In 1936 the Republic told the world that Nationalist bombers had massacred dozens of schoolchildren at Getafe. Robert Stradling shows the children were real but died ten miles away, and traces how their deaths became one of the Spanish Civil War’s most effective pieces of propaganda.
Where Benjamin sees a claim that has lost its power, Kommerell reports, as a discovery, that it still works.
Charles Mauron read Mallarmé’s tombs, mirrors and dead girls as the residue of a childhood grief. But Mallarmé had said what the tomb was for: the absent are only a name. Mauron tried to bury the poet under his biography; the poet meant to be buried under his word.
Napoleon was the lodestar for the generals of the American Civil War, Union and Confederate alike. Yet for all their admiration, they largely misunderstood both his art of war and the causes of his success.
Where academic theorists read literary works as impersonal expressions of social and economic conditions, Ellmann presented Joyce as the supreme conscious individual craftsman. It is an older and less fashionable approach, and it has the added advantage of being true.
Anna Dostoyevskaya saw in him the genius who needed an anchor for his artistic vision, someone who could compensate for his flaws, keep him on the right path, and provide the structure and the home through which he could become the man he was always meant to be.
Mere opposition to the modern world by way of romantic contemplation will remain empty. The romantic is caught in a contradiction: he seeks to escape the present through the past, and the past can offer the present no concrete alternative.
The Estado Novo legal doctrine was not merely a veneer on military rule nor a mere instrument of it but a coherent, anti-parliamentary theory of the state, elaborated by a self-conscious academic caste that survived the regime it built.
So long as Prussia retained the will to resist, her enemies would quarrel and bicker before finally losing the spirit to continue warring. All he had to do was cling on. Showalter has melted the idol of the invincible tactician and found, underneath, a man who could not be made to stop.
History is thus, for Schmitt, neither a linear progression beyond enmity nor merely a succession of stable political forms. Rather, it consists of recurring attempts to contain an ontology whose destructive possibilities can never be permanently abolished.
It was the Greeks, specifically the democratic Athenians, who first argued and debated about man’s inherent nature and how best that nature can be controlled by rational actors (i.e., princes and legislators).
In the second book of the Republic, Glaucon and Adeimantus press Socrates with a challenge that has never quite been answered.