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Today we bring you the final episode in our series on speech and censorship. We wrap up a series by bringing back guests from previous episodes to discuss the broader themes and dilemmas that have persisted over the course of the series. In this conversation we discuss if and how making distinctions among different kinds of speech might improve our ability to navigate the dilemmas around free speech. We discuss the recent phenomenon of campus protests and this extent to which this sort of activity should be protected in higher education. And we wonder if the idea of self-restraint is gone forever or how it might make a comeback. We’re excited to have three guests back with us to bring the series to a close: Alex Duff, Yuval Levin and Jonathan Rauch.
Alex Duff was with us before to discuss Herbert Marcuse’s “Repressive Tolerance.” is the author of Heidegger and Politics: The Ontology of Radical Discontent. He teaches at the University of North Texas where he is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Director of the Constitutionalism and Democracy Forum
Yuval Levin discussed essays by Walter Berns and Irving Kristol on obscenity and censorship. He is the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). He’s the founder and editor of National Affairs and author of the forthcoming book American Covenant.
Jonathan Rauch launched our series with a discussion of his book Kindly Inquisitors. He is Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution and his most recent book is The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth. -
This month we continue our series on speech and censorship by discussing an extraordinary book published in 1996, The Repeal of Reticence: America’s Cultural and Legal Struggles Over Free Speech, Obscenity, Sexual Liberation, and Modern Art. It’s terrific book of political, social, cultural history and analysis. It covers an amazingly broad range of topics, from 19th century literary sensibilities to early 20th century Supreme Court obscenity jurisprudence to the midcentury New York public intellectual scene. Its author, Rochelle Gurstein, sketches two broad, cultural movements: the party of reticence and the party of exposure. Our conversation is devoted to elucidating the discourse around privacy and obscenity in a variety of contexts. We take up invasive journalism, sexual education, and literary realism. We try to understand why the party of exposure seemed to gain victory after victory as the decades passed. Gurstein articulates what the party of reticence understands about human life that partisans of exposure often miss. At the conclusion of our conversation, Gurstein reflects on her mentor, the great Christopher Lasch.
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This month we continue our series on speech and censorship by discussing a famous critique of free speech from the left. My guest and I dig into Herbert Marcuse’s famous essay and try to make sense of its critique of tolerance and free speech. We discuss Marcuse’s background and role as a leading thinker of the New Left. We also analyze Marcuse’s goal of liberation or autonomy, his understanding of the relationship between speech and action, his use of the term totalitarian, and his understanding of the duty of the intellectual.
Our guest is Professor Alexander Duff. Alex is a scholar of the history of political philosophy, focusing on the ontology and psychology of statecraft and politics. He was trained at the University of Notre Dame, where he earned his Ph.D. from the department of Political Science and was educated in the humanities and history at Carleton University, Ottawa. He is the author of Heidegger and Politics: The Ontology of Radical Discontent (Cambridge University Press) and numerous articles on classical, Renaissance, modern, and contemporary political philosophy which have appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Political Review Quarterly, the Review of Metaphysics, the Heidegger- Jahrbuch, and other scholarly and popular publications. His work has been translated into Estonian and Farsi.
He teaches at the University of North Texas where he is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Director of the Constitutionalism and Democracy Forum. He has held fellowships from the Tocqueville Program for Inquiry into Religion and American Public Life at the University of Notre Dame and from the Program for the Study of the Western Heritage at Boston College and has delivered lectures at many colleges and universities, including Oxford, Harvard, Yale, the University of Notre Dame, Boston College, the University of Texas: Austin, and Louisiana State University. He lives in Little Elm, Texas. -
This month we continue our series of episodes on speech and censorship. We discuss James Madison’s “Report of 1800,” a document in which Madison discusses the controversies around the Alien and Sedition Acts. Madison’s report contains fascinating reflections on the nature of speech in a republic and why the Sedition Acts in particular are inconsistent with free government. His ideas have some surprising resonances with some of our contemporary debates about free speech.
