Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Political Theology

  • Kierkegaard on the Power and the Powerlessness of Earthly Power

    The following passage from Concluding Unscientific Postscript embodies a penetrating insight: . . . the legal authority shows its impotence precisely when it shows its power: its power by giving permission, its impotence by not being able to make it permissible. (p. 460, tr. Swenson & Lowrie) My permitting you to do X does not…

  • David French, Donald Trump, Christianity, and Politics

    David French maintains that Christians cannot, if they are to remain true to Christian teachings, support Donald Trump: The proper way for Christians to engage in politics is a rich subject . . . but there are some rather simple foundational principles that apply before the questions get complex. For example, all but a tiny…

  • Anthony Flood Reviews David Horowitz, Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America

    Excerpts: Cultural Marxism is but the latest form of the cultural cancer now metastasizing throughout the body politic. (Marxism-Leninism was only the deadliest form, not the first, but even today old-fashioned Communism does not lack adherents.) That the Democratic Party is now this malignancy’s host is the grim, but well-documented, conclusion of Horowitz’s long literary…

  • Equality is a Norm, not a Fact. Does it Have a Ground or is it Groundless?

    As a matter of empirical fact, we are not equal, not physically, mentally, morally, spiritually, socially, politically, or economically.  By no empirical measure are people equal.  We are naturally unequal.  And yet we are supposedly equal as persons.  This equality of persons as persons we take as requiring equality of treatment.  Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), for…

  • Nancy Pelosi and the Divine Spark

    Donald Trump famously referred to MS-13 gangsters as "animals." That's not the way I would put it inasmuch as it is an insult to animals who, unlike the gangbangers, are beneath good and evil. But Trump talks like a working stiff and we all know what he meant. Pelosi, however, took umbrage, protesting that the…

  • Integralism in Three Sentences

    Here: Catholic Integralism is a tradition of thought that rejects the liberal separation of politics from concern with the end of human life, holding that political rule must order man to his final goal. Since, however, man has both a temporal and an eternal end, integralism holds that there are two powers that rule him:…

  • David Horowitz on the War Against Christianity

    David Horowitz argues in his new book "Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America," that secularists and leftists want to turn the nation into a godless, heathen society where religion has absolutely no role. Horowitz, who heads the David Horowitz Freedom Center in Los Angeles, is used to taking controversial positions. He is the…

  • What Explains the Left’s Toleration of Militant Islam?

    From 1789 on, a defining characteristic of the Left has been hostility to religion, especially in its institutionalized forms. This goes together with a commitment to such Enlightenment values as individual liberty, belief in reason, and equality, including equality among the races and between the sexes. Thus the last thing one would expect from the…

  • A Good Summary of the Political Thinking of Carl Schmitt

    Carl Schmitt on Political Power by Jürgen Braungardt.  Excerpt: Political existentialism? Schmitt is a political existentialist in the following sense: ‘The political’, that mode of human experience that expresses itself in interpersonal relations of power and struggle, is logically and temporally prior to all political institutions. It is expressed in the distinction between friend and enemy, which is from…

  • A Note on Beccaria and Kant on Capital Punishment

    Here: According to [Cesare] Beccaria, punishment has two fundamental objectives: to restrain the criminal from committing additional crimes and to deter other members of society from committing the same crime. The first purpose is served by imprisonment, so we are left with the issue of deterrence. Not so fast! Imprisonment obviously does not prevent criminals…

  • Meditation on the Third Commandment

    A 1941 article by C. S. Lewis. (HT: Victor Reppert) The Third Commandment in the ordering preferred by Protestants of Lewis' stripe is the one about taking the Lord's name in vain:  Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain. Lewis meditates on the difficulties that must beset attempts to…

  • The Secularization of the Judeo-Christian Equality Axiom

    It is a plain fact that humans are not empirically equal either as individuals or as groups. Why then is there so much politically correct resistance to this truth? It is because it flies in the face of a central dogma of the Left, namely, that deep down we are all the same, want the…