Curing the Disorders of the Age?

Book Review by Robert Cheeks

A Citizen Legislature. By Ernest Callenbach and Michael Phillips.  A People's Parliament: A (Revised) Blueprint for a Very English Revolution. By Keith Sutherland. (Published together as a single volume) hardcover, 350 pp, $58.00. Charlottesville, Va. and Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic, 2008.

During the process of engendering a constitutional republic, the American founders knew of the dangers inherent in an unchecked democracy. They were keenly aware that a predominately democratic regime would eventually threaten the cornerstone of the republic, private property rights, and never permit Thomas Jefferson’s “natural aristocracy” to rise to the leadership of the state.

The founders hoped to solve this dilemma by installing mechanisms adapted from Montesquieu’s model whereby the central government (Leviathan) would be divided into three estates: the executive, legislative, and the judicial, by introducing the concept of “states rights” via the ninth and tenth amendments of the Bill of Rights, limiting the power of the executive, and by constitutionally requiring that election to the upper house (Senate) by the state legislature.

Today thanks to the pressures brought about by party politics, demagoguery, the “disproportionate influence of big money and the media,” and the inevitable rise of the libido dominandi, the American government has completed its journey from a constitutional republic to a social democracy. As a recent cover of Chronicles magazine proclaimed, We Are All Socialists Now!

Well, maybe.

Balancing Erudition and Piety

Book Review by Robert Cheeks

Christian Faith and Human Understanding. By Robert Sokolowski. Washington, DC: The Catholic University Press of America, 2006. Paper, 317 pgs., index, bibliography.

“Reason in man is rather like God in the world."

                                        —St. Thomas Aquinas, Opuscule II, De Regno

Professor Mark Malvasi in his delightful book, The Unregenerate South, says that John Crowe Ransom, the Fugitive Poet, Agrarian, and noted critic, believed “Science flattered men’s vanities and quieted their apprehensions. Like modern Christianity, science offered men hope that they could escape death.”

In his poetry, essays, and novel, Ransom was able to bring forth a powerful criticism of technology and technique while decrying the failure of “modern” Christianity to respond. The apparent incompatibility of reason and revelation was exacerbated by the failure of the Church in its effort to mollify the divine Word of God (Logos) and the “scientific worldview.” In the end, Ransom rejected the notion that contemporary man would return to orthodox Christianity, commenting that man had become so caught up in the exigencies of modernity he could never again find the “words of the prophets or psalmists congenial or meaningful.”

Briefly Noted

 The Unreadable becomes Irresistible

Thomas Mann.  Joseph and His Brothers. New York: Alfred A.Knopf (Everyman's Library), 2005. 1492 pgs. Hardcover $42.00.

Today Joseph and His Brothers is the least read of Thomas Mann's books.  He takes the Book of Genesis and the basic story of Jacob and his children and enriches the bare recital to give it novelistic breadth and depth. Mann thought it his best work, written and issued in four volumes over a sixteen year period from 1926 to 1942.  Eric Voegelin thought it a very great work.  Physically it is daunting: 1500 pages of fine print in a single volume. One would likely flip through it and mutter "I don't read things like this. I will never ever read it. I haven't time."  Perhaps the publishers should have issued it in four volumes as it was originally issued in German, but they didn't.  But something has changed now.  Mann entrusted his English translations to Helen Lowe-Porter.  In her time there were certain conventions that today seem strained.  But this Knopf (Everyman) edition offers the new translation by John E. Woods. 

Book Review

  by Robert Cheeks

Michael Oakeshott on Religion, Aesthetics, and Politics. By Elizabeth Campbell Corey. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006. Hardbound, 253 pages, index, bibliography.

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“I have discovered that all human evil comes from this: Man's being unable to sit still in a room." — Blaise Pascal, Pensees (1670)

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What is so fascinating about the philosophical writings of the English philosopher, Michael Oakeshott, is his “continual protest” against modernity’s perception of man as amendable to a mechanical rather than a moral interpretation, the consequent negation of man as an “agent of truth,” and its definition of the modern, therapeutic, managerial state (Leviathan) as the ultimate sovereign. Oakeshott directly challenged the doctrines of modernity even critiquing the efficacy of its central tenet, “progress.”