Pantheism and Politics
In 1749, a solitary man walked out of the city of Paris toward the village of Vincennes. As he moved along, reading, something happened to him that…
Mark Kremer’s: Romanticism and Civilization: Love, Marriage, and Family in Rousseau’s Julie
Romanticism and Civilization: Love, Marriage, and Family in Rousseau's Julie. Mark Kremer. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017. In the summer of 2018, I wrote a piece of…
Clare Graves, Spiral Dynamics, and the Purple/Blue Hybrid
The pathological version of Green thinking flattens Clare Grave’s hierarchy of moral development because it rejects the notion of superior and inferior. Strangely enough, the tendency has…
Rousseau’s and Kant’s Competing Interpretations of the Enlightenment
Introduction At the crescendo of the Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant famously admitted his intellectual debt to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Kant praised Rousseau as a man possessing “an uncommon acuity…
Leo Strauss and the Crisis of Modernity (II): the Necessity of Virtue
One of Leo Strauss’ most famous contributions to the study of modern political theory is his known idea of the “three waves of modernity”, in which Strauss…
Unearthed History: The War of The Vendée
Something about the French revolution makes it a timeless topic: It encapsulates the totality of our human condition. That condition is our inability to fully measure the…
The Baby and the Bathwater: MLK and Russell Kirk’s 6th Conservative Principle
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is an American icon and venerated hero. He bravely spearheaded the civil rights movement of the 1960s, bridging people with powerful rhetoric…
Constructive Dialogues: Understanding Sexual Assault From Both Sides of the Aisle
Some of the most contentious and unfortunate issues to surface in recent memory have related to sexual assault and sexual impropriety. Whether it is the “#me too”…
Constructive Dialogues: Understanding Immigration
Introduction Immigration is one of the most divisive issues thus far of the Trump administration. The discussion is almost guaranteed to anger at least one side of…
The Original Perversity in the Judeo-Christian Heart: Why Socialism and the Judeo-Christian Ethic Are Incongruent
As socialism ascends in popularity across the western world, many are infatuated with the promises it offers. According to a recent Gallup poll, among the Democratic Party,…
An “Ever Better” Constitution? Progressivism as Ideology and the U.S. Constitution
As a document written in the 1700’s, all the framers of the U.S. Constitution as well as their immediate relatives, friends, and colleagues are now deceased. We…
Romanticism and Civilization: Love, Marriage, and Justice in Rousseau’s Julie
La Nouvelle Héloïse is the most influential novel ever written. It shares with the Social Contract the honor of inspiring the French Revolution and, to a lesser…
Understanding Love and Marriage with Rousseau
I like slim volumes of pith and punch. Mark Kremer’s little study, Romanticism and Civilization: Love, Marriage, and Family in Rousseau’s Julie, is both. Its bold thesis…
From the Multiversity Cave: The Students and the State
One of the recent movements in American education has been to make schools student-centered, whether from Montessori pre-schools to institutions of higher education: the values of independence,…