Daniel J. Mahoney - Böcker

The Ideological Lie, as Solzhenitsyn calls it, was born when modern revolutionaries replaced the age-old distinction between good and evil with the illusory distinction between progress and reaction. In the name of progress, evil was called goodness, and goodness in the form of wise restraint was labeled evil, backward, racist, colonialist, sexist, etc.Jacobinism, Marxism-Leninism, National Socialism, Progressive Democracy, the New Left, and now the new woke dispensation have all iterated upon this central conceit. Their adherents were all frenziedly preoccupied with being on “the right side of history”—the side of “progress.”In The Persistence of the Ideological Lie, Daniel Mahoney chronicles each manifestation of the Ideological Lie, up to and including contemporary wokeism. He explains how each is marked by the same errors: impatience with piecemeal reform, contempt for self-limiting constitutional order, and the belief that people are guilty for their immutable characteristics—belonging to the wrong class or race—rather than for their actions. He shows how the woke, moved by self-loathing and a disdain for our civic inheritance, are transmuting our so-called democracy into a new form of despotism.Mahoney ultimately argues that our failure to learn from the totalitarian tragedy of the twentieth century allowed the ideological virus to metastasize in new and alarming ways. Above all, he takes aim at the omnipresent “culture of repudiation,” as the late Roger Scruton called it, and elucidates multiple paths for overcoming the ideological clichés that continue to deform intellectual and political life today.

Samantha knows her cat, Walter, is anything but ordinary - he’s a secret agent with the very serious code name Kitty Pants. Unfortunately, no one else appreciates Walter’s superspy-ness. Samantha’s parents think he’s nothing more than your average pet. It’s up to Walter to convince them otherwise.Operation Kitty Pants is a go. But will this undercover feline prove his impressive espionage skills battling foes, including a butt-sniffing pup, a wild-haired kitty, and a band of mischievous mice, or will be find his missions compromised?

We are currently witnessing an increasingly influential counterrevolution in political theory, evident in the dialectical return to classical political science pioneered most prominently by Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin. In this context, the work of the relatively unknown Aurel Kolnai is of great importance. Kolnai was one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century to place the restoration of common-sense evaluation and philosophical realism at the center of his philosophical and political itinerary. In this volume, Daniel J. Mahoney presents Kolnai's major writings in political philosophy, writings that explore - in ways that are diverse but complementary - Kolnai's critique of progressive or egalitarian democracy. The title essay contains Kolnai's fullest account of the limits of liberty understood as emancipation from traditional, natural, or divine restraints. "The Utopian Mind," a prÈcis of Kolnai's critique of utopianism in a posthumous book of the same title, appears here for the first time. "Conservative and Revolutionary Ethos," Kolnai's remarkable 1972 essay comparing conservative and revolutionary approaches to political life, appears for the first time in English translation. The volume also includes a critically sympathetic evaluation of Michael Oakeshott's Rationalism in Politics and an incisive criticism of Jacques Maritain's efforts to synthesize Christian orthodoxy and progressive politics. Privilege and Liberty and Other Essays in Political Philosophy is a searching critique of political utopianism, as well as a pathbreaking articulation of conservative constitutionalism as the true support for human liberty properly understood. It is a major contribution to Christian and conservative political reflection in our time.

Concentration camp survivor, former Marxist-Leninist and Lithuanian patriot, Aleksandras Shtromas devoted his life to understanding totalitarianism and political change. He was a remarkably prescient thinker and is probably best known for his prediction of the fall of the Soviet Union, forecast at a time when the mighty empire seemed almost invincible. This posthumous collection of writings, edited by Robert Faulkner and Daniel J. Mahoney, addresses some of the topics that preoccupied Shtromas throughout his life, including totalitarian regimes, postcommunist transitions, the fates of the Baltic states, and the nature of political revolutions. Readers of Totalitarianism and the Prospects for World Order: Closing the Door on the Twentieth Century will encounter not just a learned and impressive scholar, but also a great man who confronted monstrous evils in his lifetime.

Concentration camp survivor, former Marxist-Leninist and Lithuanian patriot, Aleksandras Shtromas devoted his life to understanding totalitarianism and political change. He was a remarkably prescient thinker and is probably best known for his prediction of the fall of the Soviet Union, forecast at a time when the mighty empire seemed almost invincible. This posthumous collection of writings, edited by Robert Faulkner and Daniel J. Mahoney, addresses some of the topics that preoccupied Shtromas throughout his life, including totalitarian regimes, postcommunist transitions, the fates of the Baltic states, and the nature of political revolutions. Readers of Totalitarianism and the Prospects for World Order: Closing the Door on the Twentieth Century will encounter not just a learned and impressive scholar, but also a great man who confronted monstrous evils in his lifetime.

In Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Daniel Mahoney presents a philosophical perspective on the political condition of modern man through an exegesis and analysis of Solzhenitsyn's work. Mahoney demonstrates the tremendous, yet often unappreciated, impact of Solzhenitsyn's writing on twentieth century thinking through an examination of the writer's profoundly important critique of communist totalitarianism in a judicious and original mix of western and Russian, Christian and classical wisdom.

This is a critical introduction to Raymond Aron's conception of political science, based on a careful study of one of his central statements, "The Dawn of Universal History", with collateral reference to most of his other major works, and with a clear account of his unfolding thought. Mahoney discusses Aron's relationship to such political and social thinkers as Aristotle, Tocqueville, Marx, Strauss and Von Hayek. He shows how Aron represented in a lively and vigorous way a tradition of political prudence increasingly under theoretical and practical assault. Mahoney argues that Aron's notion of political science is superior to today's reigning social science in scope, rigour and availability to practical political leaders and citizens.

In this book, distinguished French philosopher Pierre Manent addresses a wide range of subjects, including the Machiavellian origins of modernity, Tocqueville's analysis of democracy, the political role of Christianity, the nature of totalitarianism, and the future of the nation-state. As a whole, the book constitutes a meditation on the nature of modern freedom and the permanent discontents which accompany it. Manent is particularly concerned with the effects of modern democracy on the maintenance and sustenance of substantial human ties. Modern Liberty and its Discontents is both an important contribution to an understanding of modern society, and a significant contribution to political philosophy in its own right.

This analysis of the thought and action of Charles de Gaulle explores the intellectual foundations of Gaullist statecraft. Mahoney's careful exegesis of de Gaulle's major writings and speeches, reveals a penetrating political thinker as well as a major political actor. He explains de Gaulle to an American public that too often sees him as a posturing figure suffering from an exaggerated and misplaced sense of personal and national grandeur. Mahoney shows that de Gaulle's defense of the "grandeur" of France is tied to a fundamentally classical view of human nature and politics. In elucidating de Gaulle's political self-understanding, Mahoney highlights the foundation of his noble but elusive moderation.Mahoney shows how de Gaulle repeatedly and explicitly rejected the cult of the Nietzschean superman, the Bonapartist separation of grandeur from moderation, and all temptations of personal and ideological despotism. He explicates de Gaulle's self-understanding as a statesman or "man of character" who comes to the service of a democratic political order in a time of crisis. He articulates de Gaulle's relationship to classical and Christian thought, his place in the French tradition, his profound debts to the Catholic poet-philosopher Charles Peguy, as well as his important affinities with Alexis de Tocqueville on the need to remain faithful to the dual imperatives of democracy and grandeur.In addition, the book discusses the principal moments of de Gaulle's statecraft from his "appeal" to resistance in June, 1940, and his founding of a new French Republic in 1958, to his articulation of a "Europe of Nations" in the 1960's. In doing so, Mahoney thoughtfully clarifies the Gaullist understanding of the "problem" of democracy: The democratic statesman must correct the corrosive acids of modern individualism, while accepting that democratic individualism sets the inescapable contours of political action in our time.Written in clear and non-technical language for both a scholarly and general audience. De Gaulle will be of interest to students of modern European political history, contemporary political theory, and those concerned with statecraft or statesmanship.

