Ellen Wayland-Smith admires how Is a River Alive? places the reader in immersive contact with the nature we regard as mere backdrop to human activity. Is A River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane. 2025 IN RELIGIOUS COSMOGONIES, anthropologist Mircea Eliade argues in his 1957 book The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, the natural world… Read More What Would It Take to Re-Sacralize Nature?
We have previously written about the debates over the political relevance of the Enlightenment today, drawing on Antoine Lilti’s critical review of the histories of Jonathan Israel. We present the English translation of his essay, which has import far beyond any disciplinary boundaries: Viewpoint Magazine David A. Bell: The Uses and Abuses of Enlightenment: AV lecture; January 2025 ***… Read More How Do We Write the Intellectual History of the Enlightenment? Spinozism, Radicalism, and Philosophy
Kieran Setiya reviews Christoph Schuringa’s A Social History of Analytic Philosophy IS THE FORM of philosophy dominant in English-speaking universities covertly resistant to radical thought? Does it present as the work of pure reason what is in fact the function of an ideology complicit in oppression? In A Social History of Analytic Philosophy (2025), the philosopher Christoph… Read More The Politics of Apoliticism
DOCUMENTS: BOOKS: IMAGE & SOUND Editor’s Picks:
Søren Kierkegaard in “The Present Age” warns that the modern state seeks to eradicate conscience and shape and manipulate individuals into a pliable and indoctrinated “public.” This public is not real. It is a “monstrous abstraction, an all-embracing something which is nothing, a mirage.”… Thomas Paine writes that a despotic government is a fungus that… Read More Chris Hedges: The Rule of Idiots
George Orwell Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language – so the argument runs – must inevitably share in the… Read More Politics and the English Language (1946)
NB: India After Gandhi is a history of India after independence, but it must be said that Ramchandra Guha is among a small circle of scholars to have done singular service to the Indian and global public with his extensive and meticulous research on Mahatma Gandhi’s life. It is gratifying that his work has been… Read More Ramachandra Guha’s ‘India After Gandhi’ – Gujarati translation launched in Ahmedabad
Whittaker Chambers tried to warn us Paul Baumann I recently read Sam Tanenhaus’s excellent new biography of William F. Buckley Jr., the conservative hero who, as the subtitle of the book acknowledges, was the voice and guiding light of the political “revolution that changed America.” The impressive, talented, and endlessly combative group of editors Buckley initially gathered… Read More From Ayn Rand to Donald Trump
NB: An important interview about an important book. DS Documents unearthed by Robert Parry and reported in an article entitled When Israel/Neocons Favoured Iran show that Israel’s Likud government of Menachem Begin became an important source of covert arms supplies to Iran after Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, with the profits being invested in Jewish… Read More The People First: Rohini Hensman on Democracy, Resistance, and the Global Left
How could I write songs of hatred when I felt no hate? And, between ourselves, I never hated the French, although I thanked God when we were rid of them. How could I, to whom the only significant things are civilization and barbarism, hate a nation which is among the most cultivated in the world,… Read More The Great Unread: Goethe’s Faustian life
After the truth-shower 