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Casablanca is a movie about love and loss, virtue and vice, good
and evil, duty and treachery, courage and weakness, friendship and
hate. It is a story that ends well, but only because the main
characters make a heartbreaking choice. Casablanca is perhaps the
most widely viewed motion picture ever made, often finishing on
critics' lists second only to Citizen Kane. What accounts for its
continuing popularity? What chord does it strike with audiences?
What lesson does Casablanca teach Americans about themselves? What
influence does popular culture have on public mores? The
contributors to Political Philosophy Comes to Rick's take up these
questions, finding that Casablanca raises many of the most
important issues of political philosophy. Perhaps Casablanca has an
enduring quality because it, like political philosophy, raises
questions of human life - the nature of love, friendship, courage,
honor, responsibility, and justice.
Casablanca is a movie about love and loss, virtue and vice, good
and evil, duty and treachery, courage and weakness, friendship and
hate. It is a story that ends well, but only because the main
characters make a heartbreaking choice. Casablanca is perhaps the
most widely viewed motion picture ever made, often finishing on
critics' lists second only to Citizen Kane. What accounts for its
continuing popularity? What chord does it strike with audiences?
What lesson does Casablanca teach Americans about themselves? What
influence does popular culture have on public mores? The
contributors to Political Philosophy Comes to Rick's take up these
questions, finding that Casablanca raises many of the most
important issues of political philosophy. Perhaps Casablanca has an
enduring quality because it, like political philosophy, raises
questions of human life - the nature of love, friendship, courage,
honor, responsibility, and justice.
In The Deconstitutionalization of America: The Forgotten Frailties
of Democratic Rule, Roger M. Barrus and his coauthors embark on a
discussion of American democracy from the nineteenth century to the
present day. The present paradox democracy finds itself in can be
summed up as "the best of times and the worst of times." Democracy,
at its best, has triumphed throughout the world. It is the authors
contention that this same success represents the potential for its
undoing: with all governments claiming to be democratic, modern
democrats-and this includes just about everyone-find it difficult
if not impossible to understand the nature and problems of
democracy. Since most everyone lives within a democratic horizon,
they have nothing to compare democracy to and no one to point out
its faults. In this way, they are hampered in dealing with their
social and political problems, some of which may be the result of
contradictions inherent in the democratic principle itself. The
solution to democracy's ills might not be, after all, more
democracy.
In The Deconstitutionalization of America: The Forgotten Frailties
of Democratic Rule, Roger M. Barrus and his coauthors embark on a
discussion of American democracy from the nineteenth century to the
present day. The present paradox democracy finds itself in can be
summed up as 'the best of times and the worst of times.' Democracy,
at its best, has triumphed throughout the world. It is the authors
contention that this same success represents the potential for its
undoing: with all governments claiming to be democratic, modern
democrats-and this includes just about everyone-find it difficult
if not impossible to understand the nature and problems of
democracy. Since most everyone lives within a democratic horizon,
they have nothing to compare democracy to and no one to point out
its faults. In this way, they are hampered in dealing with their
social and political problems, some of which may be the result of
contradictions inherent in the democratic principle itself. The
solution to democracy's ills might not be, after all, more
democracy.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is almost a forgotten man, a relic of the
Cold War, like some broken and discarded bit of the Berlin Wall. He
is also one of the most important writers of the 20th century, and
has had more direct influence on politics than any author since
Jean Jacques Rousseau. At a critical time after America's loss in
Vietnam, Solzhenitsyn stood as a towering moral force against a
policy of appeasement towards an evil adversary. In this new
edition of Assault on Ideology: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Political
Thought author James F. Pontuso showcases the titanic thought that
understood Marxism to be a vain and ultimately merciless effort to
fulfill the Enlightenment dream of fully conquering and exploiting
nature in order to establish a perfect and just society on earth.
Solzhenitsyn's claim was that Lenin, Stalin, and the Russian people
applied Marx's principles to the letter yielding horrific results.
Pontuso traces the causes of the horrific events of the Great
Terror beginning with Stalin's megalomania, back through the cruel
precedents laid down by Lenin, to the ideology established by Marx,
and ultimately to the philosophy begun in the Enlightenment.
Virtue is not what it used to be. It has lost its good name. If
virtue were a television show, it would garner low ratings and
promptly be cancelled. If virtue were running for president, it
would fare poorly in the Iowa caucuses and would drop out of the
race after a weak showing in the New Hampshire primary. Virtue has
a bad name, both because people no longer use the term and because
it is associated with repression of desires. Today, it not
considered healthy to keep inner urges at bay for very long. Virtue
comes off looking like a relic of a quaint, narrow-minded, uptight
age. Virtue does not support self-esteem since it is difficult to
master the passions. Yet virtue seems to be a part of everyday
life. What accounts for the kindly relationships between people?
Why are most people peaceful, law abiding, and decent? If, as some
insist, there is no foundation for virtue, or people act only out
of self-interest, how can we explain why so many people are good to
each other? Prestigious scholars, such as Alasdair MacIntyre, After
Virtue, James Q. Wilson, The Moral Sense, Steven Pinker, The Better
Angels of Our Nature, and Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness, have
attempted to answer this question. While these authors make great
strides in explaining the character of goodness, their works do not
face the problem raised by "anti-foundationalist."
Anti-foundationalist such as Richard Rorty, Friedrich Nietzsche,
Martin Heidegger, and the libertarian school of economics maintain
that humans lack a capacity for comprehending what is good or bad.
For anti-foundationalists there are no higher metaphysical
principles that guide behavior. Prescriptive judgments are little
more than long-held cultural prejudices fortified by habit so as to
seem natural. Therefore, philosophic claims about virtue are little
more than guesses about proper conduct. Nature's Virtue squarely
faces the challenge of anti-foundationalists. The book points out
the defects of these ideas. It does so by presenting a contemporary
restatement of the case for grounding virtue in Platonic forms or
ideas.
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