Category Archives: Guest Blogger

By Glenn Stehle

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Even a small-time gang of hoodlums has its own melodramatic ideology and pathological romanticism.  Human nature demands that vile matters be haloed by an over-compensatory mystique in order to silence one’s conscience and to deceive consciousness and critical faculties, whether one’s own or those of others.

If such a ponerogenic union could be stripped of its ideology, nothing would remain except psychological and moral pathology, naked and unattractive.

–ANDREW M. LOBACZEWSKI, Political Ponerology

Capitalism is “the astonishing belief that the nastiest motives of the nastiest men somehow or other work for the best results in the best of all possible worlds.”

JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES, Attributed by Sir George Schuster, Christianity and human relations in industry

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By Glenn Stehle

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Once rationalism raised the intellectual stakes, Catholics could not go on playing by older, more relaxed rules:  if formal rigor were the order of the day in physics and ethics, theology must follow suit….

In the Library of the Convent of Ste. Geneviève, near the Pantheon in Paris, is a manuscript entitled  Traité de l’autôrité et de la réception du concile de Trente en France.  It describes the struggle, after the Council of Trent, to uproot the “pernicious heresies and errors” of Protestantism, and paints a revealing picture of the intellectual position of the Catholic Church in early 18^th-century France….  [I]ts final pages show how far the demand for “undeniable foundations” had made its way into Catholic theology by 1725.  Looking back, the author credits the Council with anachronistic motives, which are intelligible only if already, in the 1570s, it could invoke the principles of a philosophical rationalism that was invented in the 1630s.  The ambition of the Counter-Reformation, it tells us, was “to prove invincibly our most fundamental belief.”

–STEPHEN TOULMIN,  Cosmopolis:  The Hidden Agenda of Modernity

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By Glenn Stehle

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The events of the 1590s had suddenly brought home to more thoughtful Castilians the harsh truth about their native land – its poverty in the midst of riches, its power that had shown itself impotent…  For this was not only a time of crisis, but a time also of the awareness of crisis – of a bitter realization that things had gone wrong.  It was under the influence of the arbitristas that early seventeenth-century Castile surrendered itself to an orgy of national introspection, desperately attempting to discover at what point reality had been exchanged for illusion….

The arbitristas proposed that Government expenditure should be slashed…

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