Tag: rhetoric

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In Greece in the fourth and fifth centuries BCE, the sophists were highly-prized teachers of the art or craft (techne) of rhetoric. (The Greek word techne is the root of our words technique and technology.)

Socrates was widely seen as a sophist, for instance in Aristophanes’ Clouds. To a naïve bystander, Socrates certainly looked like a sophist. Like the sophists, Socrates spent a great deal of time arguing about ideas. Moreover, Socrates was seen arguing with known sophists, including the greatest sophists of them all, Gorgias and Protagoras, as depicted in the Platonic dialogues which bear their names. (more…)

Seated Socrates, fresco from ancient Ephesus

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Greg Johnson began a five-week course on Plato’s Gorgias on the latest broadcast of Counter-Currents Radio, which will continue for the next four Saturdays (July 1, 8, 15, and 22). The first lecture, which both introduces the dialogue as a whole and also examines Socrates’ argument with the great Sophist Gorgias, can be heard below.

The theme of the course is “Might vs. Right.” Dr. Johnson will be using Donald J. Zeyl’s translation of the Gorgias published by Hackett as both a separate book and as part of their Plato Complete Works volume. (more…)

Raphael, The School of Athens (1511)

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It is important to realize that “true” and “false,” like “free” and “unfree,” do not stand for anything simple at all; but only for a general dimension of being a right and proper thing to say as opposed to a wrong thing. — J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (1962) (more…)

Richard M. Weaver

681 words

America wasn’t always a liberal country. The founders drew more upon classical republicanism than liberalism. In the nineteenth century, the populist movement was decidedly anti-liberal. But the founders and the populists were never consistently anti-liberal, because consistency is the province of intellectuals, not statesmen.

America never had a genuinely anti-liberal intellectual movement until the Southern Agrarians of the 1920s and 1930s. (The North American New Right is America’s second anti-liberal intellectual movement.) (more…)

Gorgias

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Nothing exists; Even if something exists, nothing can be known about it; and. Even if something can be known about it, knowledge about it can’t be communicated to others. Even if it can be communicated, it cannot be understood.

— Gorgias of Leontinoi, circa 427 BC (more…)

Schedel’s Phoenix from the Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493

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If I had to recommend one book on politics, it would be James Burnham’s The Machiavellians. If I had to recommend one pamphlet, it would be an overlooked gem of American political discourse, Sam Francis’s The Other Side of Modernism: James Burnham and His Legacy. There is no white identitarian, racially aware conservative, American nationalist, or any other member of the Dissident Right who does not owe a massive debt to this towering genius. (more…)

Gustave Doré, The Destruction of Leviathan, 1865.

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But yet they that have no science are in better and nobler condition with their natural prudence than men, that by mis-reasoning, or by trusting them that reason wrong, fall upon false and absurd general rules.

— Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

“Go in fear of abstractions.” So admonished Ezra Pound aspiring poets. (more…)

Richard M. Weaver

671 words

America wasn’t always a liberal country. The founders drew more upon classical republicanism than liberalism. In the nineteenth century, the populist movement was decidedly anti-liberal. But the founders and the populists were never consistently anti-liberal, because consistency is the province of intellectuals, not statesmen.

America never had a genuinely anti-liberal intellectual movement until the Southern Agrarians of the 1920s and 1930s. (The North American New Right is America’s second anti-liberal intellectual movement.) (more…)

White students pondering over a Herbert Marcuse lecture on the “one-dimensional mind” of the white race.

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No one knows Friedrich Julius Stahl (1802-1861). He was a legal philosopher of Jewish parentage who converted to Christianity and became a defender of Prussian Lutheran conservatism against the imposition of Enlightenment values. He rejected Hegel’s argument (more…)

Phil Eiger Newmann, The Arena, 2020.

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Any belief, no matter how desperately well-intentioned, in the efficacy and wisdom of democracy depends on the fundamentally flawed notion that the average voter is anything loftier than an easily frightened and brainwashed lab rat. (more…)

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With all the uncertainty surrounding the 2020 election, I’m reminded of the Randy Newman song “I Want You to Hurt Like I Do.” It’s a slow, depressing waltz about a self-centered person who’s cruel to others for no reason. And when asked why, he repeats the song title for an explanation. (more…)

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Philippe-Joseph Salazar
Suprémacistes: L’enquête Mondiale chez les Gourous de la Droite Identitaire
Paris: Plon, 2020

This book results from interviews with leading thinkers of the race-conscious right — the so-called alternative right — which seeks to bring race to the forefront of political debate. The title Suprémacistes is, however, misleading; for the author, Philippe-Joseph Salazar, nowhere describes the people who are the subject of this study as supremacists (more…)