Our guest is Michael Zuckert, Nancy Reeves Dreux Professor Emeritus in the Department of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. He is currently a visiting professor at Arizona State University’s School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership. Michael’s most recent book is A Nation So Conceived: Abraham Lincoln and the Paradox of Democratic Sovereignty.
Outline of the episode:
Historical context re: Alien & Sedition Acts @ 1:02
What did the Sedition Act say? @ 4:12
Why did people think the Sedition Act was constitutional? @ 6:05
Similarity of Founding era press situation and present-day press @ 11:45
Why did Madison feel compelled to write the Report? @15:00
Free speech and republican government @ 17:00
The general case for press freedom and political speech @ 25:00
On opinion, conjecture, and truth @ 27:30
Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech @ 32:30
Madison’s on the kind of political speech we need most @ 35:30
Madison on the problem of disinformation @ 37:30
Murthy v. Missouri (5th Circuit case) @51:00
Michael Zuckert’s National Affairs essay on speech @ 54:40
Follow us on Twitter: @theEIpod. We are sponsored by the Zephyr Institute. -
This month our topic is a recent essay by Jenna Silber Storey and Benjamin Storey called “Political Speech in Divided Times,” first published in National Affairs in Fall of 2022. The essay is a reflection on the particular character of political speech and its authors make use of the work of the contemporary French political philosopher named Pierre Manent. The books by Manent most relevant to this essay are The Metamorphosis of the City and Beyond Radical Secularism.
We are pleased to have one of the authors join us for this conversation, Jenna Silber Storey. Jenna and I discuss what makes political speech distinctive and how and why our capacity for this kind of speech seems to have been lost. We discuss Manent’s articulation of the character of political speech and also his attempt to actually engaged in this enterprise using the example of Muslim immigration in his home country of France. We end by trying to untangle the differences between political speech and ideological speech.
Jenna Silber Storey is a senior fellow in the Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies department at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where she concentrates on political philosophy, civil society, classical schools, and higher education. Dr. Storey is concurrently a research fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, and a Tocqueville scholar at Furman University.
Dr. Storey is the coauthor, with her husband, Benjamin Storey, of Why We Are Restless: On the Modern Quest for Contentment (Princeton University Press, 2021). Together, the Storeys are working on another book titled The Art of Choosing: How Liberal Education Should Prepare You for Life.
Dr. Storey’s work has been published in media outlets such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, National Affairs, the Boston Globe, National Review, the New Atlantis, the Claremont Review of Books, and First Things. -
With our December episode we continue our series on speech and censorship. We take up two essays which make the case for a particular kind of censorship: Walter Berns’s “Pornography v. Democracy: The Case for Censorship” and Irving Kristol’s “Pornography, Obscenity and the Case for Censorship.” Berns’s essay was published in The Public Interest in the winter of 1971 and Kristol’s in The New York Times Magazine in March 1971.
Our guest is Yuval Levin, who’s the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he also holds the Beth and Ravenel Curry Chair in Public Policy. The founder and editor of National Affairs, he is also a senior editor at The New Atlantis, a contributing editor at National Review, and a contributing opinion writer at The New York Times.
Dr. Levin publishes essays and articles in numerous publications, including The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and Commentary. He is the author of several books on political theory and public policy, most recently A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream.
We discuss how Berns and Kristol define obscenity and why they each think a healthy society must make a distinction between the obscene and the non-obscene. Levin shows how Berns explores the distinction between the public and the private and why the capacity for shame is central to his thinking. We look at how both authors draw on the idea that democracy, perhaps more that any other form of government, demands a kind of moral formation that requires censorship and whether liberal democracy can be an exception to this idea. Berns concludes his essay with a defense of obscenity and its use by the great authors so we spend some time grappling with the necessity of transgression and how that might affect the case for censorship. -
Here at Enduring Interest we are in the midst of exploring books and essays that address the question of speech and censorship. Forthcoming episodes will discuss authors including Walter Berns, Irving Kristol, Herbert Marcuse, James Madison, and Pierre Manent. However, this month we’re pausing on that theme to discuss a newly published book by the great French thinker and writer Raymond Aron. On April 4, 1978 Aron brought his academic career to close with a final lecture at the College de France. It has been translated into English and brought out by Princeton University Press with the title of Liberty and Equality. It is a short but penetrating lecture which provides much needed precision and clarity on the question of liberty or liberties.
