In his classic history of the Lombard Communes—the finally doomed medieval republics of Northern Italy—W.F. Butler suggests that the creative and individualistic nature of the Italian people favored a rich cultural life over a stable political one. This could explain why modern Italy, historically a politically dysfunctional country, is nevertheless a civilized and delightful one. ...
267 search results for: Tocqueville
Maistre in the Dock
In September 2010, Émile Perreau-Saussine, age 37, was rushed to Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge, U.K., with chest pains. The junior physician on staff misdiagnosed his condition and thus failed to prevent his death hours later of a massive heart attack. This tragic incident is much more than a sad commentary on the quality of socialized healthcare...
Universities and Students of South America
By 1921, a few years after the Bolshevik revolution, students at Argentine universities had begun to agitate for equal rights with professors and were demanding the same rights for the cleaning staff. It sounds like the spring of 1968 in Paris and Columbia University, but in South America it was old stuff by then. Students...
Understanding Jihad’s Resurgence
Jihad is both an ideology and a global process. It has triumphed in Afghanistan in both forms, and its adherents everywhere will feel emboldened by what they see as a sure sign of Allah’s sanction. If a poorly armed jihadist force could endure for two decades, struggling against the mightiest infidel force the world has...
The Continuing Revolution
In his critical work about the bicentenaire of the French Revolution, Le Grand Déclassement, French historian Pierre Chaunu explores the first stages of the unraveling of the glorification of France as a revolutionary nation conceived in 1789. By the time Chaunu’s book was published in 1989, however, the official celebrations had been both scaled back...
Liberalism: Collectivist and Conservative
I never exchanged a word with Richard Weaver. I knew him because he was a figure at the University of Chicago. I heard that he was a teacher who expected his students to meet a high standard of intellectual probity and rigor; I think that he expected the same of his colleagues. I was told,...
Liberalism: Collectivist and Conservative
From the July 1989 issue of Chronicles. I never exchanged a word with Richard Weaver. I knew him because he was a figure at the University of Chicago. I heard that he was a teacher who expected his students to meet a high standard of intellectual probity and rigor; I think that he expected the...
When a Giant Crosses Your Path
The story of one man’s intellectual and personal friendship with Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, stretching across the last decades of the 20th century, and the lessons it might impart for us today.
Our Classical Roots
On January 6, 1816, Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to his state legislator, Colonel Charles Yancey. As we might expect, Jefferson’s letter contains reflections of general interest on many topics, ranging in this case from the dangers of a large public debt and paper money to the advantages of beer over whiskey. Near the end...
Quoth the Raven
For the past six months the United States has been experiencing another of the racial fits that have recurred more or less regularly across the half-century since the civil-rights protests of the 1950’s and the Civil Rights Acts of the 60’s that abolished legally sanctioned segregation in this country. In this spasm, as in past...
Academia Abroad
Many alumni of a junior year abroad summarize their experience as “enjoyable,” “enlightening,” or even “empowering.” Others rely on their senses in recalling the niceties of life in another country: they remember the smell of warm bread wafting from a pâtisserie, the sight of a bustling and colorful Saturday-morning market, the sound of high-pitched horns...
Remembering Moynihan
Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927-2003) was the most substantial intellectual to reach high political office in the United States since Woodrow Wilson. Thus his life, writings, policy deliberations, and political efforts, and the effects of these, deserve the most careful and respectful attention. If the apocalyptic era of European history began with the outbreak of World...
Immigration and Citizenship: Ancient Lessons for the American People
Americans have been debating immigration since the Founding era. Congress passed the first Naturalization Law in 1790, which it amended and fine-tuned in 1795, 1798, and 1802. These acts experimented with different residency requirements before naturalization. From the start, children of U.S. citizens were citizens, even if born abroad. For the Founders, where citizenship was...
Ancien Régime III, 1-3
Ancien Regime III b In his first and vitally important chapter, Tocqueville says that true aristocracies impose their system of values on a nation, but in France the nobles permitted the philosophes to impose their ideology not only on the education of the young but also even onto the edicts of the regime which began to...
Ancien Régime: Final Thoughts II
Tocqueville has offered many insights into the origins and legacy of the French Revolution. In conclusion, perhaps, we should consider three of his main points. I He rejects the interpretation that the FR was the culmination of a conspiracy to destroy Christianity and/or the Catholic Church; II He sees the FR as a...
Big Surprise
“When we gained power, the country was at the edge of the abyss; since, we have taken a great step forward.” —unnamed African government minister Tocqueville in the 19th century, and Solzhenitsyn in the 20th, noted that conformity of thought is powerfully prevalent among Americans. I have always thought that a strong justification for freedom...
The Family Way
“When family pride ceases to act, individual selfishness comes into play.” —Tocqueville “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” I’ve always thought that Tolstoy underestimated the variety of happy families, but his dictum definitely holds true from at least one point of view, that of family law. While...
