‘The moment of birth for the modern myth of progress is when Western thought retained the linear time-scheme of Christianity but radically reinterpreted its content. This “humanist turn” was essentially a process of secularization, during which divine providence was replaced…
‘In our own “post-liberal” moment, Thatcher’s Arminian liberalism deserves a second look. Liberalism, rightly understood, was never meant to be the cult of the autonomous self. It was the civic translation of a theological truth: that we are created free…
‘The problem is not whether progress has material benefits—it would be foolish to deny them—but that the concept of progress has forced upon us a materialist and quantitative worldview that is incapable of measuring, or even perceiving, what was lost…
‘Whereas Augustine’s inner self pointed beyond itself to God, Rousseau’s pointed only inward. Conscience, no longer an echo of divine law, became the voice of the self. Politics, in turn, had to be remade in its image: the true will…
‘True freedom is a paradox: we are most free when we accept the burdens of responsibility. A society that worships liberty without responsibility ends with neither. But a society that remembers responsibility as the guardian of liberty secures both.’…
‘Lévy is ultimately boxed within the same pre-October 7 suppositions that paralyse legacy Jewish institutions cornered by anti-Zionist Wokeism yet unable to broaden their appeal or become agents of larger coalitions…Yet standing on those same rigid principles blinds Lévy to…
‘Without Christianity, there are no human rights, nor any democracy. Therefore, Fukuyama’s “Last Man” is not the triumph of human history at all, but quite the opposite: as he puts, that will indeed be the “End of History” for humanity….
‘Paradoxically, it appears that democracy can only sustain and protect itself from collapse—whether through tyranny or chaos—by relying on elements that are not themselves democratic. It often seems easier to justify democracy with a quasi-mystical hypothesis than with one grounded…
‘It is not an easy task to clean the concept of democracy from the secondary meanings that have been imposed on it during more than two centuries of modern usage. I will not attempt to solve this task; instead, I…
