Daniel J. Mahoney

The Lure of Technocracyby jürgen habermastranslated by ciaran croninpolity, 200 pages, $22.95 The European project, as it is called, is marked by great promise and great peril. No less than ­Winston Churchill called for the reconciliation of a “spiritually great France” and a “spiritually . . . . Continue Reading »

It is not uncommon for readers of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s final novel, The Red Wheel, to draw comparisons with another Russian masterpiece, Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Like its predecessor, The Red Wheel is a massive, sweeping work, six thousand pages divided into four . . . . Continue Reading »

A Response to Patrick J. . . . . Continue Reading »

Moral Combat: ? Good and Evil in World War II ? by Michael Burleigh? Harper, 672 pages, $29.99 World War II”the bloody denouement of the “Thirty Years War” of the first half of the twentieth century”is in the popular imagination a “good war,” but the English . . . . Continue Reading »

With his passing a year ago—on August 3, 2008, at the age of eighty-nine—the world was obliged to come to terms once again with Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn. It was time to sum up and take stock of the Russian Nobel laureate, antitotalitarian writer, and courageous if unnerving moral . . . . Continue Reading »

In May 1982, the Russian Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn took time off from his work on The Red Wheel , his magisterial literary-historical account of the origins of the Bolshevik Revolution, to respond to his detractors in the Russian émigré community. He had some able and . . . . Continue Reading »

The Soviet Union was the world’s first experiment in totalitarianism, the twentieth century’s contribution to the political experience of humankind. That particular system, with its numerous offshoots and satellites, lasted more than seventy years and wreaked havoc on a third of the human . . . . Continue Reading »

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is one of the great souls of the age. He is also among its most maligned and misunderstood figures. It is hard to think of another prominent writer whose thought and character have been subjected to as many willful distortions and vilifications over the past thirty . . . . Continue Reading »

We do not lack theoretical “defenses” of liberalism. Indeed, academic political theorists have produced them by the truckload over the past several decades. Restatements of the case for classical liberalism, however, are less common”and, for that reason, all the more needful. In . . . . Continue Reading »

Alexis de Tocqueville is an ines­ capable presence in the contemporary debate about the nature of the democratic dispensation. His work is used to validate almost every theoretical and partisan current and is appealed to by politicians who wish to establish their intellectual credentials. For . . . . Continue Reading »