This is the book that took France by storm upon its publication in the fall of 2015. It was praised by some for its rare combination of tough-mindedness and moderation and attacked by others for suggesting that radical secularism could not provide the political and spiritual resources to address the Islamic challenge. The book is even more relevant after the Parisian terror attacks of November 13, 2015. It is a book that combines permanence and relevance, that addresses a pressing political and civilizational problem in a manner that will endure.Responding to the brutal terror attacks in France in January 2015, Pierre Manent has written a learned, passionate essay that reflects broadly and deeply on the political and religious situation of France and Europe. He freely acknowledges that the West is at war with fanatics who despise liberal and Christian civilization. That war must be conducted with prudent tough-mindedness. At the same time, serious thought must be given to the Islamic question at home and abroad. Concentrating on the French situation, Manent suggests that French Muslims are not entering an “empty” nation, defined by radical secularism and human rights alone. France has a secular state, as do all the nations of the contemporary West. That is a heritage to be cherished. But the Islamic question will not be “solved” by transforming Muslims into modern secularists devoid of all religious sensibility. It must be remembered that France is also nation of a “Christian mark” with a strong Jewish presence, both of which enrich its spiritual and political life. Manent proposes a “social contract” with France’s Muslims that is at once firm and welcoming. Rejecting radical secularism, the effort by certain “laicists” to completely secularize European society, to create a society without religion, Manent calls for a defensive policy that will allow Muslims to keep their mores, save the integral veil and polygamy. In exchange, they must accept the fact that they live in a society of a Christian mark and they must stop hiding behind charges of Islamophobia. In liberal and Christian Europe, there must be total freedom of criticism, including criticism of the Islamic religion. Muslims must forgo funding from Arab Islamic states (not to mention extremist movements) and must recognize they are henceforth participants in the common life of the French nation. They must become citizens in a nation that does more than defend individual or communal rights, as crucial as those rights are.Beyond Radical Secularism also provides a luminous reflection on the necessary coexistence of the liberal state and a nation of a Jewish and Christian mark in a Western liberty worthy of the name. Europeans have succumbed to passivity in no small part because they reject the nation which is the indispensable framework of democratic self-government. They no longer have confidence in human action, in the elemental human capacity “to put reasons and actions in common.” That faith in individual and collective action ultimately depends on belief in “the primacy of the Good,” or in theological terms, in faith in a benevolent and Providential God. The West at its best combined the pride of the citizen and the humility of the believer. Europeans—and Americans, too—governed themselves in a “certain relation to the Christian proposition.” The nation was the instrument par excellence for combining the cardinal virtues—courage, prudence, justice, moderation—and the confidence which is specific to the Christian religion. A capacious sense of Europe and the West, one that acknowledges its Christian and Jewish mark, is ultimately necessary to face the Islamic challenge. The Jewish idea of the Covenant provides a powerful reminder of the ultimate ground of democratic self-government and of deliberation and action that respect limits while acknowledging the full range of human possibilities in a world where the good is not ultimately without transcendent support. Only by recovering something of the European faith in a higher ground of freedom will the nations of Europe be able to muster the realism and the hope necessary meet the challenge of Islam.

The great Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) is widely recognized as one of the most consequential human beings of the twentieth century. Through his writings and moral witness, he illumined the nature of totalitarianism and helped bring down an ‘evil empire.’ His courage and tenacity are acknowledged even by his fiercest critics. Yet the world-class novelist, historian, and philosopher (one uses the latter term in its capacious Russian sense) has largely been eclipsed by a caricature that has transformed a measured and self-critical patriot into a ferocious nationalist, a partisan of local self-government into a quasi-authoritarian, a man of faith and reason into a narrow-minded defender of Orthodoxy. The caricature, widely dispensed in the press, and too often taken for granted, gets in the way of a thoughtful and humane confrontation with the “other” Solzhenitsyn, the true Solzhenitsyn, who is a writer and thinker of the first rank and whose spirited defense of liberty is never divorced from moderation. It is to the recovery of this Solzhenitsyn that this book is dedicated.This book above all explores philosophical, political, and moral themes in Solzhenitsyn’s two masterworks, The Gulag Archipelago and The Red Wheel, as well as in his great European novel In the First Circle. We see Solzhenitsyn as analyst of revolution, defender of the moral law, phenomenologist of ideological despotism, and advocate of “resisting evil with force.” Other chapters carefully explore Solzhenitsyn’s conception of patriotism, his dissection of ideological mendacity, and his controversial, but thoughtful and humane discussion of the “Jewish Question” in the Russian – and Soviet twentieth century. Some of Solzhenitsyn’s later writings, such as the “binary tales” that he wrote in the 1990s, are subject to critically appreciative analysis. And a long final chapter comments on Solzhenitsyn’s July 2007 Der Spiegel interview, his last word to Russia and the West. He is revealed to be a man of faith and freedom, a patriot but not a nationalist, and a principled advocate of self-government for Russia and the West.A final Appendix reproduces the beautiful Introduction (“The Gift of Incarnation”) that the author’s widow, Natalia Solzhenitsyn, wrote to the 2009 Russian abridgment of The Gulag Archipelago, a work that is now taught in Russian high schools.