My guest is Daniel J. Mahoney, an expert on Aron’s thought. He has been a guest on this show before—he was here last time to discuss Aron’s classic book The Opium of the Intellectuals. Dan is Professor of Political Science Emeritus at Assumption University. His latest books include The Statesman as Thinker, Recovering Politics, Civilization and the Soul, and The Other Solzhenitsyn: Telling the Truth about a Misunderstood Writer and Thinker. He’s the co-editor of the indispensable volume The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings. His first book, The Liberal Political Science of Raymond Aron, was published in 1992. -
John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty has been a consistent and prominent reference point in the ongoing debates about free speech. In this episode we discuss an elegant and powerful critique of Mill by the twentieth century political theorist Willmoore Kendall. His essay “The ‘Open Society’ and Its Fallacies” was published in the American Political Science Review in December of 1960. Our conversation covers various aspects of Kendall’s critique. Kendall claims that Mill’s argument for freedom rests on a false conception of the nature of society and human nature itself. We explore Kendall’s understanding of Mill’s thoroughgoing radicalism. “Mill,” Kendall writes, “is in full rebellion against both religion and philosophy, and so in full rebellion also against the traditional society that embodies them.” We also take up the phenomenon of what Kendall calls the “dispersal of opinion.” He contends that any society which guides itself according to Mill’s prescriptions will “descend ineluctably into ever deepening differences of opinion, into progressive breakdown of those common premises upon which alone a society can its affairs by discussion.” Our guest is James Stoner. Professor Stoner is the Hermann Moyse, Jr., Professor and Director of the Eric Voegelin Institute in the Department of Political Science at Louisiana State University, where he has taught since 1988. He is the author of Common-Law Liberty (Kansas, 2003) and Common Law and Liberal Theory (Kansas, 1992), and co-editor of Free Speech and Intellectual Diversity in Higher Education with Paul Carrese and Carol McNamara—just published in September of 2023. He also contributed a chapter to this volume called “Was John Stuart Mill Right About Free Speech?” which will be of interest to anyone who listens to our conversation here.
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Enduring Interest is very pleased to launch our series on speech and censorship with this conversation on Jonathan Rauch’s Kindly Inquisitors, first published in 1993 and reissued in 2013 with a new afterword. We discuss Jonathan’s conception of “liberal science,” or the liberal intellectual system’s approach to sorting truth from falsehood. He suggests this is arguably liberalism’s greatest achievement yet seems always under attack from a variety of quarters. We discuss the fundamentalist and humanitarian threats to free speech, focusing most of our attention on the latter. Can speech cause harm? If yes, why should one not limit it? We compare and contrast the threats to free speech as Jonathan saw them back in 1993 with the situation today. We conclude with Jonathan’s recommendations for books and essays that make the case for free speech. Jonathan Rauch is Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, a think-tank based in Washington, D.C. He’s the author of eight books and many, many articles on public policy, culture and government. He’s also a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a recipient of the National Magazine Award. His most recent book is The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth.
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To lead into the next season of Enduring Interest, we're re-releasing our first two seasons, covering totalitarianism and ideology and liberal education. We'll be back on September 8 with a new season covering free speech and censorship. This episode concludes our series on liberal education. We have three of our previous guests in the series back to discuss some common themes in the work of Leo Strauss, Michael Oakeshott and Hannah Arendt. We have Michael and Catherine Zuckert, Rita Koganzon, and Elizabeth Corey all returning to the podcast for the discussion. Topics include the place of reverence and tradition in liberal education, the authority of the teacher, and the purpose or purposes of liberal education. See our previous episodes for the bios of these guests.
