NOTE: The “Contents” section of the site menu list all articles, divided into six categories (“Bible Notes,” “Philosophers,” “American Politics,” “Nations,” “Manners and Morals,” and “Remembrances”). The articles are arranged in the chronological order of their posting. This Table of Contents lists articles in the “Manners and Morals” section in the order in which they may be read as if they were chapters in a book.
1. Frost and Oliver: Poets of Nature
Robert Frost: “Mending Wall.”
Mary Oliver: “Writing Poems.”
2. “Algeny”
Jeremy Rifkin: Algeny (1983).
3. Seneca: Epistle 88: “On Liberal and Vocational Studies.” Richard Mott Gummere translation. (1920).
4. Latini’s Treasure: What a Gentleman Should Know About Nature
Brunetto Latini: The Book of the Treasure. Book I: “The Origin of All Things.” Paul Barrette and Spurgeon Baldwin translation. (1993).
5. Latini’s Treasure: What a Gentleman Should Know About Morality
Brunetto Latini: The Book of the Treasure. Book II: “The Second Book Speaks of Virtues and Vices.” Paul Barrette and Spurgeon Baldwin translation. (1993).
6. Latini’s Treasure: What a Gentleman Should Know About Politics
Brunetto Latini: The Book of the Treasure. Book III: “Instructions Concerning Cities of Various Types and Good Speaking in Government.” Paul Barrette and Spurgeon Baldwin translation. (1993).
7. Is the Decline of Civility the Refutation of Montaigne?
Ann Hartle: What Happened to Civility: The Promise and Failure of Montaigne’s Modern Project (2022).
8. What Shakespeare Means to Say, When He Says, “As You Like It”
William Shakespeare: As You Like It.
9. Gentlemen and Gentlemanliness According to Shakespeare
William Shakespeare: Two Gentlemen of Verona.
10. Royal Dreaming
William Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
11. Is All Well That Ends Well?
William Shakespeare: All’s Well That Ends Well.
12. Comic Errors, Legal Slapstick
William Shakespeare: The Comedy of Errors.
13. What’s So Funny About the Law?
William Shakespeare: The Comedy of Errors. Lecture delivered for the Sixth Annual Will’n in Weslaco Festival, South Texas College, Weslaco, Texas, April 8, 2025.
14. Taming Our Shrewishness
William Shakespeare: The Taming of the Shrew.
15. Twelfth Night
William Shakespeare: Twelfth Night.
16. Geopolitics of Love
William Shakespeare: Love’s Labour’s Lost.
17. The Wisest Beholder
William Shakespeare: The Winter’s Tale.
18. Shakespearean Philosophy?
K. J. Spalding: The Philosophy of Shakespeare (1953).
19. The Roman Cato with the Soul of Washington
Joseph Addison: Cato: A Tragedy, and Selected Essays. Christine Dunn Henderson and Mark E. Yellin, editors. (2004).
20. Sade: Laclos for the Lackluster
Maurice Lever: Sade (1993).
21. Young Werther’s Wrongly Ordered Soul
Johann Wolfgang Goethe: The Sufferings of Young Werther. Stanley Corngold translation (2013).
22. Religious Toleration Among the Aristocrats? Chateaubriand’s Thought Experiment.
François-René de Chateaubriand: The Adventures of the Last Abencerraje. A. S. Kline translation (2011).
23. Tocqueville on the Moral Effects of Public Charity
Alexis de Tocqueville: Memoir on Pauperism and Other Writings: Poverty, Public Welfare, and Inequality. Christine Dunn Henderson translation (2021).
24. Sentimental Individualism
Richard Brautigan: So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away (1983).
Richard Sennett: The Frog Who Dared to Croak (1983).
25. “The Wizard of Oz,” or, Platonism for the People
26. “Gone With the Wind,” Begone
27. An Age of Inflation
28. Philip Gilbert Hamerton: Man of Letters, Man of Art
Philip Gilbert Hamerton: An Autobiography 1834-1858. (1896).
Eugénie Gindriez Hamerton: A Memoir by His Wife. (1896).
