The Great Book of the 20th Century: “The Gulag Achigralop” | Daniel J Mahoney

Summary

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Episode Overview

Theme:
This episode of Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words (Daily Signal) is a "recuperating" guest-hosted edition by Jack Fowler, featuring political philosopher Daniel J. Mahoney. The conversation offers Mahoney's recommendations for the most essential books that conservatives—or any intellectually curious person—should read to deepen their understanding of Western civilization, conservatism, totalitarianism, and the ideological challenges of the modern era. Special focus is given to Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, which Mahoney calls “the greatest book of the 20th century.”

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Discussion begins [06:18]

• Mahoney’s Appraisal:

  • Describes The Gulag Archipelago as "the greatest book of the 20th century, certainly the greatest nonfiction book" ([06:18]).
  • The book is “sui generis — not reducible to anything other than itself. It is a great work of art or literature.”
  • Captures the tragedy of a people subjected to totalitarianism, recounts Solzhenitsyn’s transformation, and embodies a powerful critique of ideology.

• Solzhenitsyn’s Transformation:

  • Raised Orthodox, became a young communist, only to be transformed in the Gulag through suffering and observation ([07:21]).
  • The camp experience stripped away ideological illusions, leading to a recovery of spiritual truth and a deeper anthropological insight: “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being” ([08:20]).

• Spiritual & Political Lessons:

  • Argues Solzhenitsyn rediscovered the spiritual/religious dimensions of humanity.
  • “Evil cannot be abolished from the world, but it can be constricted within every human person and every human heart” ([09:26]).
  • Warns against utopian projects to transform human nature — efforts that bring repression and mass murder.

• The Human Spirit’s Survival:

  • Despite attempts by the Soviet regime to crush individuality and hope, acts of poetry and spiritual resistance persisted in the camps.
  • “Somehow the human spirit survived. Somehow human beings continued to be oriented toward goods that the Soviet regime aimed to crush” ([12:06]).
  • Cites the Kengir uprising: even under the worst conditions, prisoners established a form of self-government and spiritual ascent ([13:44]).

• Nataya Solzhenitsyn’s Preface:

  • Mahoney recommends the Vintage Classics edition with an intro by Jordan Peterson and afterword by Solzhenitsyn’s widow.
  • Reads:
    • “Let the reader who expects this book to be a mere political expose slam it shut right now… the line dividing good from evil cuts through the heart of every human being… The Gulag Archipelago is ultimately a hopeful book, about the ascent of the human spirit, about its struggle with evil.” ([16:48])

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2. American Conservatism: Reclaiming an Intellectual Tradition (ed. Andrew Bacevich)

Discussion begins [21:01]

• Content & Strengths:

  • Mahoney praises the breadth of the anthology, despite Bacevich’s distinct, somewhat isolationist editorial slant.
  • Features seminal conservative figures and themes, from Henry Adams to Irving Babbitt, Whitaker Chambers, and Shelby Steele.
  • Excellent primer for curious conservatives, capturing the broad sweep of 20th-century conservative thought.

• Quotable Insight:

  • “Babbitt took aim at a kind of sentimentality and humanitarianism that reduced religion to feeling rather to the kind of elevation that comes from an encounter with the transcendent God.” ([23:32])
  • On Whitaker Chambers’ Witness: “It really provides the grounds… for Chambers' rejection of materialism. Not only communist materialism, but the materialism of technocratic civilization.” ([25:17])

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3. Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions and Roger Scruton’s Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands

Discussion begins [28:36]

Thomas Sowell — A Conflict of Visions

• Life & Intellectual Journey:
  • “Thomas Sowell is a very rare and admirable figure… starting off as a young Marxist, learning the limits of collectivism in his graduate studies with people like Hayek… a man of the utmost courage” ([28:38]).
• Constrained vs. Unconstrained Visions:
  • Sowell contrasts those who understand human limitations (Burke, Hayek, the Federalists) with utopian visionaries prone to “Promethean impatience” ([30:12]).
  • “He gives the unconstrained vision its due… but ultimately, he thinks the unconstrained vision… leads to social engineering, … the cult of violence and revolution.”
• Why Sowell Matters:
  • “He’s much more than an economist… he is a social philosopher. One of the great virtues of The Conflict of Visions is the mix of erudition with amazing accessibility.” ([33:13])

Roger Scruton — Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands

Discussion begins [36:10]

• Intellectual Range:
  • Scruton championed the underground intellectual movement behind the Iron Curtain, renewed interest in Burke, and was a defender of beauty and seriousness in culture.
  • Suffered professional persecution for his conservatism; eventually vindicated in Britain ([36:43]).
• Book’s Purpose:
  • An updated expansion of Scruton’s 1985 Thinkers of the New Left, surveying key figures: Rawls, Sartre, Badiou (“an unrepentant communist who defends ‘l’idée de communisme’”), and Zizek, who “remains an unremitting defender of that which cannot be defended” ([38:47], [41:33]).
  • On Zizek: “He thinks Robespierre was absolutely right. Political virtue and political terror are indistinguishable and go hand in hand.” ([42:29])
• On Academic Esteem for the Radical Left:
  • Mahoney expresses frustration that extreme leftists—some who defend totalitarianism—are revered in academia.
    • “Your parents are spending $300,000 a year for you to parrot a communalist from Slovenia. Can’t Amherst College do any better than this?” ([43:56])

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4. C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man and Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France

Discussion begins [45:59]

The Abolition of Man

• Central Premise:
  • Lewis critiques the reduction of values to subjective feelings, counters “the poison of subjectivism” ([46:31]).
  • Highlights the loss of “spirit” in modern education—men “without chests”—and the danger of moral relativism:
    • “We make men without chests... We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. … We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.” ([48:42], direct quote from Lewis)
• Defense of Natural Law:
  • Argues for “the Dao”—an enduring, universal moral reality cutting across humanity, uniting civilizations ([50:10]).
• Warning to Biotechnical Age:
  • “Lewis argues that the modern conquest of nature... culminates in the conquest of human nature.”
  • Draws parallels between totalitarianism’s overt violence and modern technocratic attempts to engineer humanity out of existence ([52:44]).