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To lead into the next season of Enduring Interest, we're re-releasing our first two seasons, covering totalitarianism and ideology and liberal education. We'll be back on September 8 with a new season covering free speech and censorship. In this episode we discuss a short essay by the philosopher Henry Bugbee, “Education and the Style of our Lives.” Bugbee taught for a number of years at the University of Montana. This short, beautiful and thought-provoking essay was occasioned by a report that a commission presented to the Montana legislature. In just over nine pages, Bugbee lays out the core of education as seen from the standpoint of both teacher and student. He seeks the revitalization of a dialogue that brings text and world together—experience is illuminated and meaning is discovered. The piece was published in Profiles, the magazine of the University of Montana in May of 1974. Our guest is Joseph M. Keegin. Joseph talks about Bugbee’s insistence that both teacher and student must be capable of self-risk. We discuss Bugbee’s reflections on the relationship between liberal learning and experience and how Bugbee’s appeal to experience is quite different from the way people appeal to “lived experience” today. We end by thinking about Bugbee’s appeal to the duty to bring the past to bear on the present. Joseph makes a plea for people to find a copy of Bugbee’s only published book, The Inward Morning, which is a “philosophical exercise conducted through fifteen months of journal entries.” You can find Joseph’s essay on Bugbee here and his blog is www.fxxfy.net. Joseph is an editor at Athwart and The Point, and a PhD student in philosophy at Tulane University. He has also written articles for Plough, First Things, Tablet, and The New Atlantis.
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To lead into the next season of Enduring Interest, we're re-releasing our first two seasons, covering totalitarianism and ideology and liberal education. We'll be back on September 8 with a new season covering free speech and censorship. This month we are pleased to bring you a special episode that departs from our normal path. For the past several months, we’ve been looking at forgotten or neglected books and essays on liberal education. We’re very excited to bring you this conversation with three authors who’ve all written recently published books on liberal education. We have Zena Hitz, author of LOST IN THOUGHT: THE HIDDEN PLEASURES OF AN INTELLECTUAL LIFE; Jonathan Marks, author of LET’S BE REASONABLE: A CONSERVATIVE CASE FOR LIBERAL EDUCATION; and Roosevelt Montás, author of RESCUING SOCRATES: HOW THE GREAT BOOKS CHANGED MY LIFE AND WHY THEY MATTER FOR A NEW GENERATION. All three books provide a defense of liberal education rooted in the great books, but they do so in strikingly different ways. We discuss desire, shame, and the how the encounter with great authors can shape your soul. Each author talks about the importance and difficulties of the teacher-student relationship. And we discuss the various threats and challenges to liberal education today. Zena Hitz is a Tutor at St. John’s College and the founder of the Catherine Project. Jonathan Marks in Professor of Politics and chair of the Department of Politics and International Relations at Ursinus College. Roosevelt Montás is Senior Lecturer in American Studies and English at Columbia University. He is the Director of the American Studies’ Freedom and Citizenship Program. Here are some links to reviews: Zena on JonathanJonathan on ZenaJonathan on RooseveltRoosevelt on ZenaFlagg on Zena
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To lead into the next season of Enduring Interest, we're re-releasing our first two seasons, covering totalitarianism and ideology and liberal education. We'll be back on September 8 with a new season covering free speech and censorship. This month our subject is Michael Oakeshott. We discuss two essays in particular: “A Place of Learning” and “Learning and Teaching.” Both essays can be found in the volume The Voice of Liberal Learning. Our guest is Elizabeth Corey of Baylor University. Elizabeth begins by providing a brief intellectual biography of Oakeshott. The bulk of our conversation takes up Oakeshott’s conception of liberal learning. He argues it is neither the acquisition of cultural knowledge or information nor the improvement of the mind. It is rather “learning to recognize some specific invitations to encounter particular adventures in human self-understanding.” Elizabeth and I discuss the distinctiveness of Oakeshott’s vision as well as his understanding of the primary challenges to liberal learning. We unpack Oakeshott’s meditation of the teacher-student relationship and end with a discussion of Oakeshott’s conservatism. Elizabeth is an associate professor of Political Science at Baylor University, in Waco, Texas. Her writing has appeared in a variety of popular and scholarly journals, including First Things, National Affairs and The Wall Street Journal, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. She received a bachelor’s in Classics from Oberlin College, and master’s and doctoral degrees in Art History and Political Science from Louisiana State University. She serves on the Board of Directors of the Institute on Religion and Public Life, publisher of First Things. She is also an American Enterprise Faith and Public Life Visiting Professor during the year 2022.
