‘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…
‘Liberalism…had reached its full potential by the twentieth century. It has achieved its highest goals and, in doing so, has cut the human person off from tradition, religion, and natural communities. The struggles of the first progressive ideology seem to…
‘The fleshy vernacular of this new version of the Inferno forces us to slow down and see, feel, taste, smell, and almost touch the reality of our sin—as Christ did in the Incarnation. Perfect sight awaits us in paradise, but…
‘UNESCO’s programming in the areas of education and the social and human sciences, combined with the work of the UN Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights and international human rights treaty body committees, transformed the aspirational UDHR into…
‘It can no longer be said that the individual manqué is merely a “shadow”; it appears, rather, to be the norm. Today, it is worth reflecting on the extent to which, since Oakeshott’s death, the European experience has shifted from…