Burke’s Reflections

• Conservatism’s Foundational Text:
  • “Simply indispensable, elegant, penetrating books that speak to the threats that a certain kind of ideology poses to the integrity of our civilization” ([45:59]).
  • Mahoney situates Burke as both a classical liberal and the father of modern conservative thought.
  • Burke opposed “armed doctrine informed by atheism, informed by a spirit of utopian engineering” ([55:42]).
  • “Liberty is not doing what you want. It is always necessarily informed by the virtues” ([56:23]).
• On Prudence and Human Nature:
  • Declares prudence “a high moral virtue... has to be the guide to those who think and act in the political realm.”
• Notable Quote:
  • “A manly… manliness, virility, moral and regulated liberty. You can see why Burke is now considered to be the father of intellectual and political conservatism.” ([56:09])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Daniel J. Mahoney, on Solzhenitsyn:

  “Bless you, prison, for having been in my life." ([07:38])
  "The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being... evil cannot be abolished from the world, but it can be constricted within every human person and every human heart.” ([08:26], [09:26])

• On the Human Spirit:

  “Somehow, through these acts of defiance, through this recovery of the things of the spirit, the sparks of the spirit continued to speak to human beings.” ([12:55])

• On the Importance of Books:

  “Any person who cares about self, knowledge, civilization, and what we must do to preserve them must engage this book.” ([53:18], referring to Lewis’ Abolition of Man)

• Personal Moment:

  “It was a famous moment” ([58:51]) — Mahoney on publicly confronting Alger Hiss at Holy Cross.

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [00:00] – Mahoney’s initial appraisal of The Gulag Archipelago
• [06:18] – Mahoney’s extended analysis: Why Gulag is essential
• [09:26] – The philosophical and spiritual lessons of the Gulag
• [13:44] – Story of the Kengir uprising and spiritual defiance
• [16:48] – Quoting Nataya Solzhenitsyn on the book’s meaning
• [21:01] – Introduction to American Conservatism: Reclaiming an Intellectual Tradition
• [28:36] – Why Sowell and Scruton are essential reading
• [36:10] – On Scruton’s life, career, and dissection of the left
• [42:29] – The academic prominence of radical leftists
• [45:59] – Final book recommendations: Lewis and Burke
• [48:42] – Reading from The Abolition of Man
• [55:42] – The enduring wisdom of Edmund Burke

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Tone and Language Notes

• Mahoney’s language is erudite, passionate, at times fiery—especially when discussing the moral failure of totalitarian apologists and the blindness of academia.
• Quotations from Solzhenitsyn, Lewis, and Burke punctuate the discussion, underscoring the philosophical depth and personal resonance these works hold for Mahoney.
• Tone is conversational but intellectually rigorous, engaging non-expert listeners while appealing to those searching for cultural and intellectual grounding.

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Summary Table: Mahoney’s Six Recommended Books

| Book | Author | Reason for Recommendation | Notable Segment | |------|--------------------------|-------------------------|---------------------| | The Gulag Archipelago | Alexander Solzhenitsyn | Greatest nonfiction book of the 20th century; exposes totalitarianism, spiritual and political insight | [06:18-18:30] | | American Conservatism: Reclaiming an Intellectual Tradition | Ed. Andrew Bacevich | Best contemporary anthology of conservative thought, varied and comprehensively curated | [21:01-27:03] | | A Conflict of Visions | Thomas Sowell | Accessible account of the fundamental ideological rift in modern Western thought; empathy for different perspectives | [28:36-33:51] | | Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands | Roger Scruton | Masterful, humane, and critical examination of the New Left and academic radicalism | [36:10-44:26] | | The Abolition of Man | C.S. Lewis | Penetrating critique of moral subjectivism and defense of objective value and human nature | [45:59-54:38] | | Reflections on the Revolution in France | Edmund Burke | Foundational conservative text rejecting utopian revolution and extolling liberty tempered by virtue | [54:38-end] |

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Conclusion

Daniel J. Mahoney’s thoughtful recommendations and passionate analysis provide listeners with an intellectual road map to understanding and preserving Western civilization, confronting the dangers of ideology, and re-engaging with questions of virtue, liberty, and human dignity. From the horrors and spiritual survival chronicled in the Gulag Archipelago to the philosophical warnings of Lewis and Burke, the episode is a profound call to intellectual seriousness and moral courage.

Transcript

[Daniel J. Mahoney]

Well, I consider the Gulag Archipelago to be the greatest book of the 20th century, certainly greatest nonfiction book of the 20th century. It's a book that does something that no other book does. It captures the tragedy of a people. It captures the horrific experience of applied ideology, of totalitarianism of the 20th century, while also telling Solzhenitsyn's own story. Thomas Sowell is a very rare and admirable figure. His life story, starting off as a young Marxist, you know, learning the limits of collectivism in his graduate studies with people like Friedrich von Hayek, you know, it's quite a story there. Zizek wrote a book in defense of the indefensible, and he has defenses of Robespierre, whose writings he has collected. He thinks Robespierre was absolutely right. Political virtue and political terror are indistinguishable and go hand in hand.

[Jack Fowler]

Well, hello, ladies, and hello, gentlemen. Welcome to Victor Davis Hansen in His Own Words. Alas, without Victor Davis Hansen, this is one of the several. Victor is recuperating episodes of the podcast that is happily hosted at the Daily Signal. And Victor has asked that the podcast continue. And, of course, I said yes, I will do whatever you tell me to do, Victor. So what we've settled on is for four times a week, I'm going to have on a guest, a really important person, really smart person, and ask them five questions, maybe six. I may. I may blunder into a sixth one. And I am lucky to have with me here today, with you today, Daniel J. Mahoney, my dear friend for over 40 years and one of America's truly great public intellectuals and writers, and a friend of Victor. Actually. Dan hosted this podcast for a few episodes a few years back when, after Victor had. What was it? The dying citizen had come out. Dan.

