Bram Rawlings > Recent Status Updates

In preparation to visit Gettysburg and some other Civil War sites

Second read-through

A word for Karl Popper: “As Cicero has observed, the Republic does not bring to light the best possible regime but rather the nature of political things… of what character the city would have to be in order to satisfy the highest need of man. By letting us see that the city constructed in accordance with this requirement is not possible, he lets us see the essential limits, the nature, of the city.”

On Plato’s Republic

Clement Attlee

Gets better as you go along

Mussolini

Strauss’ commentary on Xenophon’s Hiero, followed by a debate between Strauss and the French Hegelian philosopher Alexandre Kojève

Engels, Marx, Bernstein, Lenin. Didn’t know Marx was such a loser. He never worked a job, lived off subsidies from Engels (and got credit for a good amount of his work), and despised actual working class people (not to mention Jews and Slavs). Also, it’s an irony that the growth of Marxism disproves Marx’s own theory that communism must take hold in an industrializing nation like Germany. Russia was agrarian.

Finished the chapter on Robert Owen and New Harmony. 19th century America just keeps getting weirder and weirder the more I learn about it.

Every now and then, when I feel I’m becoming too conservative, I’ll read books like this. The value is that it reminds me of my blind spots. It’s also an exercise in interpreting an author charitably.

But so far it’s a lot of strawmanning. He’s reacting to a Christianity that he grew up with but I did not.

If I stay motivated, I’m gonna write a book review and submit it somewhere. Asking everyone on here to hold me accountable

Reading on the plane to ATL

Unfortunately he defends infralapsarianism