The Western inheritance is under sustained theoretical and practical assault. Legitimate self-criticism has given way to nihilistic self-loathing and cultural, moral, and political repudiation is the order of the day. Yet, as Daniel J. Mahoney shows in this learned, eloquent, and provocative set of essays, two contemporary philosophic thinkers, Roger Scruton and Pierre Manent, have––separately and together––traced a path for the renewal of politics and practical reason, our civilized inheritance, the natural moral law, and the soul as the enduring site of self-conscious reflection, moral and civic agency, and mutual accountability. Both Scruton and Manent have repudiated the fashionable nihilism associated with the “thought of 1968” and the “Parisian nonsense machine,” and have shown that gratitude is the proper response of the human person to the “givenness of things.” Both defend the self-governing nation against reckless nationalism and the even more reckless temptation of supranational governance and post-political  democracy, what Manent suggestively calls a “kratos” without a “demos.” Both defend the secular state while taking aim at a radical secularism that rejects “the Christian mark” that is at the heart of our inheritance and that sustains the rich and necessary interpenetration of truth and liberty. Scruton’s more “cultural” perspective is indebted to Burke and Kant; Manent’s more political perspective draws on Aristotle, St. Thomas, Tocqueville, and Raymond Aron, among others. By highlighting their affinities, and reflecting on their instructive differences, Mahoney shows how, together, the English man of letters Scruton, and the French political philosopher Manent, guide us to the recovery of a horizon of thought and action animated by practical reason and the wellsprings of the human soul. They show us the humanizing path forward, but first we must make the necessary spiritual decision to repudiate repudiation once and for all.“With sophisticated and profound scholarship, Daniel Mahoney deploys his elegant style to defend the soul of civilization. Through the writings of Pierre Manent and Roger Scruton, he charts a course through the political and philosophical turmoil of the present age, providing hope and light amid the prevailing darkness.”— Mark Dooley, Irish philosopher, writer and journalist. Author of Conversations with Roger Scruton and Sir Roger's literary executor. “Mahoney's collection of essays does a marvelous job of contextualizing and explaining the vital work of these two philosophers. He's also an engaging and elegant writer.”— Daniel DiSalvo, City Journal“A series of reflective essays by Mahoney on the philosophical, theological, and political thinking of our best conservative theorists: Pierre Manent and the late Roger Scruton. Recovering Politics, Civilization, and the Soul expresses well what we need.” — Richard M. Reinsch II, National Review

This book is a learned essay at the intersection of politics, philosophy, and religion. It is first and foremost a diagnosis and critique of the secular religion of our time, humanitarianism, or the “religion of humanity.” It argues that the humanitarian impulse to regard modern man as the measure of all things has begun to corrupt Christianity itself, reducing it to an inordinate concern for “social justice,” radical political change, and an increasingly fanatical egalitarianism. Christianity thus loses its transcendental reference points at the same time that it undermines balanced political judgment. Humanitarians, secular or religious, confuse peace with pacifism, equitable social arrangements with socialism, and moral judgment with utopianism and sentimentality. With a foreword by the distinguished political philosopher Pierre Manent, Mahoney’s book follows Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI in affirming that Christianity is in no way reducible to a “humanitarian moral message.” In a pungent if respectful analysis, it demonstrates that Pope Francis has increasingly confused the Gospel with left-wing humanitarianism and egalitarianism that owes little to classical or Christian wisdom. It takes its bearings from a series of thinkers (Orestes Brownson, Aurel Kolnai, Vladimir Soloviev, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn) who have been instructive critics of the “religion of humanity.” These thinkers were men of peace who rejected ideological pacifism and never confused Christianity with unthinking sentimentality. The book ends by affirming the power of reason, informed by revealed faith, to provide a humanizing alternative to utopian illusions and nihilistic despair.

In his newest book, Daniel J. Mahoney offers refreshing historical antidotes to the displays of despotism in today's political arena."A brilliantly written and researched tribute to the pantheon of classically trained and thinking men of action." —Victor Davis HansonIn The Statesman as Thinker, Daniel J. Mahoney provides thoughtful and elegant portraits of statesmen who struggled to preserve freedom during times of crisis: Cicero using all the powers of rhetoric to preserve republican liberty in Rome against Caesar’s encroaching autocracy; Burke defending ordered liberty against Jacobin tyranny in revolutionary France; Tocqueville defending liberty and human dignity against blind reaction, democratic impatience, and revolutionary fanaticism; Lincoln preserving the American republic and putting an end to chattel slavery; Churchill defending liberty and law and opposing Nazi and Communist despotism; de Gaulle defending the honor of France during World War II; and Havel fighting Communism before 1989 and then leading the Czech Republic with dignity and grace.Mahoney makes sense of the mixture of magnanimity and moderation that defines the statesman as thinker at his or her best. That admirable mixture of greatness, courage, and moderation owes much to classical and Christian wisdom and to the noble desire to protect the inheritance of civilization against rapacious and destructive despotic regimes and ideologies.