[Daniel J. Mahoney]

That's exactly right.

[Jack Fowler]

Yeah. We wanted someone with the intellectual heft to discuss this with Victor. I don't have hef.

[Daniel J. Mahoney]

Well, I had just reviewed the book.

[Jack Fowler]

Yeah, well, that mattered. Well, let me give you a little bio, Dan, and then we're going to get into some questions. Dan is a professor emeritus from Assumption University in Worcester, Massachusetts. He taught there political science from 1986 to 2021. He held the Augustine Chair for Distinguished Scholarship. He's a senior fellow now at the Claremont Institute, and he's a regular contributor to the Claremont Review of Book Books and the American Mind, amongst many other new criteria. National Review. I don't know what Dan doesn't write for. He's a senior visiting fellow at Hillsdale College. He teaches at their graduate program in Washington, D.C. dan is the author of so many books, with one, the Statesman as Thinker voted the Conservative Book of the year in 2023. Dan is a political philosopher in his own right, and he's also considered the. He is considered the world's premier expert on Alexander Solzhenitsyn. I would even throw in there Roger Scruton. And he's also esteemed as an expert on Churchill, De Gaulle, Tocqueville, Burke, and just about anyone else who's put pen to paper or even maybe papyrus. His curriculum vitae is 24 pages. That's pretty long. So today we're going to have Dan on to talk about five, we'll say six important books that it's not necessarily that any conservative would want. But, you know, there's so many of us. I mentioned Hillsdale before people go back to what did I miss in my life? I want to know more about my roots. What's the basis of Western civilization? What is this that makes America exceptional? What about our founding? So the important things to give you some intellectual heft in your life. What are five books, Dan, that you would recommend that people should read? And Dan has those recommendations. Recommendations. And we are going to get to them. Maybe even six books when we come back from these important messages.

[Daniel J. Mahoney]

Since the founding of America 250 years.

[Jack Fowler]

Ago, many things have changed, but some things never do. The commitment of husband and wife, the importance of passing along our values to our children.

[Daniel J. Mahoney]

The faithfulness of God.

[Jack Fowler]

Some wonder how we can ensure America will continue to thrive as long as we keep first things first. We've only just begun. America the Beautiful. We are back with Victor Davis Hanson in his own words on the Daily Signal Network. Daniel J. Mahoney, dear friend, is here with us today. We are recording on the 15th of January, and I've lost my notes. Oh, this episode should be up on the 23rd. So, Dan, let's get to the first book. And the man outside of yourself, who I think most scholars connect you with and genuflect even to you, and that's Alexander Solzhenitsyn. And one of the books you want to recommend is Solzhenitsyn's the Gulag, an experiment in literary investigation. It was first published in 1973. But I think, Dan, you're going to give us an ideal publication, an abridged edition. You'll make your recommendation. So, Dan, tell us why you picked this book and also explain a little. Some of these books you've picked have interesting titles. The whole title, the subtitle so this is an experiment in literary investigation, if you get to that. But, Dan, why the Gulag?

[Daniel J. Mahoney]

