The United States, The European Union, Eastern Europe: Ehallenges and Eifferent Eesponses to Modernity

"The United States and the European Union have become an arena of interesting developments, political as well as cultural, in the post-communist, post-1989 world. The issues concern such fundamental problems as the meaning of the West, the unity or discontinuity between the European and American civilizations, attitudes to the crises of modernity, attitudes to modernization of the East-European part of the European Union. There are several interrelated problems here. One is the hegemonic status of the United States. The challenge for America is to find military and political means to secure its national interests without provoking an anti-US across-the-board coalition, and without subordinating its sovereign, constitutionally established power, to international law, institutions, and powerful NGOs with their own interests and ideological agendas. With this goes a crucial issue of how to combine this hegemonic status with the soft cultural power: not the unchallenged mass culture, but ‘culture’ understood as the American metaphor of democracy, republican participation against post-political bureaucratic tendencies, religious freedom and plurality, freedom of opportunity and solidarity as opposed to the mindless pursuit of equality – mechanical and based on resentment. The other problem concerns the claim of the European Union, even if recently muffled, to form itself into a new and morally higher civilization not just in terms of economic growth, but as an ideological and cultural model of the first post-national, post-political and post-metaphysical empire based on the administration of human rights."(...

Liberal monism and the culture war: Richard J. Neuhaus and the imperial moral self

Autor poruszył zagadnienie liberalnego monizmu jako doktryny o pretensjach totalitarnych – stojących w centrum wojny o kulturę. Podejmuje analizę liberalnego monizmu i antropologii stojącej u jego podstawy na przykładzie ich krytyki, dokonanej przez wybitnego amerykańskiego teologa i intelektualisty Richarda J. Neuhausa

The Bill of Rights and Judicial Review in the American Constitution of 1787

"It is a thesis of this article that the Bill of Rights in the Constitution facilitated the practice of federal judicial review. There were no explicit statements about review in the Bill of Rights but it conditioned the federal judieiary to exercise it. The potential of the Bill of Rights for inereasing the role of the federal judieiary was not elear. But in the context of both the written and the unwritten dimension of the Constitution and the question whether the latter could be made positive law, the role of the Bill of Rights for judicial review of federal power became visible. The role of the Ninth Amendment was especially important here."(...

Harvey Mansfield and virtue in the arid land of modern liberalism

"Harvey C. Mansfield is one of the most distinguished American political philosophers writing today, standing at the very center of a bitter debate over the ultimate meaning of political life in modernity, and here, arguably the most prominent conservative academic teaching in a major American university. Mansfield is usually described as a conservative, or in recent years as neoconservative, due to the prominence some of his alleged students achieved in the ranks of George W. Bush’s administration. But this is a very inadequate label, unless it is intended to mean, in general, that he is not a liberal in the contemporary use of the word in America, and that he has had many students who have achieved public prominence, also in the conservative ranks. Mansfield in a personal description of his thought concurs with being labeled as a conservative, using the equivocal understatement that “some people, with some reason, call [me] a conservative”. But whatever the merits and demerits of such a description, it seems too narrow, and thus woefully incomplete. Mansfield’s range of thought and writings is so wide, so versatile, and his presence as a public intellectual commenting on various aspects of contemporary cultural and political life so ubiquitous, that it would be difficult to compress his intellectual and public activities in such a way as to put on it a definite conservative identification. "(...

Romantic theopolitical testament – Richard J. Neuhaus and the american city of man

"Richard J. Neuhaus was a fascinating phenomenon. A first-rate public intellectual, in the 1960s he was a civil rights Lutheran activist for the equality of black Americans within the circle of Martin Luther King. He was a socially active priestintellectual. Neuhaus’s life was a life of an incessant burning passion, a Christian acutely aware that the times in which he lived were not ordinary times. He was at ease with the world and with people of all walks of life because he knew where the anchor was, a living embodiment of a truth found in the old maps of Christian antiquity, where Jerusalem was always at the center, the axis mundi – a blatant cartographical error, but a theological truth. At a time of ubiquitous disenchantment, Neuhaus was one of the greatest apologists of Christendom of today, a spectacular feast when Christendom was consigned by the majority of modern Western cognoscenti either to the ash heap of history or, at best, to a psychotherapeutic spirituality. His apology for Christendom, and the Catholic Church in that, stemmed from his understanding that Christianity, with all its sins, created and has been a defender of human freedom in the most fundamental, anthropological, but also political sense. A possible demise of Christianity would thus constitute in his judgment a menace to freedom even for those who battled it."(...