Stephen R.C. Hicks's Blog, page 2

Geniuses and their followers

Wisdom about the challenge of learning from a great genius and then finding one’s own path. Here is Zarathustra: “Now I go alone, my disciples, You too, go now, alone. Thus I want it. Go away from me and resist Zarathustra! And even better: be ashamed of him! Perhaps he deceived you. The man of […]

CEE video interviews: Noel, Thompson, Horwitz, Sandefur, and others

I have been fortunate to interview several of CEE's expert guest speakers over the past year.

A FOURTH WAY of (Russian) POLITICS? Alexander DUGIN. Lecture 7 of *The Philosophy of Politics: From the Cold War to After 9/11*

Dugin: “The entirety of Russian history is a dialectical argument with the West and against Western culture … The brightest Russian minds clearly saw that the West was moving towards the abyss.” About the Course In this eight-lecture course, Professor Stephen R.C. Hicks takes us on a journey through the evolution of modern political philosophies […]

Luigi Zingales on Keynesians

A zinger from Zingales: “Keynesianism has conquered the hearts and minds of politicians and ordinary people alike because it provides a theoretical justification for irresponsible behavior. Medical science has established that one or two glasses of wine per day are good for your long-term health, but no doctor would recommend a recovering alcoholic to follow […]

The CAPITALIST IDEAL. Ayn RAND & Robert NOZICK. Lecture 1 of *The Philosophy of Politics: From the Cold War to After 9/11*

Rand: “Since knowledge, thinking, and rational action are properties of the individual, since the choice to exercise his rational faculty or not depends on the individual, man’s survival requires that those who think be free of the interference of those who don’t.” About the Course In this eight-lecture course, Professor Stephen R.C. Hicks takes us […]

Evelyn Waugh’s Christian self-control

The author of Brideshead Revisited was a nasty man. So much so that “a woman once remarked to Waugh that, though he claimed to be a Christian, he was one of the most unpleasant men she had ever met. Did he not, she asked, sense any contradiction here? ‘Not at all,’ Waugh is supposed to […]

From academic skepticism to “Take-it-to-the-streets” [interview excerpt]

From a 2020 interview: Jennifer Grossman [34:00]: Speaking of philosophical shifts … it seems to me like right now, we are seeing just like we’re seeing an acceleration in so many other areas, an acceleration in technological change, and acceleration in transitions to different kinds of education. Are you are you seeing an acceleration in the […]

Syllabus for The PHILOSOPHY of POLITICS: From the Cold War to After 9/11

In this eight-lecture course, Professor Stephen R.C. Hicks takes us on a journey through the evolution of modern political philosophies from the tensions of Cold War to the turbulent post-9/11 era. Major thinkers covered include: Ayn Rand, Robert Nozick, John Rawls, James Buchanan, Herbert Marcuse, Michel Foucault, Roger Scruton, Sayyid Qutb, Alexander Dugin, and others. […]

Letters from Mises and Rothbard to Rand

I had not seen these before: Two letters from Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard [pdf] to Ayn Rand upon their reading of Atlas Shrugged. The letters were also published in 2007 in the Journal of Libertarian Studies and forwarded to me by a colleague. Fascinating reading. Related: Ayn Rand, in the Philosophers, Explained series.

Immanuel Kant, portraiture, and I

I’m re-reading some biographical material on Kant, the great counter-Enlightenment philosopher of Königsberg. (Apparently, the crooked-timber house that Kant lived in early in his career was subject to vandalism. A sublime and phenomenal critique of the critiquer.) With one exception, Professor Kant had no pictures hanging on the walls of his house. Kant had been […]