First Things RSS Feed - William E. Johnston Jr. https://www.firstthings.com/author/william-e-johnston-jr en-us Copyright 2025 First Things. All Rights Reserved. ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) Mon, 20 Jan 2025 16:52:00 -0500 https://d2201k5v4hmrsv.cloudfront.net/img/favicon-196.png First Things RSS Feed Image https://www.firstthings.com/rss/author/william-e-johnston-jr 60 The Crisis of the West: Machiavelli, Rousseau, and the Imperative of Salvation https://www.firstthings.com/article/1990/06/the-crisis-of-the-west-machiavelli-rousseau-and-the-imperative-of-salvation https://www.firstthings.com/article/1990/06/the-crisis-of-the-west-machiavelli-rousseau-and-the-imperative-of-salvation Fri, 01 Jun 1990 00:00:00 -0400 What is the crisis of the West? In some cases the sense of this frequently asked if daunting question may be quite specific. It may refer, say, to an economic crisis: trade deficits, foreign indebtedness, or the collapse of the Third World. If something is not done immediately to cure this problem—eminently curable, whatever it may be, we will normally be told—we are all lost. But occasionally the point is larger and the phrase is intended to call to mind a fundamental crisis of the Western spirit. When this is the point of the question, the sense is often that the West has lost its resolve, that there is a spiritual meaningless unique to our time and place. It is in this larger sense that the question is taken up here.

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