Well, I consider the Gulag Archipelago to be the greatest book of the 20th century, certainly the greatest nonfiction book of the 20th century. It is sui generis, to use a Latin phrase. It's not reducible, I think, to anything other than itself. It is a great work of art or literature. That's why sometimes when I go into Barnes and Nobles, I see it in the fiction section, because some book clerks can't distinguish between great works of literature and works of fiction. But it's a book that does something that no other book does. It captures the tragedy of a people. It captures the horrific experience of applied ideology, of totalitarianism of the 20th century, while also telling Solzhenitsyn's own story. A young man Born in 1918, the first full year after Lenin's revolution, the Soviet coup d', etat, Red October, Solzhenitsyn was raised in a patriotic, conservative Orthodox family. But by the time he was a teenager, he had broken with the faith of his fathers. He had joined the Komsomols, the Young Soviet Youth League. He saw himself as a true believer. And yet he also aspired to be a great writer. He also, in fact, he began writing his other great work, his other great masterwork, the Red Wheel, when he was 18. He more or less composed the entire chapter on the disastrous battle of Tannenberg at the beginning of World War I, where the Russians were badly routed by the Germans. But Solzhenitsyn said he was. You know, he famously says in a chapter called the Ascent in the Gulag Archipelago, bless you, prison, for having been in my life. There's several reasons he says this, One, because the scales of ideology, of the great ideological lie fell from his eyes in prison, and he began to see the truth of the things around him, the truth about Communist totalitarianism. He got to experience prison and labor camps, what he later called the Gulag Archipelago, the islands of repression throughout the totalitarian state that held millions upon millions of prisoners. And as a result of that, Solzhenitsyn underwent a transformation that was simultaneously spiritual and political. The great truth dawned on him, and the great truth was a truth that began, that allowed him to take the spiritual and religious dimensions of the human being seriously again, to see the falsehood of all reductive and materialist and utopian ideologies. And Solzhenitsyn famously puts it in two sister parallel chapters of the Gulag Archaeology Archipelago. He saw that the truth that the line Dividing good and evil lay not between parties, between ideologies, between states, but divided every human heart. He recovered, you might say, an anthropology, a view of the human person where human beings were imperfect and yet capable of, of living virtuous and good lives, where the truth beckoned to human beings, Where the revolutionary idea that one could radically transform human nature and create heaven on earth was exposed as an illusion. And Solzhenitsyn had to undergo the experience of repression, of the camps, of applied ideology, to learn these truths. Truth. And so, on one level, he was grateful, as he says, gradually lying on prison straw, that great truth that evil cannot be abolished from the world, but it can be constricted within every human person and every human heart. That is a seemingly philosophical or religious lesson, but it had immense political implications. It exposed the ideological lie for what it was, a lie. And it allowed Solzhenitsyn to appreciate that any effort to impose such a vision on an entire nation or people would lead to calamity. It would lead to mass murder and repression. And Solzhenitsyn tells that whole story in the Gulag Archipelago. He tells the story of his own arrest, his own interrogation, his own. The camps, prisoning camps acted as a schoolhouse for Solzhenitsyn. He learned from speaking to other prisoners. He had a freedom that was impossible in so called free Soviet life, where everything was monitored, controlled, propagandized, where the lie was ascendant. And that story of every aspect of free and not free Soviet life, the account of the soul of man under barbed wire, the account of lying and betrayal as literal forms of existence, the account of the war on the peasants, the account of poetry in the camps, as he says, somehow the human spirit survived. Somehow human beings continued to be oriented toward goods that were. That the Soviet regime aimed to crush. There's a beautiful image where at the end of a chapter, Poetry under a Tombstone, Solzhenitsyn reports these poems that prisoners, I so called memorize. And he said everything in the prison experience, especially that prison experience, aimed to crush the human spirit, to make people identical. You know, their faces had been worn out by the wind, the desert wind, and by 16 hours of work and cold weather and all that. And he said, yet somehow, through these acts of defiance, through this recovery of the things of the spirit, the sparks of the spirit continued to speak to human beings. And of course, Solzhenitsyn makes these men in a way, he makes them immortal by writing about their efforts in the camps. But Solzhenitsyn, the Gulag Archipelago is not just about what Solzhenitsyn learned in the camps, his own spiritual ascent, his own experience of spiritual transformation or even redemptive suffering. It's also about the necessity of struggle against evil. And Solzhenitsyn, for example, gives a. He wasn't there, but he was in a similar camp. He gives an account of the 40 days of Kangir, where 8,000 prisoners, politicals and non politicals, rose up, took over a camp for 100 days in the spring of 1954. And he said these men experienced freedom and spiritual assent under the worst possible conditions. They set up self government in the Soviet concentration camp for the first time since 1917. And when they were all given an opportunity to escape before the tanks crushed the Kingir Rebellion, Solzhenitsyn even wrote a play about this called the Tanks Know the Truth. Only a dozen men or so took an opportunity of this escape. They knew they would lose everything. They knew many would die. They knew many face long years of imprisonment. But something had arisen in their souls, an integrity, a spiritedness, an indomitability that could not be crushed. And Tolzen, 18 tells other stories like that. In 1962, an entire city at Novocherkassk rose up against their Soviet tyrants. He said not a single Western journalist in Moscow even knew about this, even though it was just a couple hundred miles away. It was first made, brought to the attention of the world in the Gulag Archipelago. There's recently been a Russian film that was.

[Jack Fowler]

Yeah, I was going to say, wasn't there a movie on that?

[Daniel J. Mahoney]

Yeah, there was a Russian film that was highlighted in an article a year or two ago in the New Yorker about Novocherkass. But in other words, Solzhenitsyn is also saying, you know, the Russian people and other Soviet peoples did not take this all sitting down. There were acts of rebellion, et cetera. But ultimately, I'm going to read you a quotation from Nataya Solzhenitsyn, Solzhenitsyn's widow, who wrote, there's an edition of the Gulag Archipelago of the authorized abridgment that I recommend to everyone. The edition that you can get from Amazon.uk I think you can also get it from Amazon.com, but it's the edition published in London by Vintage in their classic book series. It has a very elegant and forceful introduction by Jordan P. Peterson, who gets to the heart of the work. And it has an afterword by Nataja Solzhenitsyna called the Gift of Incarnation. But let me tell you what Mrs. Solzhenitsyn says about the nature of this work. She says this work is an epic poem above all. And she says, what is the poem about? Solzhenitsyn has provided the answer. We go back to the blue caps. Let the reader who expects this book to be a mere political expose slam it shut right now. If only it were so simple. If only it were true that there exist evil people insidiously committing evil deeds whom it is necessary simply to separate out and destroy. That's what the communists tried to do with the kulaks, with the peasants, with churchmen, with czarists. Kill them all and we'll have utopian power. But the line dividing good from evil cuts through the heart of every human being. This line is not static within us. It sways to and fro over the years, even in a heart imbued with evil. It allows a small bridgehead of good to remain. And it permits a small niche of evil to survive, even in the kindest of hearts. And Solzhenitsyn's widow then adds the book the Gulag Archipelago. It's ultimately a hopeful book, a book about the ascent of the human spirit, about its struggle with evil. That is the reason why when readers reach the end of the work, they feel not only pain and anger, legitimate anger, I would add, but an upsurge of strength and light.

[Jack Fowler]

Thank you, Dan. Okay, this is a show, by the way. We have to pay bills, so I have to read something. And then we're going to talk about another book Quickly. If you want to drop extra pounds, folks, boost energy levels or reduce swelling in your legs and feet, then this message is for you. Pure Health Research is on a mission to make America healthy again. At two of the best selling health supplements are leading the way. First, Liver health formula. Over 100 billion Americans have a sluggish liver riddled with fatty deposits. This can kill your metabolism, pile on the pounds, and make you feel tired. Well, Liver Health Formula takes care of all that. It supports thriving liver health with special nutrients like artichoke extract and milk thistle. This is one of the easiest ways to slim down and to revitalize your energy levels. And the next is lymph system support. If you struggle with fluid buildup or swelling in your legs, ankle or feet, then this is for you. The natural ingredients in lymph system support help gently flush extra fluid and toxins out of the body. And right now, for a limited time, you can get 35% off liver health Formula and lymph system support along with all 50 plus supplements that pure Health Research has to offer. Head over to PureHealthResearch.com and use the coupon code Victor at checkout. And that's purehealthresearch.com with coupon code Victor to save 35% on your order today. And we thank the good people from Pure Health Research for sponsoring Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. And Dan Mahoney, you've never given a lecture before on souls and each. And that has been followed by a Pure Health Research spot. And mark your calendar.

