grapples with a big question: How did the West’s noble ideal of universal humanity”the belief that, beneath the particularities of race and culture, we’re all brothers, duty“bound . . . . Continue Reading »

“Everything for the state, nothing outside the state, nothing above the state.” So Benito Mussolini trumpeted the ideal of fascism, the wild“eyed political movement that he rode to power in Italy in 1922 and that died with Adolf Hitler’s defeat in 1945. Mussolini’s . . . . Continue Reading »

Not long before he died, the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin somberly summed up his, and our, age: “I have lived through most of the twentieth century without, I must add, suffering personal hardship. I remember it only as the most terrible century in Western history.” What made it . . . . Continue Reading »

In his important 1997 book Against Liberalism , the moral philosopher John Kekes exposed the staggering incoherence of contemporary Anglo“American liberal theory”the dominant form of political and moral thought taught in most American universities today. For Kekes, the radical . . . . Continue Reading »

The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion By Marcel Gauchet. Tranlated by Oscar Burge, with an introduction by Charles Taylor Princeton University Press. 228 pp. $29.95 Marcel Gauchet’s The Disenchantment of the World is breathtaking in its ambition, offering nothing . . . . Continue Reading »

Against Liberalism By John Kekes Cornell University Press. 244 pp. $29.95 I remember a lecture a few years back, heard when I was in graduate school, that provided one of those rare flashes that illumine an entire universe. The speaker was a well-published political philosopher (and, as I was to . . . . Continue Reading »

Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy By Pierre Manent Rowan & Littlefield, 148 pages, $40 To love democracy well, it is necessary to love it moderately.” So concludes French philosopher Pierre Manent in Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy , his meditation on the thought of the . . . . Continue Reading »

In Defence of Political Reason: Essays by Raymond Aron Edited by Daniel J. Mahoney Rowman & Littlefield, 187 pages, $ 19.95 It is ironic that Raymond Aron’s reputation is currently ascendant everywhere except in the United States, since for many years his sober defense of political reason . . . . Continue Reading »