Some guys have it and some guys don’t. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart obviously had it. By age eight he was already writing symphonies you can still hear on the radio. And there is no sign that the Mozart fad will blow over very soon. A couple of years later he was writing operas, which culminated, for [...]
St. Thomas Aquinas has the rare quality of wanting to know all that can be said for the other side. He understands that you can’t find good answers. Before I discovered Shakespeare, the writer I most admired was St. Thomas Aquinas. Dazzling as Shakespeare is, I think I was right the first time. Apples and [...]
During World War II, C.S. Lewis realized that both the Allies and the Axis were abandoning the traditional morality of the Christian West, the great principle of which is that certain acts are intrinsically right or wrong. Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our readers the opportunity to join Joseph Sobran as he [...]
There’s nothing quite like the joy of falling in love with an old book, finding a mentor who speaks to you across the centuries… Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Joseph Sobran as he explores the delight that is reading old books. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher Dogged readers [...]
I have had a lot of response to my column on Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s book Democracy — The God That Failed, most of them enthusiastic. A surprising number of citizens of this democracy have lost faith in the state, democratic or otherwise. It is amazing how seldom we ask the most basic questions: What is a state, [...]
Abraham Lincoln Harry Jaffa says Jack Kemp and I have been conducting an “uncivil war” over Abraham Lincoln’s character. Well, for my part, I deny it. Kemp called me one of the current “assassins of Lincoln’s character,” which I thought was a little rabid, inasmuch as I had given Lincoln praise as well [...]
How can the federal government be prevented from usurping powers that the Constitution doesn’t grant to it? It’s an alarming fact that few Americans ask this question anymore. Our ultimate defense against the federal government is the right of secession. Yes, most people assume that the Civil War settled that. But superior force proves nothing. [...]
We are taught that the change from monarchy to democracy is progress; that is, a change from servitude to liberty. Yet no monarchy in Western history ever taxed its subjects as heavily as every modern democracy taxes its citizens. But we are taught that this condition is liberty, because “we” are—freely—taxing “ourselves.” The individual, as [...]
A few weeks ago I wrote some mild criticisms of the Beatles and the sky fell. Angry readers called me “ignorant,” “vicious,” and various other things displaying blindness to my finer qualities. I hadn’t realized there was a militant Beatle Taliban, and I was an infidel. I was lucky to escape a fatwa. Some of the [...]
Albert Jay Nock, an excellent but largely forgotten writer, once wrote a little book titled Our Enemy, the State. I still reread it when I’m groggy from absorption in the daily events of politics. It revives me like a slap in the face. If I were a pagan, I might fancy I heard the Olympian laughter [...]
Dogged readers of my columns will observe that I habitually quote a handful of classic writings, chiefly the Shakespeare works, Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, and The Federalist Papers. If those readers suspect that these few masterpieces pretty much exhaust my learning, they are correct. When I was young, I bought the whole set of [...]
Not long ago, I read that Hollywood is worried about a shortage of young male stars who can play big roles. I’m not surprised. And I think I can give the chief reason in a single word: voices. […]
In “Macbeth,” Roman Polanski shows that even fidelity to Shakespeare can leave plenty of room for surprise. The film’s images capture the story’s paradoxes. April 12 was Shakespeare’s birthday. The real Shakespeare, I mean: Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. I thought a little celebrating was in order, so I watched one of the best [...]
It doesn’t take much imagination to guess what Thomas Jefferson would think of the U.S. government today, when its supposed “implied” powers are virtually infinite and nobody bothers measuring them against the powers expressly granted. When the federal government claims a new power nowadays, nobody even asks just which clause of the Constitution “implies” it. [...]