The Idiots

Easy Game

We do not always know who is predator, who is prey and how to distinguish the two, or even if we should. It is all a game, we are told, and our chiefs, whether justices or executive officers, can only articulate the corporate good — to maximize profit. Corporations are thus not corporate as bodies, [...]

Peter Saint-Andre on Politics, Technology and Art

(1) Last May in your essay on “the Gathering Storm” you quoted Benjamin Franklin, “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail” and provided a number of tips for surviving it, including exercising our right to speech, defense, privacy and association. A year has passed. Is there anything you would add or modify today [...]

One Glimpse

Hillel Halkin’s new book, Yehuda Halevi, is an exploration of the life and passions of this important Jewish figure of religious and philosophical significance. What this book tells us about the history of the medieval period in which he lived in Spain, however, is interesting in and of itself, and it is especially provocative in [...]

Definitions of Terms Political

In general, these definitions are suggestive and mechanistic, meaning that all actors and their actions can be described with respect to a rational choice model and without any necessary appeal to outside or irrational forces. Political Union A group of people who recognize an authority or authorities, which can commit internal and external acts of [...]

A Weak People

Carl Schmitt quotes Vergil’s Fourth Ecologue at the close of his Der Begriff der Politischen (The Concept of the Political), “Ab integro nascitur ordo.” A new order is born from the renewal. Schmitt claimed that a world state could not exist, that such an attempt, where legitimacy rested primarily on economic means could and would [...]

“Black Mass” Book Review

John Gray is a former professor of philosophy at Oxford and the LSE, and not to be confused with the pop psychology author of Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. In 2007 he published one of the most thought provoking intellectual works of the past decade. The title derives from the fact that [...]

Finding Freedom

Danny Suarez’s second novel is a blood and guts laced techno-thriller that will probably not make much sense without knowledge of his earlier book, Daemon, in which he outlines his vision of a “botnet” powered by a potentially benevolent AI. If this doesn’t already make sense to you, you might want to stop here. In [...]

The Anti-Narrative

Sexism, racism, homophobia, culturism. All of these -isms take part in the grand narrative of oppressed peoples, tied together and advanced against conservative elements of society, usually without any understanding of the elements they criticize. That is, to say, this grand narrative is essentially an anti-narrative, possessing no positive element, and ironically performing the same [...]

Clausewitz and the End of Europe

A review of Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre by René Girard. As stated at the outset, this book is focused on mimetic rivalry in French-German relations, leading to a total war largely already completed, and the apocalypse described as more or less already with us, including the vapidity of contemporary American culture, [...]

Tradition and T.S. Eliot: A Journey to the East?

We shall not cease from exploration T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding What is tradition? What is orthodoxy? Wherein lies the greatness of poetry? These questions not answered, Eliot moves forward in time to new formulations, new questions. Why tradition? Why orthodoxy? Why “great” poetry? These questions easier to answer, yes, though answers no less convincing. Why [...]