[Daniel J. Mahoney]

No, but we live in the commercial west, and these are inevitable realities.

[Jack Fowler]

Gotta pay them bills. Well, thanks. We really do appreciate Pure Health Research, folks. So, Dan, let's take this one quickly since it's the least of the. I don't want to knock it, but this is a book. This will be the sixth book, so we'll stick it in here quickly, okay? In 2020, the Library of America published a collection, American Conservatism Reclaiming an Intellectual Tradition. Andrew Bacevich was the editor of that. You reviewed that for National Review. But you think this is for the purpose here of recommending worthwhile books to conservatives about to strengthen their intellectual roots? You recommend this is a book folks should read.

[Daniel J. Mahoney]

I think it's a very fine book. I think it's eccentric in that Bacevich, who has his own very distinctive I wouldn't call it exactly isolationist, but I would call it a kind of pre Cold War America staying close to home approach to foreign policy. Bacevich includes some figures in the book, like Charles Beard, who I don't think are conservative at all. But on the whole, the selections chosen by Bacevich are varied, thoughtful, interesting, and I think for a reader looking for a comprehensive account of the full range of conservative currents, conservative ideas, conservative thinkers, it's probably the best place to turn. Russell Kirk's Conservative Mind is a very great book. It's much more literary. It's longer. It includes many writers per se who are important to the conservative tradition but are not, let's say, conservative political thinkers per se. And this is much more up to date since Kirk's book was published in 1953. So Bacevich's book includes some earlier thinkers who are of interest to conservatives, including Henry Adams, the famous chapter from his autobiography on the dynamo and the virgin, the contradictions of our civilization, the one hair, industrial energy, movement, acceleration, the dynamo, but then the virgin, the symbol of beauty and holiness that is so essential to an older West. And if we think about our civilization, the coexistence of Religion, the quest for holiness with quotidian material realities. Well, Henry Adams captures that very well. It includes a beautiful chapter by the new Humanist. Humanists in the old sense, not like atheistic preachers and busybodies, but people are keeping alive a tradition of classical humanism. Irving Babbitt, who was a professor of French literature at Harvard, wrote a very important book published in 1924 called Democracy and Leadership. There's a beautiful excerpt from one of his. An essay of his called what I Believe Rousseau and Religion. And Babbitt took aim at a kind of sentimentality and humanitarianism that reduced religion to feeling rather to the kind of elevation that comes from an encounter with the transcendent God. And he located the kind of lowering the kind of radical democratization of American culture and universities. On two figures. Bacon, Francis Bacon, the 17th century British philosopher who made everything about utility, productivity, science, conquering nature for the relief of man's estate and a famous freight of him. And then the kind of sentimentality and romanticism that stemmed at least in some part from the thought of Rousseau and his beau ideal of a hero, of a thinker who combines the moral imagination with deference toward more traditional understanding of human obligation and of civilization. As Edmund Burke. So that's. But in this same volume you have Whitaker Chambers forward to witness a letter to My Children, which is a text that can change lives and move hearts. It really provides the grounds, you might say, for Chambers rejection of materialism. Not only communist materialism, but the materialism of technocratic civilization. Beautiful account of looking in his daughter's ear and how it reveals something about the purposiveness and design inherent in the nature of reality. But many important figures. John Courtney Murray, who wrote we hold these Truths, a kind of Catholic defense of American democracy. Old conservative philosophical stalwarts like Wilmore Kendall and Harry Jaffa. Shelby Steele on affirmative action. Richard John Newhouse on whether atheists can be citizens. Christopher Lasch on what secularism does to the soul of men. A figure who was very important to William F. Buckley Jr. Whose centenary we celebrated last year. Albert Chinnock was a fine writer, a kind of aristocratic liberal, I guess. An excerpt from Our Enemy the State we have great figures like Milton Friedman on the intrinsic connection between capitalism and freedom. Irving Kristol's more pessimistic account of the effect of capitalism on the virtues you need virtue to be a good capitalist. Delayed gratification, self restraint. But material prosperity undermines all of that. And we have many other figures, including James Burnham and Reinhold Niebuhr. But I think this book, Richard Weaver, this book allows the busy thinking person to confront a wide range of conservative thought, you might say the 20th century conservative classics. And for that I recommend it.

[Jack Fowler]

Well, when we by the way, Henry Adams piece, I do think I married the dynamo virgin myself. But when we come back from this when we come back from this break, we'll take on two at one time, two contemporaries, one who's just recently passed away, but that'll be Thomas Sowell and Roger Scruton. We'll do that when we come back from these important messages. We are back with Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. I have the great pleasure Jack Fowler, that's me. I have the great pleasure of interviewing my dear friend for over 40 years, Daniel J. Mahoney, one of the great political philosophers of our time and great writers. Dan is also a great friend of Victor. Dan is offering us six books that he thinks he's recommending that conservatives or the intellectually curious, mature intellectually curious should be reading. So two of them, Dan, are people you. Well, one is you have particular expertise. Let me just give these titles. Thomas Sowell's 2007 book, A Conflict of Ideological Origins of Political Struggles. That's one. And then Roger Scruton, who I think it's fair to say you were a friend of and not only an admirer, but a great scholar of. And Roger Scruton's 2019 book you recommend, that's Fools, Frauds and Firebrands, Thinkers of the New Left. Dan, why are you recommending these two books?

