Dear Mr. Bolotin: I Wish It Were Only That Bad

Social justice ideology has redefined the meaning of “equality” and “freedom,” devastating the study of humanities. The answer? Return, without shame, to the reading of Great Books.

Creating a rich reading environment

The days of starting a child's reading development, age five, with an ‘early reader’ are long gone. Children will always pick up a book when it feels interesting to do so, just like adults. With so many great books and resources available, it has never been easier to find the inspiration.

Three great books about power. Actual analysis of concepts

In this article, three books related to power were analyzed: Kitami Masao’s “The Swordless Samurai”, Han Feitzu’s “The Book of Law and Order” and N. Machiavelli’s “The Prince”. The main judgments were highlighted and conclusions were drawn on how each author understands the power. Similar and opposite conclusions were compared. Also, the reasons for the fundamental differences between these ideas are identified. Analysis of differences on a religious basis was made using the modern Agamben's work “The Kingdom and the Glory” as it touches on the relationship between religion and power. The study used an integrated cultural-philosophical approach, in which descriptive method, comparative analysis, and synthesis can be separated from each other. As a result of this work, the following conclusions were obtained: the difference in the functions of power leads to different understanding of power; the religious environment surrounding a person largely influences his understanding of power. Based on this, different concepts of power should be compared to identify common significant positions that demonstrate the nature of power relations.

Matthew Arnold and the Institutional Imagination of Liberalism

I first took up Matthew Arnold's essays as a dissertation writer circa 2008. Although I had not read much of Arnold's prose beyond the commonly anthologized pieces (“The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” “The Study of Poetry,” bits of Culture and Anarchy), he was a figure very much out of favor, and I brought to the table a strong preconception of his polemic. Arnold, I had learned, was a kind of cultural nationalist trying to fight class divisions within Britain by prescribing a narrow canon of books that could shore up a common language for his compatriots. His main claim was that there was a singular tradition of great books called “culture” that embodied “the best that is known and thought in the world.” Everyone in Britain needed to keep reading these books if the nation were to retain a shared identity and not fall into chaos. Furthermore, as I understood it, Arnold thought that to experience culture you needed to remain “disinterested” and “aloof from what is called ‘the practical view of things’” (5:252). Arnold was a Victorian Mortimer Adler who sought to defend the authority of traditional literary canons as well as a Victorian Wimsatt-and-Beardsley who upheld disinterested close reading against hyperpolitical Theory.

Método socrático: el diálogo y la educación en la universidad

This article delves into the characteristics, virtues and advantages of the Socratic method in higher education based on the experience of the Great Books at the University of Chicago. It also reflects on the actuality and challenges of such a method in times of pandemic and technology.

Two

This chapter examines the meaning of America, which is present as much in the great books written about the American experiment as in the most practical elements of its politics and economic life. It considers Alexis de Tocqueville's theory of the American experiment and looks at how the image of America as a representative of European civilization was built over two centuries by thinkers and writers for whom no alternative was yet conceivable or for whom a transatlantic community offered a distinct promise of happiness. Wealth and power will not be enough to provide Americans with a new understanding of their place in the history of civilization. Only a new-—equally full and vast—-system of thought can do that, and this new system cannot be imported from outside. It must be built from the actual experience of American life, even and especially when that experience seems most random and unintelligible.