Classic texts

A word from Rousseau

Featured image Collin Anderson reports at the Washington Free Beacon that, in his capacity as President Biden’s climate prince, “John Kerry Has Flown More Than 180,000 Miles, Emitting 9.5 Million Pounds of Carbon.” Although Kerry’s air travel supposedly endangers the future of humanity, Kerry is in the air to save the world from the “existential crisis” of climate change caused by carbon emissions. Collin cruelly quotes Kerry: “If you offset your carbon, »

Learning from Euthydemus

Featured image I’ve been studying Xenophon’s Memorabilia with friends over the past few months. Xenophon was a student and friend of Socrates. His memoirs are devoted to an account and defense of Socrates following the trial that resulted in his death. It’s an interesting and classic work. We have used Amy Bonnette’s translation in Cornell’s Agora series as our text. It comes with an excellent introduction by Christopher Bruell and annotations by »

Relevant classic texts (5)

Featured image I want to add a few more paragraphs from Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) to Steve’s introduction and excerpts in “Relevant classic texts (4).” With the Terror yet to come, Burke observed of those to whom he attributed the spirit of the revolution: “In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows….” (paragraphing added below). * * »

Relevant Classic Texts (4)

Featured image This weekend’s main topic of the Three Whisky Happy Hour podcast will be an exploration of Edmund Burke, in part because we received an interesting reader email after a recent episode that prompted an argument between me and Lucretia (she is a Burke skeptic, to put it mildly).  In rereading Burke in preparation for our taping this evening, I was struck by several passages in Burke’s most famous work, Reflections »

Relevant Classic Texts (2)

Featured image A lot of the supercharged racism uber alles ideology we’re seeing right now under the general banner of “critical race theory” is not new. Most accounts place its origins in the late 1980s or 1990s, but in fact it is possible to make out the essential dynamic back in the 1960s. Harry Jaffa gave a valedictory lecture on the occasion of his retirement from teaching at Claremont McKenna College in »

Relevant Classic Texts (1)

Featured image From time to time I post excerpts from classic authors that bear on the current scene, especially C.S. Lewis’s anticipations of postmodern nihilism and progressivism in works such as The Abolition of Man and The Screwtape Letters. It strikes me that we should have a regular Power Line series on classic texts to keep handy. I previously quoted The Screwtape Letters on progressivism, but in the sequel Lewis wrote almost »