Category: Access

Filmer is typically accused of tracing the legitimacy of Charles I, back, in an unbroken line, to Adam.  What he actually argues is something different.  In the first place, he points out that, at least in principle,  there is always an heir, even if that heir is unknown.  If Adam were still alive and died today, there would be an heir, though no one would be able to discover who it was.  On the strength of the Old Testament, he assumes that the principle of primogeniture is universal, when it is not.  The privilege given first-born sons is a natural tendency,...

Barbara Streisand, at a recent performance in Brooklyn, paid tribute to Hillary Clinton and shared her dreams of the New Camelot that would have replaced the Evil America being rebuilt by Donald Trump and his legions of straight white males.  Speaking of a recent interview with Hillary, Streisand added that it “makes us yearn for what could have been, what should have been. I was thrilled to hear yourself describe yourself as an activist citizen and part of the resistance.” Streisand as political commentator is a satirist’s dream come true.  At the age of 75, herself, she actually had the...

Filmer begins his detailed argument with an attack on Robert Cardinal Bellarmine, one of the greatest of the Jesuits and a doctor of the Church.  Bellarmine was a widely respected thinker, a man of sound judgment and excellent reason, whose arguments against Protestantism were credited with saving some parts of Europe from the Reformation and restoring many doubting souls.  He played a creditable role in the controversy over Galileo and deserves to be better appreciated today. Like several other Jesuits, Bellarmine wanted to protect the power of the Church (and its earthly head) from the ambitions of the nation states...

Americans sometimes think theirs is the only “nation of immigrants” beset by ethnic conflicts and bound together only by the flimsy cords of a national ideology.  According to our official propaganda, America is a nation “dedicated to the proposition” and unified by the war to end slavery and republican government.  The Italian state, however, has its own mythology.  According to official Italian propaganda, the varied regions and cultures of Italy were unified in the Risorgimento, a glorious uprising that unified Italy and culminated (after a few disgraceful decades in the middle of the 20th century) in a universal nation more...

Revolution & Resistance   Dear Friend and Fellow-Reader: “The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.”   Sir Edward Grey’s famous remark was inspired by the outbreak of World War I, the European civil war that was the beginning of the end of our civilization.  Now that we are closer to the end than to the beginning of our descent into the abyss, it is more vitally important than ever to understand what has happened, or rather, what we have done to ourselves.   At our first Summer School, we...