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(Originally published in Feb 2022) Eduard Limonov died on March 17th, 2020, at age 77. For a larger-than-life exhibitionist, the timing couldn’t have been worse. Coming just six days after the WHO had declared COVID-19 a pandemic, Limonov’s death was completely eclipsed by the global response to the novel respiratory virus. The low-key, banal cause…
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Book in the spotlight: The Old Regime and the Revolution by Alexis de Tocqueville Alexis de Tocqueville is primarily known for Democracy in America, his penetrating analysis of democracy (and not only of the one in America). While the work is an indisputable masterpiece, it has the effect of eclipsing his other texts. I am thinking here of The…
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Book in the spotlight: Political Theology by Carl Schmitt It is rarely a good sign when the foreword and introduction preceding a text are longer than the text itself. Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology is an exception, which is quite apposite for a work whose very first sentence tackles the exceptional. Schmitt was one of the towering figures of German…
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Book in the spotlight: War and Peace and War by Peter Turchin Peter Turchin is best known for championing cliodynamics. For those unfamiliar with this concept, it’s a fancy way to describe the use of math in the study of history. Proponents of cliodynamics hold that history is “shaped by great impersonal forces,” as Turchin…
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Book in the spotlight: Byzantinism and Slavdom Is the sun finally about to set on the West? Allowing for the problematic nature of the question (how does one define the West, and what does one mean by its death?), as well as for the number of false positives produced by doomsday tropes, the answer is…
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What one 19th-century book can teach us about freedom at a time when freedom is in retreat Of all the books bandied about in discussions of our current quasi-dystopian reality (more than a year and counting), Alexander Herzen’s From the Other Shore is not one likely to be mentioned. Nor is Herzen himself much of a household…