In our last article we explored Charles Taylor’s concept of “the buffered self,” a peculiar kind of self-consciousness engendered by Enlightenment rationalism, and which has become customary (at least for educated elites) in our own time. We saw how it can be at once a source of pride, a profound source of accomplishment and self-worth, and also a source of confinement and Continue Reading …
Leo Strauss: Three Waves of Modernity
The crisis of modernity reveals itself in the fact … that modern western man no longer knows what he wants—that he no longer believes that he can know what is good and bad, right and wrong. –Leo Strauss Leo Strauss (1899–1973) was a German-Jewish political philosopher who, like earlier conservatives and later postmodernists, challenged the central contention of the Continue Reading …
Jurgen Habermas and the Public Sphere
The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor. Continue Reading …
Carl Becker: The Heavenly City of Eighteenth-Century Philosophers
In a very real sense it may be said of the eighteenth century that it was an age of faith as well as of reason, and of the thirteenth century that it was an age of reason as well as of faith. –Carl Becker In The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers (1932) the famous American historian Carl Becker (1873–1945) offered an influential interpretation of the Continue Reading …
Philosophy of History Part XXVI: Will Durant: The Story of Civilization
The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding. –Will Durant Will Durant (1885–1981) was an American philosopher and historian who is best remembered for his still-classic introduction to philosophy, The Story of Philosophy (1926), and an 11-volume history of Eurasia, The Story of Civilization (1935–1975), which he wrote Continue Reading …
Philosophy of History Part VII: The Politics of Modernization
Reason obeys itself, and ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it. –Thomas Paine Kings will be tyrants from policy, when subjects are rebels from principle. –Edmund Burke Now that we’ve discussed the Revolution, let’s turn to the politics of the Enlightenment for a moment. Between them, Revolution and Enlightenment defined much European history and intellectual life Continue Reading …
Philosophy of History Part VI: The French Revolution
What is the Third Estate? Nothing. What does it want to be? Something. –Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès During the French Revolution (1789–1799) a new generation risked their lives to make the ideals of the Enlightenment a reality. They overthrew the Monarchy, established the first modern Republic, and proclaimed the universal rights of man. In the short run, their Revolution was a Continue Reading …
Philosophy of History, Part V: Condorcet
The time will come when the sun will shine only upon free men who know no other master but their reason; when tyrants and slaves, priests and their stupid or hypocritical instruments will exist only in works of history and on the stage; and when we shall think of them only to pity their victims and their dupes. –Condorcet Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Continue Reading …
Philosophy of History, Part IV: Edward Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”
I have recorded the triumph of barbarism and religion. –Edward Gibbon When Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) was 27 years old, he visited Rome and, standing in the ruins of the forum, he imagined he saw the ghosts of Scipio, Caesar, Pompey, and the other heroes of the Republic. He spent days lost in imagination, thrilled simply to walk on the same ground that they had walked. Later, Continue Reading …
Philosophy of History, Part III: Voltaire and the Age of Reason
History should be written as philosophy. –Voltaire Voltaire, in many ways the paradigmatic Enlightenment intellectual, had a lifelong interest in history. And here, as in other fields, he was a severe critic of traditional ways of thinking. He wrote in response to at least two important strains of pre-Enlightenment historical writing. The first was the Augustinian Continue Reading …
Philosophy of History Part I: The Enlightenment
'Have the courage to use your own understanding,' is therefore the motto of the enlightenment. –Immanuel Kant As for so many other areas of thought, the Enlightenment marks, if not exactly the origins of philosophy of history, at any rate of a characteristically modern approach to it. It will therefore be useful to spend some time with that epoch as a whole, by way of Continue Reading …
Amateur Philosophy at it Worst: How to Write a David Brooks Column
Here's how you write a David Brooks column: Take a common conservative meme: some easy complaint or claim that has been beaten to death -- in its usual form -- in political opinion pieces far and wide. Dress it up and soften it significantly -- avuncular-ize it -- by replacing the usual objects of axe-grinding with less direct symbols taken from your vaguely-remembered Continue Reading …