Free Republic

The 150th anniversary of the publication of Dostoevsky’s Demons (also known as Devils and perhaps less accurately as The Possessed) provides a welcome opportunity to reengage this timely and timeless literary dissection of moral and political nihilism. In it, Dostoevsky gathered all his imaginative and prophetic powers to confront the spirit of radical negation that defines the modern revolutionary project. This powerful novel is at once an unerringly accurate diagnosis of the sickness of soul that drives the totalitarian temptation as well as an inexhaustible literary monument to the ideological scourge that is coextensive with late modernity. It is at...

... People do not live by bread—or, what philosophers called the maximalization of “advantage”—alone. All utopian ideologies presuppose that human nature is fundamentally good and simple: evil and apparent complexity result from a corrupt social order. Eliminate want and you eliminate crime. For many intellectuals, science itself had proven these contentions and indicated the way to the best of all possible worlds. Dostoevsky rejected all these ideas as pernicious nonsense. “It is clear and intelligible to the point of obviousness,” he wrote in a review of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, “that evil lies deeper in human beings than our social-physicians suppose;...

The nineteenth century has often been characterized as an "age of revolution." Indeed, it was an age brimming over with revolutionary ideas of all sorts, as well as with political and social movements seeking to implement those ideas. The cast of revolutionary characters includes Marx and Engels, Darwin, Comte, and Freud; among major events -the French Revolutions, to name but a few. The nineteenth century was also an age of scientific revolution -- not The Scientific Revolution, a designation traditionally reserved for the period of radical and innovative discoveries which occurred in the interval between Copernicus and Newton -- even...

While we previously discussed the French Revolution of 1789, we will now look to better understand the year 1848 — a world caught up in the fire of revolution. This fire was widespread around the globe with consequences far and wide. And out of this overturned world, came the rise of a prophet. In 1848, revolution swept across Europe and the world. The “February Revolution” in Paris lit the flame as the current world order was crumbling. In the days leading up to the overthrow of the French King Louis-Phillippe, the historian Alexis de Tocqueville commented on the state of...

Your word I have hidden in my heart, That I might not sin against You! (Ps. 119:11) Years ago, I heard a statement from an American monk: “The contemplative need go no further than his own heart to find the source of all violence in the world.” It struck me as true then and has only seemed more so as the years have passed. At the time (not long after the Vietnam War) this monastic was remarking on the many young people whom they had visiting his monastery who were “so deeply angry about peace.” The statement echoed an experience...

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) was a famous Russian novelist.  His most recognized work was Brothers Karamazov, a long -- and tedious -- story about a family feud that Dostoevsky finished only 4 months before his death at the age of 60. However, chapter 5 of the novel is The Grand Inquisitor, one of the most stirring philosophical, religious, and political tales in all of literature. In the tale, Christ comes back to Earth in Seville, Spain at the time of the Inquisition.  Christ performs some miracles and the people recognize and adore him, but he is arrested by Inquisition leaders...

Why Rowan Williams is the best man for the job – of appreciating the greatness of DostoevskyFyodor Dostoevsky’s views on religion are notoriously hard to pin down with confidence. If you collected up the criticism devoted to Tolstoy, there could be no doubt about what he believed at any stage of his journey. Yet in the history of Dostoevsky criticism we find, for example, Henry Miller reading Dostoevsky as a great social revolutionary, whereas others have seen him as a diehard conservative. Rowan Williams, in his latest book, quotes (and rebuts) William Hamilton, who sought to enlist Dostoevsky as a...

Once upon a time, not too awfully long ago, America was known as the ‘shining city on the hill.’ America, the most radical experiment in the history of the world, was the only nation to which people oppressed and repressed by old world systems of social classes and castes could be free of the stifling bindings engendered by those man created constraints. She was a Judao-Christian nation where God of the bible, and not an elite ruling class, was sovereign over all. America was the land of hope, promise and opportunity, where not only all men were equal before God’s...

Europe is trapped by complacency and an all too human desire for oblivious contentment, says a leading French philosopher. This helps ensure the success of the nihilistic terror and extremist ideology exemplified by al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein. Nobody wants war – but genocide is worse than war. Liss Gehlen/Jens Heisterkamp: Why do you return to the work of Dostoevsky to explain the terrorism of the 20th and 21st centuries? André Glucksmann: In Dostoïevski à Manhattan I pose a philosophical question: what is the ‘idea’, the characteristic form of modern terrorism? And my answer is: nihilism. Socrates asked: what do a...

"I can but thank you," he said, in a tone too respectful to be sincere, "for your kindness in letting me speak, for I have often noticed that our Liberals never allow other people to have an opinion of their own, and immediately answer their opponents with abuse, if they do not have recourse to arguments of a still more unpleasant nature."----------------"Excuse me," continued Evgenie Pavlovitch hotly, "I don't say a word against liberalism. Liberalism is not a sin, it is a necessary part of a great whole, which whole would collapse and fall to pieces without it. Liberalism has...