Tag: Ricardo Duchesne

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Curtis Dozier
The White Pedestal: How White Nationalists Use Ancient Greece and Rome to Justify Hate
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2026

Curtis Dozier is one of my long-time academic stalkers. An associate professor of Greek and Roman Studies at Vassar College in New York, he is the director of Pharos: Doing Justice to the Classics, a website on which Leftist classics scholars bemoan “appropriations” of classical antiquity by “hate groups.” Naturally, my writers and I are all over Pharos and Dozier’s new book. (more…)

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Ricardo Duchesne
Greatness and Ruin: Self-Reflection and Universalism Within European Civilization
Antelope Hill Publishing, 2025

Everyone agrees that we Europeans are distinct from (and therefore stand out amongst) the other members of our species. Where the disagreement begins is when we attempt to apprehend the precise nature and substance of this difference. (more…)

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Normally when people think about the province of Saskatchewan, they picture pastoral prairieland filled with golden wheat, towering grain elevators, spectacular summertime lightning storms, windswept snowscapes, and that old joke about how the land is so flat you only have to stand on a milk-crate to see Halifax. (more…)

World of Warcraft (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

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Videogame livestreaming platforms are strange places. If you frequent websites such as Twitch or Kick, you will know that they are equal parts autism, attention deficit disorder, and exhibitionism. They are toxic places full of profanity and performative video-game violence as automatic weapons are used to shred other players while hopping around in tactical gear on virtual battlefields. (more…)

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I was down in the dumps last weekend when I headed once more to the annual American Renaissance conference. This year was a significant milestone for the organization, founded by Jared Taylor in 1990: It was the twentieth such conference. I was hoping that spending some time with fellow haters would perk me up — and indeed it did. Let me tell you why. (more…)

Francis Fukuyama heralded a return to a Western-centered universal conception of history — but one which sees universal liberalism as its endpoint.

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Part 7 of 7 (Part 1 here, Part 6 here)

We have no standards to judge what are “good” and “bad” forms of being a human, since there are no subjects existing outside the contingencies of historical time and power relationships. All we can do is engage in “discourse analysis” so as to uncover existing hierarchies by analyzing the fields of knowledge through which they are legitimated. We can engage in questioning how we came to be the “humans” we think we are, such as how we came to think that we have natural rights to life, liberty, and happiness, but such a questioning can only show us how our current way of being human is historically contingent and thus changeable. (more…)

Fernand Braudel, widely regarded as the greatest historian of the twentieth century.

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Part 6 of 7 (Part 1 here, Part 5 here, Part 7 here)

The “Grand Liberal Narrative” of the Twentieth Century

Despite a wide variety of historical schools, a centrist liberal historiography committed to the ideals of rationalism, meritocracy, and the global spread of human rights dominated the writing of history until about the 1980s — while subsequently integrating within its fold the more progressive schools of New Left, feminist, multicultural, and postmodernist historians via a “new liberalism” determined to ensure equal rights for everyone against the continuing racism, sexism, and ignorance of old liberals. (more…)

Anton von Werner, The Proclamation of the German Empire (1885). The rise of the German Empire coincided with the rise of German historicism. Both presented a new challenge to British and French world domination.

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Part 5 of 7 (Part 1 here, Part 4 here)

German Historicism: The Defeated Alternative to Liberal Progressivism

Peter Watson’s comprehensive book of over 900 pages, The German Genius: Europe’s Third Renaissance, The Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century (2010), demonstrates that from 1750 to the 1930s Germany was the dominant intellectual force in Western civilization. (more…)

Giambattista Vico

7,419 words

Part 4 of 7 (Part 1 here, Part 3 here)

Enlightenment Consolidation of the Idea of Progress

One of the great philosophers of history of this era would seem to have retrogressed away from this developing idea of progress with his cyclical view of history — that is, Giambattista Vico, author of Scienza Nuova Prima (1725/1744). First, it needs to be recognized that this book offered a very original and profound perspective on history: the idea that we can only understand cultural practices by studying history, which spoke to the improving historical consciousness of Europeans. (more…)

A medieval depiction of the Emperor of China.

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Part 3 of 7 (Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 4 here)

The Stalled Development of Chinese and Islamic Historiography

Did the modern Chinese write better histories than ancient Europeans? Hegel said that “no other people has had a series of historical writers succeeding one another in such close continuity as the Chinese.” (more…)

Justus of Ghent, Saint Augustine, c. 1475

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Part 2 of 7 (Part 1 here, Part 3 here)

The Emerging of a Christian Historical Consciousness

For all we have said about Greek and Roman historiography (and there were other historians, such as Suetonius, Appian, and Casius Dios), contemporary scholars invariably agree that the ancients remained a “non-historical” people. Herbert Butterfield is convinced “the Greeks did not achieve historical mindedness, and never could have achieved it, because they had the wrong view of time and the time process.” The Greeks “only knew of a comparatively short history behind them — they thought that the historical past extended back for only a very few hundred years.” (more…)

Theodoros Pelecanos, Ouroboros (1478)

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Part 1 of 7 (Part 2 here)

One of the most startling historical truths is that Europeans invented the writing of history as “a method of sorting out the true from the false,” as a conscious search for a rational explanation of the causes of events, while rendering the results of their investigations in sustained narratives of excellent prose. The other peoples of the world, including the Chinese who maintained for centuries a tradition of chronological writers, barely rose above annalistic forms of recording the deeds of rulers or the construction of genealogies devoid of reflections on historical causation. This would not have been judged a controversial view a few decades ago. (more…)

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There is an elective affinity — a relationship of reciprocal attraction and mutual reinforcement — between a) John Locke’s argument that a child’s mind initially resembles an “empty cabinet” or a “white paper void of all characters” which can be shaped by controlling the education impressed upon the child’s mind, and b) the origins of a literature specifically written for children in the 1700s in England. (more…)