Nov 1, 2009

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Louis de Bonald, On Divorce, Part II

Read Part 1 here.DivorceThe reader may be forgiven for wondering why the foregoing matters are discussed at length in a treatise called On Divorce. Today we are inclined to view marriage as a “personal matter.” But it is not. Most obviously, it also concerns the interests of the children it produces:Public power is the guarantor of the commitment of the two spouses to form a...

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Oct 31, 2009

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Louis de Bonald, On Divorce, Part I

On Divorce Louis de BonaldTranslated and edited by Nicholas DavidsonNew Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1992On the European continent, Louis de Bonald has long been named alongside Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre as a foremost first generation critic of the French Revolution and founder of modern conservatism. De Maistre himself, late in life, wrote to Bonald: “I have...

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May 27, 2009

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Melville’s Typee (1846) and the Case for Civilization

from The Brussels Journal, May 19, 2009My subject is Herman Melville, and more specifically Melville’s case for civilization, but I would like to approach his Typee (1846), where he makes that case, through a preamble having to do with the figure against whose arguments Melville stakes his own: Jean-Jacques Rousseau.IThere is a shadow-side in the Western tradition that takes the...

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