Commonplace Book

Our very conception of participation in the public discourse is predicated upon a gross distortion of the proper relationship between truth and opinion. We abhor silence, as if having nothing to say is somehow worse than saying much without substance. […]

Joshua Katz, a classicist, made tenure at one of the most prestigious universities in America when he was just thirty-six years old. That is not why I know his name, though it is among the reasons that the implosion of […]

Throughout modern history, the greatest threat to democracy has come from…the denial of political legitimacy to those who fail to share one’s own views on key issues. Historians have devoted intensive study to the long and painful process by which […]

There they found a small book in which was written the life of Antony. One of them began to read it, marveled at it, was inflamed by it. While we was actually reading he had begun to think how he […]

The poor are not actually as disinterested and pure as the Marxist apocalypse assumes. They do have fewer interests to defend than the rich. But though their justified resentments against injustice may be a creative force in history, their bitterness […]

Genuine community is established only when the knowledge that we need one another is supplemented by the recognition that “the other,” that other form of life, or that other unique community is the limit beyond which our ambitions must not […]

If I say to an American that the country he lives in is a fine one, “Ay,” he replies, “there is not its equal in the world.” If I applaud the freedom that its inhabitants enjoy, he answers: “Freedom is […]

Objectivity…is the sturdiest ground of justice, and the despisers of objectivity are playing with fire. Feelings are a reedy basis for reform. After all, the other side also has feelings–which is how we wound up with the revolting solipsist in […]

The difficulty, for us modern Americans anyhow, comes with the need to honor rightly both the “all” and the distinct persons and lives within the “all.” It is easy to issue a general approval of “all humans” or of all […]

The intellectuals’ self-image, it will be seen, had come to coincide with the popular stereotype of the intellectual. The popular stereotype, contrary to a widespread impression among intellectuals themselves, was not unfavorable. By the 1960’s it was a well-documented fact […]

The most interesting think about the cult of the New Frontier was what it revealed about the changing conception not only of culture but of intellectual life in general. The downgrading of Kennedy’s political skill and the upgrading of his […]

Do you visualize the Italians of today as nurturing the traditions of Ancient Rome? Don’t delude yourself. A few years ago some Italian historians were arguing about the period in which the origin of their nation should be set. Some […]

A man born with a political vocation cannot succeed in adapting himself to normal life, and sooner or later he will fund his predestined way. As he pushes forward, everything else will become a matter of indifference to him and […]

The sight of me with my sister tapped one of their deepest feelings: that of a blood relationship which was all the more intense since they had so little attachment to either religion or the State. It was not that […]

To the peasants of Lucania Rome means very little; it is the capital of the gentry, the center of a foreign and hostile world. Naples has more right to be their capital, and in some ways it is; it is […]

Pietro Spina was Don Benedetto’s best pupil as a boy, and he remains his best pupil as a man because he has never given over his love of learning, and he never depends upon other people for his thinking. Even […]

The radical feminists’ assertion that a woman has absolute property in her body provoked mirth from those who, like Betsey [Fox Genovese], knew that the modern Left had arisen to oppose the bourgeois theory of absolute property in anything. Betsey […]

But we shall never have peace so long as we believe that fascism is an aberration only, or the organization of power only–made by the tyrants and controverted by the Red Army only–we shall never have peace until we see […]

So, as we assess the impact of the academic Left, we find a mixed picture. There was opposition and repression, but there was also acceptance and co-optation. There were reforms. Faculty hiring practices changed. Radicals got their scholarship published. A […]

Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions. In the Western world, at least, they have the power that comes from political liberty, from […]