4. Modern Thinking.  More Political Essays

Authoritarian deceptions endanger civil society and threaten to eradicate democratic ideals and institutions and the rule of law.  Propaganda, violence and intimidation are hallmarks of the abuse of power and whether right-wing fascism or progressive left-wing authoritarianism are neither new nor passing occurrences.  Modern technology has weaponised social media and widened its toxicity and misinformation for profit into a powerful economic force. Social media has intensified extreme falsehoods widening the gap between those who value objective evidence and rational argument and those who do not.  Fusing fact with fiction is a poisonous brew that endangers survival as individuals and as members of communities.

The essays in this volume consider issues people are concerned today through the insights of political thinkers.  They begin with Homer, one of the most famous people who ever lived but could equally not have existed at all. The following two short chapters were written in the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ on 2 April 2025 and revisited on several occasions in the months before publication.  The ideas of Adam Smith, especially the notion of tariff free trade and Thomas Carlyle's notion of the 'hero' provide the backdrop for this.  The fourth chapter considers the art of behaving well as seen in The Book of the Courtier by Baldassare Castiglione published in 1528 and in Galateo overo de’ Costumi by Giovanni della Casa posthumously published thirty years later.

In the 1730s and the 1770s respectively, Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke and Edmund Burke developed two contradictory approaches to political parties with Bolingbroke taking a negative position while Burke saw parties in a more positive light.  The ensuing debate is the subject of Chapter 5.  Chapter 6 looks at Liberalism under threat considering the major challenges it faces and how those challenges could be countered. Chapter 7 reconsiders aspects of George Orwell’s life through his relationship to Eileen, his first wife or, at least, how some critics have seen that attitude.   In Chapter 8, I return to the question of Orwell and totalitarianism that I  considered in a much-revised  essay on Orwell and 1984  that was initially written for a conference in 1984 and subsequently revised on several occasions.. Chapter 9 explores why during the 1940s and 1950s, the Frankfurt School apparently had no echoes in France and during the 1960s critical theory was in and in France soon dissolved into the shadows.

The next six chapters consider the role of women writers and thinkers and political thinking.  Chapter 10 is a brief introduction to the question of women and political thinking. Chapter 11 looks at the role played by Christine de Pizan in the early fifteenth century. Hannah Arendt is considered in Chapter 12 while French thinker Simone Weil, a philosopher who died at the age of thirty-four, is the subject of Chapter 13 . Simone de Beauvoir is the subject of Chapter 14 and Ayn Rand is examined in Chapter 15.