When you read Umberto Eco's Foucault’s Pendulum and saw the allusions to Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, did you begin to suspect a Plan. Did you think that James was obviously sending you on a literary journey from one stepping stone to the next on the way to a predetermined destination? That would be a perfectly reasonable supposition...but it's completely incorrect. These works were chosen completely independently from each other by people who didn't even know of the other's existence, let alone the other's choice of book. Does this information bother you? Should it? Why? These are the sorts of questions one begins to ask oneself when you engage in a rabbit hole as large and as all consuming as Foucault's Pendulum—a rabbit hole that…
Perchance AI By Christopher Chantrill Every political movement is the story of the mystical origin of a people, and prophesies its heroic journey from the darkness of subjection into the glorious light of ascendance, the Promised Land of political dominance.
Photo Credit:Giuseppe Canella, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons Public Domain By Lars Møller Along with architectural historian Vincent Scully (Yale) and urban theorist Colin Rowe (Cornell), the European architect and theorist Leon Krier is widely recognized as a foundational intellectual inspiration behind the American New Urbanism movement.
Photo Credit:Rowland Lockey, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons Public Domain By Lars Møller The breach of the social contract and the rise of judicial governance.
Photo Credit:AnonymousUnknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons Public Domain By Lars Møller Traditionally, we like to celebrate genius and indulge in romantic fantasies about the source of special insights, but overlook personal suffering as a companion.
Photo Credit:Joseph Murray Ince, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons Public Domain A defense of Western meritocracy against the academically destructive DEI incursion.
A new biography from one of his students examines Richard Pipes, the historian and Cold Warrior. The post The Russianist appeared first on The American Conservative .
The Man Who Knew Russia: Richard Pipes, Humanist and Cold Warrior Jonathan Daly Stanford University Press, 408 pp. $65.00 In 1985, I invited Richard Pipes to speak at Oberlin College. As chairman of the College Republican club, I hosted a variety of neoconservative and conservative thinkers, ranging from Carl Gershman, who headed a fledgling organization called the National Endowment for Democracy, to William Rusher, the publisher of the National Review. But my biggest, or at least most controversial, catch was Pipes. Pipes was a professor of Russian history at Harvard and a former Reagan administration national security council adviser on Soviet and Eastern European affairs. At Oberlin, then as now a hotbed of political…Open