John Gross: The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: A Study of the Idiosyncratic and the Humane in Modern Literature. (1969).
29. The Life of the Mind as a Way of Life
Philip Gilbert Hamerton: The Intellectual Life. (1877).
30. The “Two Cities” Viewed from Poland
Adam Zagajewski: Two Cities: On Exile, History, and the Imagination. Lillian Vallee translation. (2002).
31. Why Ardor?
Adam Zagajewski: A Defense of Ardor. Claire Cavanaugh translation. (2004).
32. Teaching as Distinct from Educating
Jacques Barzun: Teacher in America. (1945).
33. Pedagogy of the (Would-Be?) Oppressors
Paulo Freire: Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Myram Bergman Ramos translation. (1968).
34. How Bloom Did It: Rhetoric and Principle in The Closing of the American Mind
Allan Bloom: The Closing of the American Mind (1987).
35. The Intellectual Life and the Social Life: Imperfect Together
Thomas Sowell: Intellectuals and Society (2009).
36. Sociology, That Societal Problem
Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss: Primitive Classification. Rodney Needham translation (1967). Originally published in 1903.
37. Liberal Education, That Vexed Thing
John Agresto: The Death of Learning: How American Education Has Failed Our Students and What to Do About It. (2022).
38. Oedipus’ Self-Deception
39. Fatherhood and Friendship in the Modern Regime
Jean Dutourd: The Springtime of Life. Denver and Helen Lindley translation. (1974).
40. Politics and Romance: Hawthorne’s Blithedale
Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Blithedale Romance.
41. Vaunting Guardians of the Marxist Revolution
42. The Goodness of Banality
43. Peace-Seeking in the Western Tradition
James Turner Johnson: The Quest for Peace: Three Traditions in Western Cultural History (1987).
44. The Holocaust Reconsidered
Tzetan Todorov: Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps. (1996).
45. Can the Use of Nuclear Weapons Be Moral?
Joseph P. Martino: A Fighting Chance: The Moral Use of Nuclear Weapons (1988).
46. Malraux and the “Farfelu”
André Malraux: The Kingdom of Farfelu with Paper Moons. W. B. Keckler translation. New York: Fugue State Press, 2005.
Georges Lemaitre: From Cubism to Surrealism in French Literature. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1978 (1947).
André Vandegans: La Jeunesse Littéraire d’André Malraux: Essai Sur L’Inspiration Farfelue. Abbeville: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1964.
Domnica Radulesca: André Malraux: The “Farfelu” as Expression of the Feminine and the Erotic. New York: Peter Lang, 1994.
47. Malraux and De Gaulle: Can Democracy Be Cultural?
48. Malraux and ‘Diversity’
Claude Tannery: Malraux, The Absolute Agnostic (1991).
49. Literary ‘Theory’ Refuted
Raymond Tallis: In Defence of Realism (1988).
50. Leftist Lit-Crit, Revised
Patrick Holm Hogan: The Politics of Interpretation (1990).
51. How Not to Edit a Collection of Essays
John K. Roth and Robert C. Whittemore, eds.: Ideology and the American Experience (1988).
52. What Is the Point of Studying Literature?
John Guillory: Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study. Part One. (2022).
53. Undertaking Literary Study
John Guillory: Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study. Part Two. (2022).
54. Does Music Mean Anything?
Peter Kalkavage: Music and the Idea of a World. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2024.
55. Soul Music
Robert R. Reilly (with Jens Laurson): Surprised by Beauty: A Listener’s Guide to the Recovery of Modern Music. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2016.
56. How to Be a Sensible Tourist: Edith Wharton in the Mediterranean
Edith Wharton: The Cruise of the Venadis (2004).
57. The Spirit of the (Democratic) Laws
Dominique Schnapper: The Democratic Spirit of Law (2016).
58. What Is a ‘Network’?
Niall Ferguson: The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, From the Freemasons to Facebook (2017).
59. Epidemic of Fear
Bernard-Henri Lévy: The Virus in the Age of Madness (2020).
60. The Crisis of Islamic Civilization
Ali A. Allawi: The Crisis of Islamic Civilization (2009).
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