John Boersma Tyranny and Revolution: Rousseau to Heidegger By Waller R. Newell; 2022 Waller Newell: Interview: The Characteristics of Tyranny Today’s political discourse is rife with the prognosis that liberalism is in trouble, evidenced by the rise of anti-liberal and post-liberal thought, each of which maintains that a politics based on material self-interest is incapable… Read More Tyranny and Revolution: Rousseau to Heidegger
Albert Camus has long been misunderstood, but a new translation of his complete notebooks offers a corrective By Matthew Lamb The Complete Notebooks by Albert Camus. Translated by Ryan Bloom Source: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1957/camus/biographical/ EACH NEW TRANSLATION of a work from a major author should spark a reevaluation of that author’s critical reception and public reputation. Since his death in 1960, a… Read More Fame! A Misunderstanding
NB: A gripping and very informative account of the intertwined crises that led to war and global confrontation in 1970-1971. I was a small witness to it from the Indian side of the border; and was caught up in the political cyclone which became the central theme for my novel Revolution Highway. Indeed, it was… Read More The Vortex
When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut The Spanish title of Labatut’s book is Un Verdor Terrible – roughly, A Terrible Greening NB: This is an astonishing piece of writing, at once simple and deeply thought-provoking. The style is reminiscent of Borges, and the philosophical citation that comes to mind is this one from… Read More A Terrible Greening
This sort of cynical piracy has begun to thrive in today’s AI Wild West, a territory largely devoid of government regulations. Though Amazon may take down the offending volumes once it is informed by aggrieved authors like Cline and myself, it faces no consequence for its behavior. The most astonishingly productive historian in recent times… Read More Who Is Blake Whiting?
William Pfaf (June 2013) Reviewed: The Devil in History: Communism, Fascism, and Some Lessons of the Twentieth Century by Vladimir Tismaneanu The twentieth century undoubtedly will mainly be remembered for producing totalitarian politics. Italian Fascism was the first to give this name to the phenomenon, even though Mussolini’s movement was the least “total” of the… Read More Pure, Purifying, and Evil
By JOSEPH FRONCZAK One long century ago, on June 9, 1917, not quite halfway between the February Revolution and the October Revolution, Eric Hobsbawm was born in Alexandria, Egypt. The lifelong communist died only five years ago, in 2012 at the age of ninety-five. He spent his final years placidly convinced that socialism belonged still… Read More Eric Hobsbawm’s Long Century
‘At the core of both our nature, and our way of being within nature, is a relentless, collective conversation about what is good and what is true.’ Richard Bernstein Richard J. Bernstein. The Vicissitudes of Nature: From Spinoza to Freud. New York: Polity Books, 2022 During the past few decades, our practices have been destroying nature,… Read More Alex Betancourt reviews The Vicissitudes of Nature
Frances Stonor Saunders on MI5 and the Hobsbawm File First posted March 26, 2015 On 25 January 1933, the 16-year-old Eric Hobsbawm marched with thousands of comrades through central Berlin to the headquarters of the German Communist Party (KPD). When they arrived at Karl Liebknecht Haus, on the Bülowplatz, the temperature was –18°C. They shuffled and… Read More British Intelligence (MI5)’s file on Eric Hobsbawm
Pranjali Bandhu A stalwart of India’s freedom movement, Gandhian economic philosopher, pioneer in the development of village and cottage industries and advocate of a decentralised, localised economy of permanence and freedom, it is unfortunate that J C Kumarappa (1892-1960) remains practically unknown to the present generation of Indians. The reasons for this are many, but… Read More J C Kumarappa’s Concept of an Economy of Permanence
