Brian C. Anderson

Ivan Illich’s star once burned brightly. From the late sixties through the mid-seventies—when his influence was greatest—this learned Roman Catholic became a countercultural guru, notorious for facing a 1968 Vatican inquisition that led him to cease exercising his priesthood, though he . . . . Continue Reading »

Over the past three decades, the French philosopher Pierre Manent has published a series of works on the destiny of the West and our modern political condition that are both profound and—atypical of Parisian intellectuals—expressed in luminous prose.

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 »

The Fascist Revolution: Toward a General Theory of Fascismby george l. mossehoward fertig. 230 pp. $35. 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 . . . . 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 so . . . . Continue Reading »

A Case for Conservatism.By John Kekes.Cornell University Press.  239 pp. $29.95. 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 . . . . 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 »