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To lead into the next season of Enduring Interest, we're re-releasing our first two seasons, covering totalitarianism and ideology and liberal education. We'll be back on September 8 with a new season covering free speech and censorship. This month we’re pleased to present a conversation on Eva Brann’s book Paradoxes of Education in a Republic. Brann serves as a tutor at St. John’s College—she’s the author of many books and Paradoxes was published in 1979. Our guest is Pavlos Papadopoulos—himself a graduate of St. John’s and now an assistant professor of humanities at Wyoming Catholic College. Brann’s vision of education is a bibliocentric one, rooted in reading the great books. Such an education’s purpose, as Pavlos articulates Brann’s vision, is to take up and read the worlds of knowledge, nature and art. Brann’s book is a philosophical and historical inquiry into education. In thinking through the prospects for liberal education in a republic, she appeals to and quotes from a vast range of texts stretching back to ancient Greece, although her chief interlocutor is Thomas Jefferson. She examines three paradoxes (defined as a “dilemma inherent in the thing itself”): utility, tradition and rationality. It’s a short, penetrating and charming book that deserves a very wide audience. Pavlos Papadopoulos teaches Great Books seminars on politics, literature, and history. He received his MA and PhD in Politics from the University of Dallas. Pavlos has a long-standing interest in the history of liberal arts education, especially the revival of liberal education in America that began in the early 20th century. It was while pursuing this interest that he first read, and later taught, Eva Brann's Paradoxes of Education in a Republic. Pavlos's writing has appeared in Interpretation, First Things, Law & Liberty, The American Mind, and The American Conservative.
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To lead into the next season of Enduring Interest, we're re-releasing our first two seasons, covering totalitarianism and ideology and liberal education. We'll be back on September 8 with a new season covering free speech and censorship. In this episode Rita Koganzon and I discuss two essays by the philosopher Hannah Arendt: “Crisis in Education” and “Reflections on Little Rock.” The former was first published in Partisan Review in 1958 and the latter in Dissent in 1959. Rita gives an account of the context for the two essays and how they are related. We discuss Arendt’s critique of a number of progressive educational reforms including learning as doing and emancipating children from the authority of adults. Rita explains Arendt’s concept of natality and her understanding of the relationship between knowledge and authority. We discuss Arendt’s reasons for pessimism as far as school integration as an educational enterprise and why the Little Rock essay generated such controversy. We also discuss the relevance of Arendt’s reflections on education to our own time. Rita Koganzon is the associate director of the Program on Constitutionalism and Democracy and Assistant Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia. Her research focuses on the themes of education, childhood, authority, and the family in historical and contemporary political thought. Her first book, Liberal States, Authoritarian Families: Childhood and Education in Early Modern Thought (Oxford, 2021) examines the justifications for authority over children from Jean Bodin to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Her research and essays have been published in the American Political Science Review and the Review of Politics, as well as in the Hedgehog Review, National Affairs, The Point, and the Chronicle of Higher Education, among others. She received her PhD in Government from Harvard University, and her BA in History from the University of Chicago. Check out Rita’s essay “A Tale of Two Educational Traditions.” “Crisis in Education” can be found in Between Past and Future and “Reflections on Little Rock” in Responsibility and Judgment.
