Against Politics

Toward a depoliticized society

James Burnham on liberalism and decline

James Burnham’s Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism proposes the thesis that modern liberalism is the ideology of a society in decline; its doctrines motivate and justify the contraction of Western civilization and reconciles us to it. In the chapter “Liberalism vs. Reality” Burnham observes that liberals feel [...]

John Derbyshire’s hard-headed realism

Paul Gottfried reviews John Derbyshire’s latest book We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism, which appears to make a secular, empirical case for “hard-headed realism.” Although We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism would appear to be a light read, brimful of anecdotal asides, first impressions can and, at least in this case, do deceive. Derbyshire’s work [...]

Counter-modernism

In my review of Jonathan Bowden’s book Mad I  discussed the possibility of “a unique and coherent Nietzschean/Lovecraftian worldview that is strictly positivist in its epistemology, and  distinctly reactionary in its rejection of egalitarianism and democracy, as an alternative to socialism, (classical) liberalism and contemporary conservatism.” Interestingly, Samuel Francis made a related observation in his [...]