History of Ideas

• Hazony vs. Neo-Marxism

  I wouldn’t be giving Hazony this much air time if I didn’t think that it was important to understand what people on the Right like him are saying. He doesn’t fit into most of the cubbies that most Americans put someone who is MAGA friendly. As I said in a previous post, his team that

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• Hazony’s Conservative Paradigm

  Is Hazony a Continuist or a Discontinuist? I thought before that he’s more of a Discontinuist, but maybe he needs another category, say, Re-Contintuist. There’s a part of me that thinks that Hazony would be better off if he called what’s he’s talking about something other than ‘Conservative’, perhaps a Whig. I don’t think the

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• Continuists vs Discontinuists: Setting Up a Critical Look at Yoram Hazony

  Let me start by saying that I don’t think that Yoram Hazony is an ideological hack, even if he's associating with hacks that I think diminish his credibility with the non-hack community. Nevertheless, I think he's writing in good faith, and his ideas have to be taken seriously if for no other reason that they

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• Herder Office Hours

  Q: I think I kind of get it, but could you clarify why you’re spending so much time talking about two ancient Germans that hardly anybody has heard of? A: There are several reasons. First, I thought that all my talk about Aristotle and Neoplatonism needed to be balanced by something more down to earth

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• J.G. Herder’s Nationalism

  Those in the traditionalist group, insofar as they have retained some sense of their living tradition, see modernists as the American Indians saw the white man–as people who have no understanding, people who have become crazy and disoriented, people who have lost their souls because in their uprooted individualism they have lost any experiential connection

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• Enlightenment v. Counter-Enlightenment: Hamann’s Particularism

  I’ve started Hazony’s most recent book, Conservatism: A Rediscovery, and find it a better book than the one on nationalism. There is much in it I agree with because when push comes to shove, I am a small ‘c’ conservative. The problem for me is that in the condition of Postmodernity, there’s nothing left to

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• Taking a Step Back: Here’s an Overview of My Argument

  What I’m trying to do here is probably not ideal for blog or Newsletter, but should rather be in a book. I’m not particularly motivated to write a book that nobody is going to read, but it might be useful exercise for me and for the few people who are interested to try to integrate

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• Epstein’s Revenge

  And a project at the University of Maryland to track radicalization by QAnon found that 83 percent of the women who had committed crimes in the name of the conspiracy theory had children who had been abused by a romantic partner or family member. The QAnon movement doesn’t draw adherents online the way it once

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• Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing

  Q: In our last conversation, you said that there is no such thing as an uninterpreted fact. Are you saying that there is no objective ‘something’ that we have to measure the accuracy of our perceptions and knowledge against? A: No. But we have to frame the way we understand the relationship between the knower

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