Stephen R.C. Hicks's Blog, page 3

REVOLUTIONARY DANGER. EDMUND BURKE. Lecture 1 of *The Philosophy of Politics: From the French Revolution to World War II*

Burke: “The French have rebelled against a mild and lawful monarch with more fury, outrage, and insult than ever.” About the Course In this eight-lecture course, Professor Stephen Hicks takes us through the development of political philosophy from the late 18th to the early 20th century, focusing on key thinkers and movements that shaped the […]

REVOLUTIONARY DANGER. EDMUND BURKE. Lecture 1 of *The Philosophy of Politics*

“The French have rebelled against a mild and lawful monarch with more fury, outrage, and insult than ever.” About the Course In this eight-lecture course, Professor Stephen Hicks takes us through the development of political philosophy from the late 18th to the early 20th century, focusing on key thinkers and movements that shaped the modern […]

Cineas and the meaning of life

Pyrrhus, the great Greek general, is off to conquer the world — Italy, Sicily, Libya, Carthage, and beyond. Cineas, his eloquent adviser and ambassador, asks him: What will you do after you conquer the world? Pyrrhus answers that he will take his ease. Cineas replies, Then why not take your ease now? Source: Paraphrasing from […]

Standpoint epistemology and social fracture [interview excerpt]

From a 2020 interview: Jennifer Grossman  [27:04]:   One thing I hear is when we talk about race, and this gets to sort of the metaphysics and epistemology of reality, it’s common refrain is, you have your facts, I have my facts, you have your reality, I have my reality isn’t, you know, possible to have […]

Thompson’s *America’s Revolutionary Mind*

. Reiterating that I’m a fan of C. Bradley Thompson’s America’s Revolutionary Mind. First published in 2019, it is a moral history of the founding era that will stand the test of time. Thompson is a transplanted Canadian and a Political Science Ph.D. now teaching at Clemson University, South Carolina. Related: Thomas Jefferson on Slavery. […]

Kierkegaard: A Christian must “relinquish his understanding and his thinking, and keep his soul fixed upon the absurd.”

Defending Christianity—and the legacy of Abraham in particular—Søren Kierkagaard concludes (approvingly) that one’s accepting it means “to relinquish his understanding and his thinking, and to keep his soul fixed upon the absurd.” Source: Kierkegaard, Søren. Fear and Trembling [1843]. Related: On the fuller context of Kierkegaard’s provocative claim: Related: On Kierkegaard’s place in the historical […]

Syllabus for *PHILOSOPHY of POLITICS: From the French Revolution to World War II*

In this eight-lecture course, Professor Hicks takes us on a journey through the evolution of modern political philosophies, from the cataclysm of the French Revolution to the Second World War. Major thinkers covered include: Edmund Burke, Georg Hegel, Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, William James and John Dewey, Giovanni Gentile and Benito […]

Is Woke “liberalism on steroids”? James Orr (Cambridge Univ.) debates Stephen Hicks (Rockford Univ.)

Professor James Orr: “I am convinced where he {Hicks] is not that wokus pokus is liberalism on steroids.” That is from Dr. Orr’s third essay, “Conservatism: Final Thoughts,” in this Reason Papers three-round debate with Dr. Stephen Hicks. Orr advocates and defends Conservatism; Hicks does the same for Liberalism. Links here: Conservatism or Liberalism? A Debate […]

Nietzsche on his contemporary Germans

[This is Section 29 of Stephen R.C. Hicks’s Nietzsche and the Nazis.] 29. On contemporary Germans: the world’s hope or contemptible? While the Nazis put the German-Aryan racial type first, Nietzsche is almost never complimentary about his fellow Germans. In Nietzsche’s view, Germany has slipped into flabbiness and whininess. Germany once was something to be […]

Socialism in practice: “Private land was 32.4 times as productive as public land in the Soviet Union”

 An economic historian on socialist Russia after WW II:  “The only sector of the economy which showed vigor was private farming: the 33 million private plots belonging to collective farm households, averaging 0.6 acre and constituting 1.5% of the country’s cultivated area, furnished the postwar Soviet Union with nearly one-third of its foodstuffs. In 1979, […]