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To lead into the next season of Enduring Interest, we're re-releasing our first two seasons, covering totalitarianism and ideology and liberal education. We'll be back on September 8 with a new season covering free speech and censorship. With this episode Enduring Interest moves into a new series on the subject of education. In the coming months we will be hearing from guests on authors including Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, Eva Brann, Michael Oakshott, and others. Leo Strauss once wrote, “I own that education is in a sense the subject matter of my teaching and my research.” Yet, as Michael and Catherine Zuckert note, Strauss wrote very little directly on this subject. “What is Liberal Education” was first given as a commencement address at the Basic Program of Liberal Education at the University of Chicago in the late 1950s—it was subsequently published in 1961. The second essay was prepared for a conference sponsored by the Fund for Adult Education—the organizers asked Strauss to elaborate on some lines from the first address. “Liberal Education and Responsibility” was then published in 1962. These two essays can be found in An Introduction to Political Philosophy: Ten Essays by Leo Strauss or in Liberalism Ancient and Modern. Michael and Catherine Zuckert are both Nancy Reeves Dreux Professor Emeritus in the Department of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. They are currently visiting professors at Arizona State University’s School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership. In addition to their voluminous, independent scholarly work, together they are the co-authors of The Truth about Leo Strauss and Leo Strauss and the Problem of Political Philosophy. Listeners can find their reflections on the two essays under discussion here in chapter 11 of this latter volume. The Zuckerts and I discuss Strauss’s understanding of education as the cultivation of the mind and the capacity to see human greatness. Although both essays ultimately point to liberal education as the study of what Strauss calls the great books, we explore the differences in these two essays. Strauss emphasizes different threats to liberal education—consumerism and mass democracy on the one hand and scientism and technocracy on the other. We also discuss Strauss’s biography and how he conducted himself in the classroom over the course of a long teaching career. Strauss points to liberal education as something to be pursued for its own sake—a liberation from vulgarity. “The Greeks had a beautiful word for ‘vulgarity,’” notes Strauss, “they called it apeirokalia, lack of experience in things beautiful. Liberal education supplies us with experience of things beautiful.” As the Zuckerts emphasize in our conversation, Strauss also suggests liberal education is necessary for the civic goods it can yield. Liberal education might produce the moderation that “will protect us against the twin dangers of visionary expectations of politics and unmanly contempt for politics…It is in this way that the liberally educated may again receive a hearing even in the market place.” We hope you enjoy the episode and don’t forget to rate Enduring Interest on iTunes and other places where you might get your podcasts. Follow us on Twitter: @theEIpod. We are sponsored by the Zephyr Institute.
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To lead into the next season of Enduring Interest, we're re-releasing our first two seasons, covering totalitarianism and ideology and liberal education. We'll be back on September 8 with a new season covering free speech and censorship. In this episode I speak with four previous guests on the podcast (Clare Cavanagh, Jacob Howland, Perry Link, and James Pontuso) and take up the question of the relationship between art and totalitarianism. We consider the fate of artistic inquiry and expression under totalitarian regimes both past and present. Why and how have totalitarian regimes sought to control all forms of art. How successful were and are such regimes in this effort? How have artists both past and present managed to elude their totalitarian masters and produce enduring works of art? In answering these and other questions, my guests draw on a range of examples from regimes such as the Soviet Union, Communist Poland and Czechoslovakia, and the People’s Republic of China. We conclude with some recommendations for authors and books—especially for those who might be taking up this subject for the first time.
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To lead into the next season of Enduring Interest, we're re-releasing our first two seasons, covering totalitarianism and ideology and liberal education. We'll be back on September 8 with a new season covering free speech and censorship. Nathan Pinkoski, Research Fellow and Academic Director at the Zephyr Institute, and I discuss François Furet’s terrific book The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism of the Twentieth Century—first published in English in 1999. We talk a bit about Furet’s biography—he’s regarded as one of the greatest historians of the French Revolution. Like many French intellectuals who came of age in the years after the Second World War, Furet became a communist during that period and then became disillusioned shortly thereafter. The book is not a straightforward history of communism, but an account of the communist idea and how it managed to attract so many disparate figures into its fold. This gives Passing an Illusion a very distinctive character—it’s by turns philosophical, political, and historical and includes wonderful miniature biographical sketches. Nathan and I examine Furet’s account of the revolutionary passions that provided the fuel for the grand ideological movements of the twentieth century: bourgeois hatred and bourgeois self-hatred. We turn next to Furet’s account of ideologies and ideological governments which he argues are novel, twentieth century political phenomena. Nathan suggests that Furet roots the unprecedented character of these movements in their prioritization of action over thought. We also spend some time discussing the crucial role that anti-fascist discourse played in raising the world-wide reputation of communism to its greatest height. We end with some thoughts of the continuing relevance of Furet’s book. In the final chapter of the book, Furet notes, “The end of the Soviet world in no way alters the democratic call for another society, and for that very reason we have every reason to believe that the massive failure of Communism will continue to enjoy attenuating circumstances in world opinion, and perhaps even renewed admiration.” Listeners should be sure to check out Nathan’s essay “The Strange Rise of Bourgeois Bolshevism” (indebted to many aspects of Furet’s analysis) which appeared as the lead essay in Law & Liberty’s Forum series in May of 2020.