Hooked on Socialism
“In politics a community of hatred is almost always the foundation of friendships.” —Tocqueville Norman Podhoretz, in the March 11, 1987, Washington Post, describes Sidney Hook as “one of the most courageous intellectuals of the twentieth century.” While this particular description may more aptly be used for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and others who have fought for...
The Dream Ticket
“While the natural instincts of democracy lead the people to banish distinguished men from power,” Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America, “an instinct no less powerful leads distinguished men to shun careers in politics, in which it is so very difficult to remain entirely true to oneself or to advance without self-abasement.” Some 170 years...
Pragmatic Destruction
Greek writers, and writers coming after them for the next 2,000 years, attributed the short life and violent end of democratic governments to democracy’s infallible tendency toward demagoguery and the dispossession of the wealthy and educated by the poor and ignorant. Tocqueville thought democracy’s fatal weakness to be uniformity of thought and opinion, and the...
Why Democracy Doesn’t Work
Critical stands against democracy, when not simply ignored or mechanically rejected as mere fascist outbursts, are usually met with a supposedly wise objection: You may be right, except that you’re targeting an imperfect form of democracy. Thus, Tocqueville never addressed the principle; he decreed democracy would perfect itself as it matured. This is why I...
The Voice of Democracy
“Democracy Dies in Darkness,” declares the Washington Post. With apologies to Alexis de Tocqueville, I reply: Doesn’t something have to live first before it can die? There is one great advantage to the ongoing, interminable, and farcical “Russia investigation” that grips the Establishment and those who choose to be entertained daily by America’s mass media. ...
The Dream Ticket
[McCain and Soros: The Most Dangerous Man in America, Bankrolled By the Most Evil Man in the World] “While the natural instincts of democracy lead the people to banish distinguished men from power,” Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America, “an instinct no less powerful leads distinguished men to shun careers in politics, in which it...
The Reduction of Certainty
[This review first appeared in the June 2009 edition of Chronicles.] One should begin a review with a summation of a book and then of its author. The reverse is warranted in this case. James Grant is an extraordinary American, a financial expert whose mind is enriched by his knowledge of history. His previous book...
Moving Beyond Myths
“The difficulty in life is the choice.” —George Moore Please excuse the personal anecdotes scattered throughout this essay. As a woman, I found it difficult to write a standard third-person review and instead drew on my own experiences and emotions in responding to this book. Rejecting rationality, logic, and “vertical” thinking, I recognized that my...
The Classless Republic
I cannot see the least possibility of recreating either an elite republican class (if, by “elite,” one means an untitled aristocracy) or the American Republic itself. The notion of a republic is a product of classical political thinking, which is now virtually dead in the Western world, and never appeared elsewhere. Not only has the classical...
Speaking for God or Men?
“Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays.” —Kierkegaard For those unaware of the growing influence of religious lobbies in the nation’s capital. Representing God in Washington should prove informative. It shows that religious lobbies of left and right are many and powerful, well-funded and well-staffed. They have learned the ropes of...
Taking the King’s Shilling
Historically, the primary function of schooling has been to teach the young how to live responsibly and productively in their own society. In our day, the notions of civic, familial, and vocational obligations have been virtually banished from pedagogy. Today’s ethically and morally barren system of education has not only failed to fortify its students...
Talking to Strangers
“Black History Month, sometimes called February . . . ” Sam Francis’s witticism has been repeated ad infinitum, by friend and foe alike, usually with little appreciation of the broader implications. Ever since the French Revolution, Jacobin reformers conceived it their duty to redesign the calendar. If they cannot always get away with dating the...
Blowing Bubbles
Between 2000 and 2005 I found myself spending an increasing amount of time scratching my head. I had been researching and investing in financial-services stocks since 1992, but what I saw during that five-year span confounded me. Banks offered “ninja” mortgages—no income, no job, no assets—to any borrower brazen enough to walk into a branch...
Genes vs. Culture
In the current American definition of democracy, all adult citizens should have the right to vote and otherwise participate in politics. Earlier exclusions of women or nonwhites have been disallowed. Similar rules are supposed to apply to preferred positions in civil society. In a meritocracy, it has been believed until recently, individual capability should count...
The Way We Are, No. 2
Shine on, O perishing Republic. —Robinson Jeffers If Western man in the future should recover his analytical ability, our times will be known as the age in which trivia replaced culture and bureaucracy replaced life. Economic stimulus: On the face of it, the proposition that we can borrow and spend ourselves into prosperity is lunacy....
One Nation Divisible
Something extraordinary has happened over the last decade or so—something neither the Republican nor Democratic leadership seems to understand. A large and growing number of Americans are now openly saying that much of what the central government does is not simply wasteful, corrupt, and destructive but illegitimate as well. This year the central government will...
The Dialectic of Suicide
“A nation never falls but by suicide.” —R.W. Emerson The ambush was prepared and actually triggered several months before Samuel Huntington’s Who Are We? appeared in print. When Mr. Huntington, the author of The Clash of Civilizations and a leading political scientist at Harvard, published last winter an excerpt from his new book dealing with...
