Over the last two years I have written a few pieces on the flagging vitality of American intellectual life. This week Ross Douthat wrote up a response to these pieces. It has prompted a few thoughts. 1. In the comment thread for “Where Have All the Great Works Gone?” a common objection to the premise […]
Last summer the New Yorker published an essay by James Marcus that asks the following question: why was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow so loved in his own lifetime when today he is so little read or respected? There is one very compelling answer to this that the article that does not discuss—indeed, that the article itself […]
Some of the things that make “the discourse” terrible are new to social media—especially Twitter. But not all. Some other problems are very, very old. Perhaps the best guide to today’s Twitter beefs was written near three centuries ago. Listen here to one Adam Smith, theorist of moral sentiments. Our journey begins with an observation: […]
A few months ago I wrote about Oswald Spengler’s attempt at comparative world history. I expressed severe reservations with Spengler’s methods and conclusions.[1] But for me the most fascinating parts of the book were the footnotes to Spengler’s main argument. Take, for example, Spengler’s attempt to compare and contrast members of his chosen pantheon of […]
One of the great ironies of 20th century history: Marxist revolutionaries could only ever seize power in the wrong countries. Marx imagined a revolution of industrial proletariat; he expected that this proletariat would at first achieve its aims in highly industrialized nations like England and Germany. His theory of socialism presupposed that a successful transition […]
Every year I post a list of every book I read the year previous, with my ten favorites bolded. You can find my past entries here (2019) here (2018), here (2017), here (2016), here (2015), here (2014), and here (2013). As in those posts, I list the books in the approximate order in which I […]
Several months ago I wrote a few reflections on Ross Douthat’s newest book, The Decadent Society.[1] As I noted, Douthat’s most interesting claim is that we live in an age of intellectual sterility. We cycle ever backwards to the intellectual, cultural, and political priorities of 1975. In response, I argued that complaints of cultural sterility […]
Samuel Cohn’s Epidemics: Hate and Compassion from the Plague of Athens to AIDS is true door-stop of a book, encyclopedic in ambition, coming in at a full 650 pages of prose and citations. In a new book review over at the Washington Examiner I describe the book’s origins: In the summer of 2009, Samuel Cohn, […]
Image source Ideology, which was once the road to action, has become a dead end. —Daniel Bell (1960) Yuval Levin’s 2017 book Fractured Republic: Renewing America’s Social Contract in the Age of Individualism has several interesting passages inside it, but none so interesting as Levin’s meditation on the generational frame that clouds the modern mind. […]
Over at the Washington Examiner I have a book review out of Timothy Brook’s The Great State: China and the World. Brook is a well regarded historian whose past work has focused on both the Ming Dynasty and on early 20th century China. This book is a popular history that narrates episodes from the Yuan Dynasty […]
