The Wreck of Western Culture

Rod Dreher recommends it and lets us know that ISI will be publishing it this Fall: Western culture, wrecked this fall

The Wreck of Western Culture
humanism revisited

But is it another example of history of ideas that is actually bad history? In the past I was sympathetic to such efforts, but I grow more and more skeptical of them. Do we really need grand philosophical systems to explain the sinfulness of fallen man, especially of the political and economic elites behind the growth and development of the modern nation-state? And how influential were the liberals on the constitutions of these nation-states? (Especially on the questions of the nature and origin of society and political authority?) How much of what is understood to be part of liberalism actually antedates it and can be found in the medieval political and legal tradition?

To ask these questions is not to deny that liberals and their intellectual heirs may have had an impact on some level--indeed, perhaps instead of causing the rise of the modern nation-state, what they did was actually to undermine it while ostensibly providing a rationale and taking credit for its existence.

Community vs. Citizenship: MacIntyre's Revolt against the Modern State

John Zmirak on another ISI book, Human Goods, Economic Evils: Against Unselfishness