The great Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn understood more clearly than most that the revolutionary spirit born in France was a perpetual revolution, one that would spawn revolutionary movements across the political spectrum and around the globe. During his exile in the West from 1974 to 1994, he recognized that among these new political religions was...
Ours is an age of politicization. No matter the problem, real or imagined, proposed solutions are always couched in the language of politics. No subject can be discussed without constant reference to its political ramifications. Whatever position a political leader may adopt with respect to a current “issue,” it must be judged not by its relevance...
“Too much liberty leads both men and nations to slavery.” —Cicero In a recent and provocative essay, Paul Gottfried described Eugene D. Genovese as a “hero of paleoconservative intellectuals.” No doubt this declaration qualified as news in some circles, for the distinguished historian of the American South has always worked within the Marxist tradition. Or...
In a spate of recent books, neoconservatives have rehearsed the drama of their radicalization and subsequent deradicalization. Typically the curtain rises on their active participation in, or engaged sympathy for, leftist movements of the 1960’s, and falls after they have regained their equilibrium and embraced liberal democracy. One thinks, for example, of former Ramparts editors...
“The purity of a revolution can last a fortnight.” —Jean Cocteau Magisterial works of history are almost always informed by a tragic sense of life. Some recall epochal transformations that were as lamentable as they were inescapable. Still others dramatize the clash of two valid, but irreconcilable, principles. Among the latter, certainly, are the best...
“People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.” —Edmund Burke Not long before his death on November 20, 1975, Francisco Franco asked a young aide if he thought Spain’s future was “inevitably democratic.” On receiving an affirmative reply, he gazed sadly into the distance and said no more. The...
“Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.” —Tennyson In our day the mere mention of imperialism is enough to provoke paroxysms of moral outrage. Except in derision, no one any longer dares to speak of the white man’s burden, and few possess the courage to say that it was Europeans who created...
“In the end I shall have to renounce optimism.” —Voltaire Among other, more profound things, Dostoevski’s anti-revolutionary novel, The Possessed, is a withering dissection of liberal intellectuals. In its pages, liberals parade as hostile and irresponsible critics of a society that affords most of them a life of comfort and status. They are the “fathers”...
“Guns will make us powerful; butter will only make us fat.” —Hermann Goering It is 40 years now since the Allies claimed victory over Germany and survivors on both sides made the first groping attempts to uncover the meaning of Nazism. Yet despite the availability of almost inexhaustible sources and the persistence of armies-of scholars,...
“Thus wit, like faith, by each man is applied To one small sect, and all are damned beside.” -Alexander Pope Pauline Johnson: Marxist Aesthetics: The Foundations Within Everyday Life for an Enlightened Consciousness; Routledge and Kegan Paul; London. T. W. Adorno: Aesthetic Theory; Routledge and Kegan Paul; London. Of Marx’s numerous ex cathedra pronouncements, none has presented a greater...
Most contemporary intellectuals reject Hilaire Belloc’s claim that the West must return to Christianity if it is to survive as a civilization. In their view, we live in an enlightened and disenchanted world that has left behind forever the integral but innocent and uncritical Age of Faith. And as if to lend support to their...
The Passionate War: The Narrative History of the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 by Peter Wyden; Simon and Schuster; New York. History has not been kind to the radical left, not because modern revolutions have invariably failed, but because they have frequently succeeded. So deplorable has been the record of revolutions in power that those who...
This starry-eyed reappraisal of two unhappy decades in our nation’s history serves as a sobering reminder that “the revolt of the masses” is far from over. Its author, deaf to any appeal to duty or civility, is an unabashed apologist for “postdeprivational,” appetitive, man. Indeed, insofar as I am able to tell, there is almost...
Maurice Isserman is one of the more resilient members of the radical generation that came of age during the 1960’s. Although his apocalyptic ambitions were frustrated, he refused to succumb to gloom, setting out instead in search of a “tradition that could serve as both a source of political reference and an inspiration in what...