History

Is Justice a Matter of Truth or Power?0
- History
- May 16, 2018
In the first book of the Republic, Plato shares a conversation between Socrates and Thrasymachus, a Sophist orator, that touches on the nature of truth, justice, and law. “I proclaim that justice is nothing but the interest of the stronger,” Thrasymachus tells Socrates. He continues: “…the different forms of government make laws democratical, aristocratical, tyrannical,
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Ancient Heresies Back from the Dead 0
- History
- May 8, 2018
The decline of the prestige of Christianity raises the question of what will replace it. No culture can live without a philosophy which gives structure and meaning to social institutions and to individual lives. The alternative is nihilism, whose wintry bleakness makes it an unwelcome guest at the dinner table. So what, then? One answer
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What Did Hannah Arendt Really Mean by the Banality of Evil?0
- History
- April 24, 2018
Can one do evil without being evil? This was the puzzling question that the philosopher Hannah Arendt grappled with when she reported for The New Yorker in 1961 on the war crimes trial of Adolph Eichmann, the Nazi operative responsible for organising the transportation of millions of Jews and others to various concentration camps in
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When ‘Civilization’ Became a Bad Word 0
- History
- April 20, 2018
Kenneth Clark’s “Civilisation” mini-series, produced by the BBC and aired on American public television in 1969, celebrated the Western art and culture it depicted and explained. The show was one of the most widely watched and re-aired shows of its kind at the time, and is still discussed today, almost fifty years after its television debut.
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Imperialism Is Baked into America’s (Progressive) DNA 0
- History
- April 19, 2018
Just how much imperialism is in the DNA—so to write—of the American character? When Frederick Jackson Turner delivered his famous address, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” on an outrageously humid Chicago afternoon, July 12, 1893, he warned that what had been a healthy frontier expansion might well turn into bald-faced imperialism with
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Only Congress Has the Power to Declare War. Just Ask James Madison 0
- History
- April 16, 2018
Tim Kaine, the 2016 Democratic vice presidential nominee, said about President Trump’s airstrikes on Syria. “The last thing Congress should be doing is giving this president a blank check to wage war against anyone, anywhere.” Of course, Kaine’s protests are hypocritical. Undeclared presidential wars are a bi-partisan problem. Despite three years of heaving fighting, and
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