Sublime

The Apology, as recorded by Plato, his student, is a bracing defense of the individual in search of truth:

A man who is good for anything ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying; he ought only to consider whether in doing anything he is doing right or wrong. . . . I shall obey God rather than you, and while I have life and strength I sh

It is the question of whether in these days the claims of government are to leave anything whatever of the rights of man.

The question agitating every defender of democracy is: How can this be reversed? A more precise phrasing would be: How are legitimate elites selected in a democratic society?

But King John was attacked because he was strong, not because he was weak. Richard the Second lost the crown because the crown was a trophy, not because it was a trifle. And President Wilson was deposed because he had used a power which is such, in its nature, that a man must use it at the risk of deposition. As a matter of fact, of course, it is e

the preliminary indications are that we have substantial historical ground under our feet in saying that Jesus’ characteristic message was the announcement of the kingdom. This conclusion, indeed, is not particularly controversial except where dogma has gained total control over history.

The Augustus was Washington, whose “reflexive restraint in seeking power,” his most recent biographer has suggested, “enabled him to exercise so much of it.” He hosted the 1785 meeting while committing himself to nothing. He allowed two young Agrippas—James Madison and Alexander Hamilton—to lead in public, while making it clear privately where he s

The Seminar announced to its public that the real Jesus was innocent of the wicked apocalypticism with which so many Christians, not least in the conservative American churches against which American academics react so strongly, had for so long associated him.

the new millennium it became apparent to anyone with eyes to

A curb on the practice was enacted in 1917, after President Wilson had added a phrase to the American political lexicon by denouncing “a little group of willful men” (actually eleven senators, including La Follette and his fellow liberal George Norris) who had talked to death Wilson’s proposal to arm American merchantmen against German submarine at