Niall Ferguson
7,568 words
In 2011 there appeared two major scholarly works that attempted to investigate the sources of Western supremacy in the modern world, especially in view of the recent rise of China as a potential threat to this supremacy. These are the Puerto Rican-Canadian social historian Ricardo Duchesne’s The Uniqueness of Western Civilization[1] and the British economic historian Niall Ferguson’s Civilization: The West and the Rest.[2] Read more …
Historicizing the Historicists:
Notes on Leo Strauss’ “The Living Issues of German Postwar Philosophy,” Part 2
Max Weber
4,535 words
Part 1 here
The Intellectual Bankruptcy of the Present Age
Not only does Strauss claim that historicism is a healthy reaction to the intellectual bankruptcy of the modern world, in the next section of his essay, he also attributes this bankruptcy to non-historicist causes.
First, Strauss talks about Max Weber’s Learning and Science as Vocation. He specifically objects to Weber’s claim that reason cannot speak about the ultimate aims of life: Read more …