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Articles by Peter Baehr
The peace women | The New Criterion
Europe is once again the theater of a major armed conflict, the worst since the Second World War ended in 1945. Four of the belligerents possess their own nuclear weapons: the Russian Federation, the United States, Great Britain, and France. Several nato nations have U.S. nuclear weapons stationed on their territory: Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey. Russia recently sent nuclear weapons to its ally Belarus.
Issues | The New Criterion
January 2024 New York chronicle by Jay Nordlinger On recent performances at Carnegie Hall, the Metropolitan Opera House & David Geffen Hall.
The best books to help one understand the relationship between capitalism and nationalism
This book is a powerful argument, logically and sociologically unassailable, about cultural foundations of economic activity, whose specific hypothesis (that Protestantism was responsible for the rise of capitalism) was refuted by empirical evidence. It served as the point of departure for my research.
Claremont Review of Books
When Mao Zedong died in 1976, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) mutated from a totalitarian regime into a limited dictatorship under the rule, consecutively, of Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, and Hu Jintao. Deng foreswore the cult of personality. All three leaders resolved never to return to the days when any man could hold as much power as Mao. Slogans of “spiritual civilization” and “peaceful rise,” and promises of order with harmony, displaced the blood-soaked language of old.
Claremont Review of Books
Charles R. Kesler's new book brings together the classical beginnings of the study of politics with the story of our nation in thought and deed.
Dictadura y responsabilidad en Hong Kong
Así, la población fue sacudida, forzada al silencio y dejada sin posibles líderes de resistencia. Así se inculcó la “sabiduría”, se cortaron los antiguos lazos y amistades. (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Archipiélago Gulag) I ¿Puede la vida moral sobrevivir a la dictadura? Cuando un gobierno intimida a sus súbditos, cuando siembra la desconfianza entre ellos, cuando penaliza la virtud e incentiva el servilismo, ¿cómo pueden los hombres y las mujeres mantener la fe en sí mismos y en sus semejantes?
How Should the Citizens of Hong Kong Prepare for Dictatorship?
“Thus, the population was shaken up, forced into silence, and left without any possible leaders of resistance. So it was that ‘wisdom’ was instilled, that former ties and friendships were cut off.” – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago (1985). I Can moral life survive dictatorship? When a government intimidates its subjects; when it sows mistrust among them; when it penalizes virtue and incentivizes servility, how might men and women keep faith with themselves and their fellows?
Liberals on trial: Rebecca West & Alistair Cooke by Peter Baehr
Perplexed as we are by an age of splintering identities, it is tempting to look back on the Cold War as an ideologically simple time. The battles between liberal and Communist intellectuals—epitomized by the bitter dispute between Raymond Aron and Jean-Paul Sartre in France—are legendsof Cold War history. So, too, are the stories of those that renounced Communism to become liberals or liberal-inflected conservatives, people like Sidney Hook, Arthur Koestler, François Furet, and Leszek Kołakowski.
Whittaker Chambers through the Eyes of Rebecca West
West understood more clearly than anyone the allure of Communism for educated Westerners Bolshevism’sappeal to Western intellectuals is a mystery we still struggle to explain. Why did artists who despised patriotism show a larger loyalty to Russian chauvinism? Why did writers defend a regime that repeatedly imprisoned, tortured, and killed writers? In short, why did intelligent people who lived in free countries worship at the altar of despotic states?
Whittaker Chambers through the Eyes of Rebecca West | National Review
Rebecca West (Madame Yévonde/Wikimedia) West understood more clearly than anyone the allure of Communism for educated Westerners Bolshevism’s appeal to Western intellectuals is a mystery we still struggle to explain. Why did artists who despised patriotism show a larger loyalty to Russian chauvinism? Why did writers defend a regime that repeatedly imprisoned, tortured, and killed writers?
Of decency and heroism in a time of plague in Hong Kong » MercatorNet
One thing is certain: in you, there are two natures. The miserly, the prudent one against the generous. For many years you will attempt to reconcile them Till all your works have grown small And you will prize only uncalculated gifts, Greatheartedness, self-forgetful giving, Without monuments, books, and human memory (From A Boy, by Czesław Miłosz) If we know anything about human beings in extreme circumstances, it is their remarkable capacity for goodness.
City under Siege: Authoritarian Toleration, Mask Culture, and the SARS Crisis in Hong Kong
Citing Literature Number of times cited according to CrossRef: 5 Willem R. Boterman, Urban‐Rural Polarisation in Times of the Corona Outbreak? The Early Demographic and Geographic Patterns of the SARS‐CoV‐2 Epidemic in the Netherlands, Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie, 10.1111/tesg.12437, 111, 3, (513-529), (2020).
A letter from Hong Kong, Joel Kotkin on demography, Geoffrey Miller on virtue-signalling, and how #MeToo has affected the Nordic countries
Welcome to this week's round up of Quillette articles, where you will find sociologist Peter Baehr reflecting on his students in a moving letter from Hong Kong, evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller on the purpose of virtue-signalling, and Danish literature professor, Marianne Stidsen, on the regressive impact the #MeToo movement has had in Scandinavia. We hope you this week's collection.
A Letter From Hong Kong
The normal coexists with the brutal. Last Saturday, in Hong Kong, carefree expat children walk by my apartment building, holding party balloons as Puma police helicopters buzz overhead. Less than a mile away people are fired on with tear gas and water cannon spewing blue dye. I imagine that this is what it felt like in the last days of the Shah. My days are not usually surreal. I am a teacher at Lingnan University, a liberal arts college and the smallest of eight public universities in Hong Kong.
The "Masses" in Hannah Arendt's Theory of Totalitarianism
This symposium has the intriguing objective of "learning from Arendt's attack on cliché." She was certainly wary of formulaic thinking. She was even more perplexed when cliché took on bodily form, as she claimed it did with Adolf Eichmann. Yet while Arendt was a daring thinker in many respects, she was by no means inoculated from the topoi of her own time.
The Unsafe Feminist: Rebecca West and the ‘Bitter Rapture’ of Truth
In an era when indulgent university administrators and professors treat students like spoiled children, one longs for intellectuals who address their audience as adults. The British novelist, biographer, literary critic, travel writer and political commentator Rebecca West (1892-1983) is the tonic we need. Like other great authors of the 20th century—including George Orwell and Doris Lessing—West never received a university education.
The “Iron Cage” and the “Shell as Hard as Steel”: Parsons, Weber, and the Stahlhartes Gehäuse Metaphor in the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
In the climax to The Protestant Ethic, Max Weber writes of the stahlhartes Gehäuse that modern capitalism has created, a concept that Talcott Parsons famously rendered as the “iron cage.” This article examines the status of Parsons's canonical translation; the putative sources of its imagery (in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress); and the more complex idea that Weber himself sought to evoke with the “shell as hard as steel”: a reconstitution of the human subject under bureaucratic capitalism in...
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