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To lead into the next season of Enduring Interest, we're re-releasing our first two seasons, covering totalitarianism and ideology and liberal education. We'll be back on September 8 with a new season covering free speech and censorship. In this episode I speak with Clare Cavanagh, Frances Hooper Professor of Arts and Humanities and Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Northwestern University. She’s the author of a forthcoming authorized biography of Czeslaw Milosz and a prize-winning translator of the poets Adam Zagajewski and Wislawa Szymborska. Her essays and translations have appeared in publications including The New York Times Book Review, the New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, and Partisan Review. Some of her recently taught courses include What is Lyric Poetry? ; Gender and Revolution in Soviet Russian Culture; Heart of Europe: Poland in the Twentieth Century; Poetry and the Cold War; and 19th Century Russian Poetry. Clare and I discuss three poems by Czeslaw Milosz: “You Who Wronged”; “Child of Europe”; and “Mittelbergheim.” These poems are from an early collection called Daylight, some which were written when Milosz was working as a cultural attaché for the post-war Polish government. Clare calls Daylight a “book of struggle” where Milosz is asking questions about his audience and his own perspective and role as a poet. He writes about the falsification of history and the corruptions of ideology. We draw some connections between the poems and the arguments elucidated in his famous book The Captive Mind. Clare also offers her thoughts on Milosz’s conception of the role of poetry broadly speaking. We conclude our conversation with some recommendations for listeners on where one might start to engage with Milosz’s vast body of work. Clare also shares some of her experiences in meeting Milosz in Krakow and her impressions of him.
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To lead into the next season of Enduring Interest, we're re-releasing our first two seasons, covering totalitarianism and ideology and liberal education. We'll be back on September 8 with a new season covering free speech and censorship. In this episode I speak with James Pontuso, the Charles Patterson Professor of Government and Foreign Affairs at Hampton Sydney College, about Václav Havel’s trilogy revolving around the remarkable character Ferdinand Vaněk. We discuss Havel’s life as a playwright, dissident, and statesman and the immediate context in which these plays were written—the “normalization” regime in post-1968 Communist Czechoslovakia. Havel wrote the first play Audience in the summer of 1975 to amuse his friends during gatherings at his cottage in the country. Despite this modest beginning, not only would Havel go on to write two more plays about Vaněk, but three other authors would also make Vaněk a character in their one-act plays. Havel once picked up a hitchhiker, who, without knowing whose car he had entered, began quoting lines from Audience. The plays would go on to be performed in theaters around the world. The character Vaněk is a writer who is known to have taken oppositional stances in his home country. He is often frustratingly shy and somewhat reticent to share his opinions. In each play he speaks much less often that his interlocutors do, who in each case need something from Vaněk. While Vaněk engages them awkwardly and at a distance, he does so with genuine sympathy—yet he also makes it clear there are certain lines he will not cross. Jim and I talk about the kind of moral responsibility that Vaněk seems to embody. We also discuss Havel’s plays more broadly and the tradition of absurdist theater. The plays are genuinely philosophical in their treatment of themes like friendship, virtue, and responsibility. They are also by turns very funny and sad. We hope you enjoy the episode. Be sure to check out Jim’s book Václav Havel: Civic Responsibility in the Postmodern Age. And Theater 61 Press has a very nice edition of the trilogy called The Vaněk Plays.
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