What the Editors Are Reading
“Why, I pray, do you accuse me of a weak character? It is an accusation to which all enlightened men are exposed, because they see the two, or better say, the thousand sides of things, and it is impossible for them to make up their minds upon them, with the result that they stumble sometimes...
Restoring Island Park
The great Yellowstone caldera, home to Old Faithful and Mammoth Hot Springs, last exploded some 600,000 years ago. With a power more than one thousand times greater than Mt. St. Helen’s, it threw boulders the size of Greyhound buses nearly to Kansas. Pressure is building up again. The Yellowstone caldera is bulging in preparation for...
Virtual Democracy
Dittoheads were depressed at the end of April, when Rush Limbaugh announced his “trial separation from the Republican Party.” As in so many divorce cases, the charge was infidelity: the GOP had caved in on the minimum wage. Even though a good moral case might be made for the concept of a living wage, there...
Happy at Home
“No changes have been made in the text of the book for this printing,” Robert Nisbet wrote in his preface to the 1970 edition of The Quest for Community. Nor have changes been made in the new ICS Press edition, though it does carry a 13-page foreward by William A. Schambra that attempts to locate...
On Europe and America
I would like to congratulate François Furet (“The Long Apprenticeship,” July 1996) on his Richard M. Weaver Award and do him the courtesy of taking his acceptance speech seriously. I start by confessing that here in England the sense of inexorable democratic/ constitutional progress which Furet claims for France and Europe seems tremendously problematic. England...
Goodbye, George
An American president can wreck his country and blow up the world, but he cannot recreate either of them. —Chilton Williamson A recent book on the George W. Bush presidency is called A Tragic Legacy. But tragedy suggests the fall of something high and noble. There never ...
Communitarians, Liberals, and Other Enemies of Community and Liberty
I remember a time when the terms “community” and “virtue” had almost disappeared from philosophical discourse. Working on a doctorate in philosophy at Washington University in the mid-60’s, I took a seminar in ethics from Prof. Herbert Spiegelberg, who had written the definitive history of phenomenology. One day, he observed that philosophers no longer even spoke...
End of the Liberal Dream
Hell hath no fury like a peaceable liberal whose peaceable cause seems to be losing—especially when that cause is represented by the liberal himself, as Hillary Clinton’s tirade in the guise of a concession speech in Manchester, New Hampshire, demonstrated. Liberals and liberalism are currently under siege in Western countries. So liberals are in a...
Scientific American Goes to Moscow
Who is Mr. Piel? He is an American, a Harvard graduate (1937 magna cum laude), and a journalist who has devoted his career to the promotion of public understanding of science. From 1947 to 1984 he was president and publisher of Scientific American and is now its chairman. (In 1984 his son, Jonathan Piel, became...
Jefferson or Mussolini?
The right side of the World Wide Web has been aquiver with reports on Executive Order 13083, otherwise known as Bill Clinton’s attempted coup d’etat. How seriously should we take the Clinton plot to abolish the last vestiges of states’ rights? Setting aside the equivocations and dissimulations that mark all of Mr. Clinton’s official utterances,...
Stalingrad, 80 Years Later: Amnesia and Folly
Willful amnesia, such as Germany recently exhibited on the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Stalingrad, ensures that past debacles will be repeated.
State’s Wrongs
Chilton Williamson, Jr.’s column “Pragmatic Destruction” (What’s Wrong With the World, December 2011) attacks American democracy with a vengeance. He seems to be bothered by the fact that Southern blacks were “freed” (his quotation marks) by civil-rights laws through the negation of “states’ rights” (my quotation marks). I don’t see how restricting a certain class...
Cannibal Statistics
In debate, it is always possible to be right for the wrong reason. For instance, in supporting the proposition that cannibalism is immoral, I might argue that, historically, cannibalism encouraged the killing of human beings who might otherwise have been kidnapped by Arabs or rival African tribesmen and sold ...
Republicanism, Monarchy, and the Human Scale of Politics
The Founding Fathers had to face hard and unprecedented questions about the size and scale of a political order. They occupied a vast region, and conventional wisdom said that such could only be governed by monarchy. They were determined to be republicans, however, and the conventional wisdom was that republics had to be small. The...
Essay: The Literature of Order
Nature imitates art: so Oscar Wilde instructs us. Whether or not natural sunsets imitate Turner’s painted sunsets, surely human nature is developed by human arts. “Art is man’s nature,” in Burke’s phrase: modeling ourselves upon the noble creations of the great writer and the great painter, we become fully human by emulation of the artist’s...
No Surrender
People whose families did not arrive in America yesterday or the day before yesterday are likely to discover, some time or another, among their parents’ and grandparents’ effects small, faded campaign buttons advocating Coolidge for President, or FDR, and later larger and more elaborate buttons promoting Eisenhower-Nixon, or Stevenson-Kefauver, Kennedy-Johnson, Goldwater-Miller, Reagan-Bush, and perhaps Clinton-Gore. ...