[Daniel J. Mahoney]

All right. Well, it seems to me that Thomas Sowell is a very rare and admirable figure. His life story, you know, coming from a poor black family, well being, you know, raised in between Harvard and North Carolina, starting off as a young Marxist, learning the limits of collectivism in his graduate studies with people like Friedrich von Hayek. It's quite a story there. And he's a man of the utmost courage. He's a very black man, if I can put it that way, who also refuses to buy into a philosophy of victimization that has very little moral or empirical support. He's also, I think, a formidable thinker. Many of his books repeat and renew themes he's previously developed, but some are wholly original and worthy of reading and rereading. One is Knowledge and Decisions, an early philosophical book that I greatly esteem. But his most accessible book and the book I chose for our presentation and discussion today is the Conflict of Visions, I should add. It was Originally published in 1987 and then republished in an augmented and somewhat Revised Edition in 2007. That book is beautifully written, and it displays all of Soul's considerable learning. Soul is much more than an economist, you know, he is a social philosopher. He is a man of great learning. He's the author of a very important book on the Marxism of Marx. But this book lays out the fundamental conflict of visions that Sowell think lies at the heart of modern and contemporary intellectual and political life. And in essence, Sowell contrasts a constrained vision, as he calls it. He draws on Burke, the Federalist Papers, Hayek and others, some literary writers, thinkers who had a profound sense of the complexity of society and human nature, who thought limits were built into the human condition, who thought that there could be unintended, disastrous, calamitous unintended consequences from the best of intentions. Thinkers who were wary of utopianism, wary of the cult of violence and revolution. And so, looking at the constrained vision, Saul essentially lays out his own social and political philosophy. But what makes the book interesting is he admits that people are inclined to one of the two visions, the constrained and the unconstrained. Dispositionally, I mean, it's pretty clear anyone who reads this book or Thomas Sowell's work as a whole knows that he embodies and sympathizes greatly with the constrained vision. But he gives the unconstrained vision its due. He admits that there are many writers and thinkers associated with that who wrote well, who had considerable learning, who had some insights. But ultimately, I think he thinks the unconstrained vision, the vision that leads to social engineering, Promethean impatience, you know, an exaggerated sense of our ability to control events, to remold people, to master things that are beyond human control. One reason why I think Soul is so sympathetic to the market economy is the market economy works without central direction, released, without a command and control approach. It allows the certain spontaneity of human nature, of certain. Certain motives, including self interest, but also hard work, diligence, love of family, sense of energy, and entrepreneurship to thrive. And like Hayek, Sol knows that the pricing system gives us information about goods and services, about what we ought to do, what we ought to produce, where we can make money that no system of centralized command could do. But again, Sol is much more than an economist. He's an artful social philosopher with immense learning. And I would say one of the great virtues of the conflict of visions is the mix of erudition with amazing accessibility.

[Jack Fowler]

Dan, before you address Scruton, I have to do my business. I need a stage manager here. To our listeners, to our viewers. If you've studied enough history, you start to see a pattern. Nations don't lose their way overnight. They drift through debt and division until one day you realize the foundations you thought were permanent were never permanent at all. Today, America is spending at levels once reserved for wartime. We've normalized deficits that would have stunned earlier generations, and policymakers now debate whether the only path forward is more intervention, more printing, more distortion. But here's the historical truth. Every society that pushed its currency beyond discipline eventually paid a price. The wise never waited for collapse. They prepared for the correction. And that's why so many thoughtful Americans, especially those nearing retirement or in retirement, are reallocating part of their wealth into something that has outlasted every paper experiment in human history, talking about physical gold not as speculation but as insulation. Our reputation matters here at Victor Davis Hanson in his own words. And that's why we're partnered with Allegiance Gold, a company distinguished by integrity, reliability and an A rating with a better Business Bureau. For years, they've guided Americans through transparent education and long standing relationships built on trust. And right now, they're extending a special liberty offer for our listeners and viewers to help you get started with real gold, whether your funds are in a retirement account or sitting in the bank. If you believe, as we do, that the best time to reinforce your position is before the storm becomes obvious. Call 8447-909191-84479,09191 or visit protectwithvictor.com that's 844-7909-1918-4790-9191 or visit protect with victor.com History rewards those who take the long view, and we thank the good people from Allegiance Gold for sponsoring Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. Dan the Man Mahoney Roger Scruton Fools, frauds and firebrands, thinkers of the New Left. Why is this one of the books you've selected?

[Daniel J. Mahoney]

