The Calvinist International
Yesterday I responded to one of Sarah Conly’s critiques of moral perfectionism, but I mentioned she provides useful objections to stringent libertarianism. Shortly after I posted this, Steven wrote a provocative analysis of some current libertarian politicking. In the spirit of continuing a criticism of anarcho-capitalism, here is Conly’s argument in a nutshell: I argue […]
In his stimulating The Pretenses of Loyalty, John Perry conveys a seminal moment in John Rawls’ life from autobiographical comments: To the extent that Christianity is taken seriously, I came to think it could have deleterious effects on one’s character. Christianity is a solitary religion: each is saved or damned individually, and we naturally focus […]
Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (Cambridge: Belknap Press), 2014, 434 pp + viii. At the very beginning of Inventing the Individual, Larry Siedentop laments in terms that will resonate with many. Many goods of the past are lost. The western world, taken as a whole, has mislaid its cultural and historical identity. […]
From Ernst Kantorowicz’s magisterial The King’s Two Bodies: Godfrey of Fontaines, a Belgian philosopher of the late thirteenth century, for example, succeeded in integrating very neatly the corpus mysticum into the Aristotelian scheme. To him the “mystical body” appeared not as a supra-natural foundation, but as a gift of nature. His major premise was that “everyone is […]
In the introduction to Niall Rudd’s Oxford World’s Classics translation of what survives of Cicero’s Republic and Laws, Jonathan Powell and Niall Rudd include a section on natural law, which for Cicero stands above all civil and positive law. There they note that Cicero’s view of natural law rests on other commitments, “certain fundamental beliefs” (xxvii). They […]
It’s hard to think of two men better suited for each other, both ideologically and temperamentally, than Slavoj Žižek and Noam Chomsky. Lucky for us readers, they’ve gotten into a spat. Chomsky accused Žižek of not actually having a philosophical or political theory, relying instead on rhetoric and comedic behavior. Žižek’s response is, as usual, pointed and […]