The Red Wheel of Revolution
No one surpasses Solzhenitsyn in conveying a sense of what it feels to live at and near the center of this kind of vortex.
After the February Revolution Russia had a Provisional Government whose authority was based on the Revolutionary Duma. Duma messengers are here protected by Armed guards. (Everett Historical, shutterstock.com).De Gaulle, Re-Founder of French Republicanism
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Liberalism’s Ungrounded Present
Solzhenitsyn’s Sweeping Tale of War and Revolution
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) wrote first for Russians, especially the young. “The recent history of our country is so little known, or taught in such a distorted fashion,” said he, that young Russians more than anyone needed resources to be able to think clearly about what their forebears experienced in the cataclysmic time of his birth. In The Red Wheel, Solzhenitsyn challenged that history with a series of eight novels divided into four groups or “knots.” The image of the red wheel first comes to sight as the giant wheel of a locomotive—big enough to lean on but spine-twisting if it moves. In the…
Theory Comes Down to Earth
Political Political Theory is no misprint. Jeremy Waldron’s stuttering title well expresses his intention. In the last generation, observes Waldron, “political theory” has become synonymous with considering the moral foundations of political life; the writings of John Rawls and Robert Nozick have framed much of the discussion. With the phrase “political political theory,” he signals the need to direct some philosophic attention to the actual operations of political life—particularly the forms, structures, and institutions by which we rule ourselves or are ruled by others. Philosophers used to think institutions too important to be left to the political scientists, and they should…
Formed for a Statesman
George Washington served as the model citizen of the republic founded upon the defense of natural rights. One might add that Benjamin Franklin served as the model citizen-intellectual, which isn’t quite the same thing. John and Abigail Adams (themselves no mean models) educated their son, John Quincy, to become the worthy successor of the Founding generation of the new regime. What does a man formed to defend natural rights look like? In John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit, the New Yorker writer James Traub gives us a carefully drawn portrait of a man “who did not aim to please, and . . . largely succeeded”—both…
From Division to Resistance
To this day, every major political grouping in France has had its own account of the opposition the country mounted against the Germans in World War II, leaving it to historians to try to sort things out. Robert Gildea has produced a well-researched and balanced book on the subject, Fighters in the Shadows: A New History of the French Resistance.
Retro Commie Chic Tailored to This Year’s Campaign
Franklin D. Roosevelt delivers campaign speech, Topeka, Kansas (1932).What made Franklin Roosevelt and the Greatest Generation great? Others may tell you it was defeating Nazism in a worldwide war. But Harvey J. Kaye, Professor of Democracy and Justice Studies at the University of Wisconsin, maintains that its heart and soul was none other than the Popular Front.
Making Americans
The Early Puritans of New England Going to Church, George Henry Boughton (1867).English settlers in America might have intended to transmit the traditions of the mother country to subsequent generations. This didn’t exactly happen—partly because the settlers disagreed amongst themselves about which of those traditions deserved preservation, and partly because the experience of life in North America challenged many of the traditions they did want to preserve. The disagreement and the adaptation together led, eventually, to a political revolution.
