Like the journalist Wesley Yang, who asked on Facebook, “Who is Casey Anthony?” I have no idea who Casey Anthony is. I don’t know if s/he is a man, an adult, white, American, really nothing. (Though in the back of my mind I imagine a fey black singer ca. 1963—the obvious Little Anthony and the Imperials connection.) All I know is that s/he is involved in some kind of court case, which may or may not be still going on. What this tells me is that you really can ignore a lot of the news if you want to, even if you’re a media junkie like me. I read tons of magazines and surf the net religiously. While I’ve seen […]
The death of Otto von Habsburg, the man once slated to be Emperor of Austria-Hungary, reminds us just how recent the destruction of Europe’s old order really is. Up until World War I—some would say the end of World War II—Europe was still in thrall to its feudal past. (Otto was the eldest son of Charles I, who ascended to the Hapsburg throne at the tail end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.) Landed aristocracies possessed inordinate political and military power, furnishing what Joseph Schumpeter called the “steel frame” of bourgeois capitalism. Academics like me often wield the term “modernity” as if it describes a centuries-old formation, but the fact is: a great part of Europe only became modern—in the sense of […]
The Times ran a serious and substantive story two days ago about Noam Chomsky’s attempt to persuade Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez to free a judge from house arrest. Look out for tomorrow’s follow-up story, in which Ethan Bronner devotes a respectful 600 words to Chomsky’s thoughts on the Gaza Flotilla.
Leafing through my copy of the latest Princeton Alumni Weekly, I find out that the university is making great strides. The new chair of the board of trustees, Kathryn “Katie” Hall, is a woman—a first—who “sport[s] six piercings in each ear.” Another first. What’s not a first? She’s a corporate tool. Ain’t capitalism grand?
A few weeks ago Andrew Sullivan complained—and not for the first time—that contemporary conservatism has grown too ideological and fundamentalist, abandoning the tradition of Burke and Hayek. You know, the tradition of prudence and restraint that abjures fanaticism and counsels moderation, that eschews the grand designs of the left in favor of the evolutionary, piecemeal reforms of the right. You know, that tradition that says this: “A successful defence of freedom must therefore be dogmatic and make no concessions to expediency.” (Hayek, Law, Legislation, Liberty, Vol. 1, p. 61) And this: “Utopia, like ideology, is a bad word today…But an ideal picture of a society which may not be wholly achievable, or a guiding conception of the overall order to […]
The Times asks Harry Jaffa to review a new translation of Aristotle’s Ethics. We got lots of heavy breathing about Leo Strauss (“the greatest political philosopher of the 20th century”), the crisis of modernity, and Athens v. Jerusalem. What don’t we get? A review of the Ethics or this translation.