Well, I have profound admiration for Roger Scruton, who was an incredible example of a whole human being, a man who aspired to write and think intelligently, humanely, prudently about the full range of human phenomena. He was a philosopher of note, a political commentator. He worked assiduously to help the intellectual underground behind the Iron Curtain. In fact, wrote a wonderful political intellectual novel about that in 1985, published in 1985, called Notes from Underground. He renewed the serious attention to Edmund Burke and other aspects of the modern philosophical conservative tradition. All in all, he wrote on aesthetics he defended Beauty against the idea is a lovely book, a television series called Beauty, where he defended the reducibility of what's beautiful to our feelings or our sentiments. He thought we could know with a certain reliability what is beautiful or why it's beautiful. He wasn't a moral relativist, he was a heroic man. He was persecuted really for many years in Britain simply for being a wise, discerning, prudent, erudite conservative. And if you think wokeness started in 2017, send me an email and I'll fill, you know, the whole story. But Scruton came to be esteemed in Britain, although he was viciously attacked at the end of his life. That's a long story. And if it hadn't been for the intervention of Douglas Murray, the British journalist, he might have. He might have been canceled by the powers that be. It turns out everything said about him had been a lie. That was all exposed. What do I like about fools, frauds and firebrands? This was originally a book. The core of it was published in 1985 as Thinkers of the New Left, when Scruton was the editor of the Salisbury Review, Britain's only conservative intellectual review. And in it he tried to give a kind of disinterested but not neutral account of the major thinkers of the intellectual, academic and political left. And he did so, I think, very compellingly. He picked some figures that are, I would say, are sort of left of center, people like John Rawls and John Kenneth Galbraith. He picked people who openly tried to combine the extremes of Marxism and existentialism, of radical freedom and radical historical determinism, like John Paul the Sartre in a heady stew of nihilism, pretending to be bravado. And he showed a little bit like Saul, but with more philosophical depth. I think the mixture of hubris and the lack of attentiveness to human nature, to what's possible, to the human good, that infused these leftist doctrines, these leftist philosophies, and their remarkable blindness about the great scourge of the 20th century totalitarianism. The 2019 volume has several. It's been expanded, but it includes treatments of two of the most odious but influential figures in the academic intellectual world today. Badieu. Alain Badiou, who is an unrepentant communist who defends what he calls lide de communisme, the communist idea. Marx famously said, you can't separate theory and practice. Badiou says the practice was nasty, but the idea is the only game in town. And he, in impenetrable Prose that was linked to what Scruton rather deliciously called the Parisian nonsense machine, the mixture of Freudianism, Marxism, Heidegger, Parisian obscurantism, words nobody understands. But Badiou has continued to attempt to resurrect the Communist idea. And by the way, he's widely read in academic philosophy departments, but also, and especially in literature and humanities courses. And then there's Zizek, the Slovenian Leninist, who. Well, I'll give you an idea. He's very smart. Does he write for Compact? On occasion he writes for Compact. Yes. Our New Right friends who think it's cool to have a defender of Lenin and Stalin and Mao Zedong in their pages. I find it abominable and inexcusable and regrettable and ignorant, all mixed in one. But Zizek wrote a book in Defense of the indefensible, and he has defenses of Robespierre, whose writings he has collected. He thinks Robespierre was absolutely right. Political virtue and political terror are indistinguishable and go hand in hand. He's written a book like Defense of Lenin. He even defended Heidegger in 1933, who opted for National Socialism because Heidegger knew that anything was better than bourgeois mediocrity. He has written commentaries on Mao's discourses during the Cultural Revolution, which are hardly of any philosophical interest, but do call for terror and inhumanity and cruelty on a mass scale. So he's a very sophisticated guy. Sometimes he criticizes political correctness in the West. He didn't like the MeToo movement. He thinks American universities aren't very free. So, you know, sometimes Zizek will surprise you. But Zizek remains an unremitting defender of that which cannot be defended. Roger Scruton has a nice line at the end of his treatment of Zizek in Fools, Frauds and Firemen. He says, you know, it would all be horrible if you weren't open the possibility that Zizek is winking at you a little bit, you know, is he completely serious about all this? I think he's generally serious. But does Zizek really want to renew the purge trials, collectivization, mass religious propaganda, the economic penury of socialism? Who knows? But the fact that these two men who defend Communism in theory and practice, after all of its crimes, all of its monstrous crimes, that they are esteemed. I got angry one time. My friend Hadley Arkeys, when he was still teaching at Amherst, invited me to speak, and I gave a talk about major European thinkers you've never heard of. All the good guys like Scruton and Piermanand and Raymond Aron and others. And this guy raised his hand and asked a question about Zizek. And I said, you, parents are spending $300,000 a year for you to parrot a communalist from Slovenia. And I said, can't Amherst College do any better than this? I renew that question some years later.

[Jack Fowler]

Very good. All right, well, Dan, we're gonna take a little break, a final break, and when we come back, the two final books we're gonna get your thoughts on. We gotta get this into 10 minutes, I think. My Friend by C.S. lewis and Edmund Burke. This podcast stinks some Brits, but we'll get to these books right after these final important messages. We are back with Victor Davis Hanson in his Own words, recording on the 15th of January, this episode up. Well, I forget now, I Lost my papers in the 20s, something like that, with Dan Mahoney, my great friend, the great political philosopher, the writer, author of so many books, Idols of Our Age, the Statesman as Thinker, the Persistence of the Ideological Lie. These are all. Check them out and do buy them and read them, Dan, final two books. I'll just throw them out there together, and you take them as you see fit. C.S. lewis wrote the. Again, these books both have tremendous titles. The Abolition of Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools. And then from 1943, and then in 1790, Edmund Burke wrote Reflections on the Revolution in France and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London relative to these events. Dan, why are these two books you're recommending to those of us thirsting for intellect?

[Daniel J. Mahoney]

