Intellectuals and Democracy: The Case Against Radical Ideology
I Introduction: Revel and Popper on a “Way of Being for Man in the World” The first chapter of Jean-François Revel’s incisive 1983 book How…
Jean-Paul Sartre
Past and Future Gulags
Vladimir Solovyov’s insightful The Crisis of Western Philosophy can enlighten us today as to the importance of re-telling history to educate subsequent generations. With its…
A Manifesto of Neo-Romanticism
He is thinking: “See how God writes straigh on crooked lines.”1 What realistic form can a manifesto of neo-romanticism take in a positivistic age? How…
Marxism and Secularism’s Cultural Overreach
I God is the “Opiate of the People” For Karl Marx, God is what he calls the “opiate of the people.” That is, belief in…
René Girard – Imitation and Life Without God
In preparation for teaching a literature course in the 1950s, René Girard reread some of the classic novels. In the process he realized that the…
Essays on the Frankfurt School, Part III: Carl Jung
As to the previous essay on Existentialism, it could be surmised that man’s obligation to construct meaning in his own life is limited only to…
Essays on the Frankfurt School, Part II: Existentialism
I. Introduction If we’re going to tackle the Frankfurt School, we ought to understand their ideas. In order to understand their ideas, we have to…
Pied Noir
¶ When Venner shot himself Jean and I went to see Papa because we knew he’d be a wreck. When we made it to the house…