Tocqueville in Arabia
by Joshua MitchellDemocracy will only arrive in the Middle East when families and tribes become much less important than they now are. Continue Reading »
Democracy will only arrive in the Middle East when families and tribes become much less important than they now are. Continue Reading »
George Will argues that American politics is divided between conservatives, “who take their bearings from the individual’s right to a capacious, indeed indefinite, realm of freedom” and progressives “whose fundamental value is the right of the majority to have its way in making rules about which specified liberties shall be respected.” For Will, real conservatives favor an activist judiciary that will aggressively defend our “capacious, indeed indefinite realm of freedom” from the majority. Continue Reading »
Peter was fishing for my responses on Christianity and its relation to modernitys three stages in America AND on whether or not America is more oligarchic than democratic according to Platos sense of the terms. Well, that first topic is huge, but even as I focus upon the second one . . . . Continue Reading »
Here’s what Plato wrote about democracy almost 2350 years ago: “ . . . do you notice how tender they make the citizen’s soul, so that if someone proposes anything that smacks in any way of slavery, they are irritated and can’t stand it? And they end up, as you well know, by . . . . Continue Reading »
More than ten thousand Nigerians have lost their lives in communal unrest since 1999. One incident in Kaduna State alone claimed more than two thousand lives. And in the 2006 riots that erupted across the world over the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, Nigeria had more of its citizens . . . . 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 »
If you want to know why the United States is in a constitutional crisis, a good place to begin thinking about it is the series of outrages perpetrated by the 1992 Supreme Court decision Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which upheld the outcome, though not the reasoning, of the infamous abortion . . . . Continue Reading »
Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America by robert hughes oxford university press, 210 pages, $19.95 This book immerses us in the discontents that derive from our sexual, ethnic, racial, economic, political, moral, and religious differences. Yet again we are taken over the familiar and . . . . Continue Reading »
The vicious riots that took place last spring in the South-Central section of Los Angeles may be taken as a tragic reminder of the need for all Americans continually to evaluate the unique character of ethnic relations in this country. Such relations clearly remain fragile and, indeed, represent . . . . Continue Reading »
“Vatican II,” George Weigel writes in Freedom and Its Discontents, “posed a basic challenge to the many monisms, religious and secular, ancient and modern, that continue to beset human life and the cause of human freedom.” The Council mounted this challenge to the monistic cast of . . . . Continue Reading »