Prufrock: The Politics of C. Max Deutsch is an amateur chess player with a knack history of photography essay learning quickly.
He wondered if he could beat the world’s best with only a month of training, so he challenged Magnus Carlsen to a match. The repetition seems entirely deliberate and suggests that the idea is near the center of Schmitt’s argument. What does Schmitt mean by this, and what significance does it have for us? A crisp, autumnal morning in the Vale of Malmesbury, 80 miles west of London. Watery skies, clay soil, and gentle hills quilted with the ancient pattern of cows and sheep, hedges and coppices, stone farmhouses and industrial barns. At Sunday Hill Farm in Brinkworth, the range was fired up early, and the kitchen is busy.
Half a dozen apple pies are cooling on the table, a partially carved leg of cold lamb waits on the sideboard, and a dog dances under everyone’s feet. The annual Apple Festival begins in just over an hour’s time. It’s a rather strange event,’ Sir Roger Scruton reflects. Like all traditions, it’s an invented one. We at this farm have nothing to sell except me. Leaving his muddy Wellingtons by the back door, Scruton drifts shoelessly through the busy kitchen and into his study, a converted barn with book-lined walls, two grand pianos, and a view over the fields.
Is the Electoral College Doomed? Who’s to Blame for the Moore Fiasco? Also: An amateur challenges Magnus Carlsen, Marvel names a new editor in chief, and more. Sorry, you’ve reached the limit on the articles you can view. Speaking not only for myself but for all other Old Western men whom you may meet,’ C. I would say, use your specimens while you can. There are not going to be many more dinosaurs.
De Descriptione Temporum,’ a description of the times. Lewis turned his observant eye to a watershed difference between a previous age, that of Austen, Milton, and Shakespeare, and the modern age of machines, Darwin, and progress. As one steeped in the ancients but living among the moderns, Lewis offered himself as a specimen of the Old Western Man, someone who could speak to both sides of the divide between modernity and the ancients. Although he gave this address in 1955, and died on November 22, 1963, Lewis still speaks, retaining a devoted following that shows no sign of diminishing. Four years later, Lewis had sold more than one million copies of his books and spoken on twenty-nine radio broadcasts to audiences averaging 600,000 listeners. The interest in Lewis has never abated. Lewis’s Narnia chronicles and his Christian apologetics are well known.
Less well known is his approach to culture and politics. Lewis’s political thought has been relatively unexplored in the fifty-four years since his death. The conventional wisdom suggests that Lewis was at best apathetic about politics and at worst actively hostile to it. His earliest biographers, his brother, and even Lewis himself testified to his indifference to political matters. In the early 1950s Lewis declined an invitation from Winston Churchill to become a Commander of the British Empire. Lewis claimed to avoid newspapers, and to the end of his life he expressed skepticism, and even despair, about politics.
Lewis held many politicians in disdain and was indeed pessimistic about the potential for political solutions to live up to their advertising. Nevertheless, conventional claims about the apolitical Lewis are overstated. We know from Lewis’s personal letters, his education and teaching, and his published works that he was both very interested in and knowledgeable about politics and political thought. Lewis had much to say about the foundations of a just political order. Get Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning.