They're simply indispensable, elegant, penetrating books that speak to the threats that a certain kind of ideology poses to the integrity of our civilization, the integrity of our souls, I should say. By the way, C.S. lewis is far more popular and sells many more books in the United States than he does in very secular England. And I think Burke is far more influential among American conservatives than he is in England, where there really are not that many conservatives, tell you the truth. And that dreadful Conservative Party, which hasn't been conservative since Churchill or maybe Thatcher. But anyway, the Abolition of Man is the least religious of CS Lewis's books. CS Lewis, of course, the author of Mere Christianity, the Problem of Pain, the Chronicles of Narnia, is well known as a Christian apologist and a Christian apologist of great talent and insight. This is a more philosophical book, and it is an attack on modern subjectivism and nihilism. The same Year or two, Lewis wrote an essay, a kind of accompaniment to abolition of man, called the Poison of Subjectivism. And the Abolition of Man is really a dissection of the poison of subjectivism. One of those school books he refers to. He begins with this grammar book that was widely used in British and Commonwealth schools or Empire schools at the time that basically says, when you say something is beautiful, or you're looking at a waterfall, or you say, that woman is the most gorgeous woman I've ever seen, you're not telling us anything about reality. You're telling things about your feelings. In other words, the very dogmatic indoctrinaire thing. That we have no access to values per se. And Lewis challenged that. And he thought that when we would describe. When we say a tyranny is bad, we're describing the quality of the tyranny, what it is, what it does to human beings. We're not describing, like an ethologist, the fish in an aquarium in some neutral way. And so he dissects this view and argues that fact and value, judgment and reality are inseparable, that the reality we describe and that we inhabit is a moral reality. He also famously says the first of the three chapters is entitled Men Without Chess. And he says people who believe this kind of nonsense, that there is no moral judgment, that everything is relative, that we should be indifferent to good and evil. He says these are people who lack thumos. They lack spirit. Thumos is a Greek word for spiritedness. In other words, they're men without chests. They can defend nothing, they can be nothing. And, you know, I gotta tell you, it's a very, very powerful cultural critique of a certain type of effect human being who arises in modern times. But the ending of the first chapter just cannot be summarized. It must be shared. We make men without chess, without courage, without vitality, and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. Think Alger Hiss or the Cambridge Five. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful. The second part of the book called the Way the Dao, it's Lewis's defense of natural law. There's a moral consensus among mankind. You can find it in different scriptures. You can find it throughout history. It's been challenged, of course, by modern and postmodern nihilism. But basically, you're not going to find a civilization or people on earth that thinks murder is choice worthy, that being a traitor is being better than being loyal, that stealing from your neighbor is a good thing, that Raping women is licit, et cetera, et cetera, that there's something intrinsically perverse about preferring evil to good. And perhaps there are some sociopaths here and here or there are some people who go astray, but on the whole, humanity has a long enduring consensus about natural morality. There's a way, the dao, he calls it, using a Chinese word. And his argument there is you don't have to believe in Jehovah or God Almighty to recognize the power of the Dao, of the way of moral truth. On the other hand, if you believe in the Dao, if you believe in a non subjectivist moral truth, then I think the path to religious faith is much more obvious, for reasons I could go on and explain. And the last book, and it's the one that speaks to our biotechnical age, the conquest of human Nature. It's called the Abolition of Man, and as you said, a very striking title. Lewis argues that the modern conquest of nature, the scientific project of mastery over nature, revealed itself in the 20th century to include and culminate in the conquest of human nature. And he said the conditioners or the tyrants will exempt themselves from us. But he says we have to adamantly reject the idea that human beings can be engineered out of existence. Think Brave New World, the Dystopia. It's not a great novel in the sense it's not beautifully written, but it's a really important book of ideas. It's a dystopia that has striking confirmation in modern experience. Or think of the Transhumanist project. All these fools, technocrats, engineers, scientists, demi educated people in Silicon Valley and elsewhere who want to be gods, they want to download their minds. They don't believe we have minds, we just have brains. Where they want to download something onto machinery and have the great singularity and live forever. And then of course, so totalitarianism, the Gulag was one way of abolishing man, but the more subtle way is to do through the suicide, where we allow the human soul to be engineered out of existence. This is one of the most important books of the 20th century. It is only 103 pages long. And any person who cares about self, knowledge, civilization and what we must do to preserve them must engage this book. I would say 85% of what's Leon Cass writings are indebted to CS Lewis and he has said so himself, for example, in his Jefferson lecture, that this is the book, one of the three books that opened his eye to all the threats that confront us today in the realm of medicine and biotechnology. Edmund Burke. Edmund Burke. I'm an Irishman, Mahoney. Edmund Burke was raised in a Catholic family in Dublin. He moved to England. He became Anglican, but his wife Jane was Catholic. His mother's family, the Nagles from Cork, were a leading Catholic family. He spoke firmly way into the 1790s against the disabilities, against the Catholics, saying, you will create a revolutionary situation unless you meet the Catholic population with justice. He understood the Americans reasons why they wanted to be self governing and independent and oppose Lord north and George III's policy. He brought Warren Hastings, the Governor General of India, was the head of the East India Company, impeached him for undermining Hindu culture and for his rapaciousness and thievery. So he was a Whig and a liberal, but he was also the greatest critic of the French Revolution. He saw the French Revolution as something new under the sun, armed doctrine informed by atheism, informed by a spirit of utopian engineering. He opposed it with every bone in his body. Burke was also the great theorist of prudence, which he called the God of this lower world. Prudence, for him did not mean calculation, it did not mean cleverness. It was a high moral virtue, as it was for Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle. Prudence sought to be our guide. Not abstract doctrine, not ideology, but humane. Prudence has to be the guide to those who think and act in the political realm. The reflections are incomparable in its rejection of the revolutionary temptation, but also in its beautiful, the beautiful spirit of humane liberty and dignity that informs it. Burke proclaims what animates him. Right at the beginning of the book, he says, I love a manly. That's not a politically correct word. Manliness, virility, moral and regulated liberty. You can see why Burke is now considered to be the father of intellectual and political conservatism. And yet Burke said, liberty is not doing what you want. He says, it's not a wild gas. It's not turning ourselves into gods. It is always necessarily informed by the virtues. So while Burke defended modern commerce, parliamentary government, religious liberty, while he was a friend of Ireland, America and India, he hated totalitarianism and he hated what we might call moral nihilism, a kind of godless understanding of human freedom. I think in every way, Burke remains our contemporary, a man of wisdom and frankly, for me, a student of political philosophy. To have one great statesman, political philosopher who's an Irish is of some importance. Connor Cruz o' Brien wrote a whole book saying, the Irish background to Burke is the key to everything. I think that goes Too far. But.

[Jack Fowler]

I want to say. Go ahead, finish. Yeah.

[Daniel J. Mahoney]

But anyway, Burke is somebody. Samuel Johnson, the famous Dr. Johnson of the dictionary, who himself was a political thinker and writer of great achievement and talent, said, and if you were waiting for a taxi, I suppose a taxi in 1785 meant a carriage in the rain under an umbrella, standing next to Burke, and you chatted with him for a minute, you would conclude, this is a very great and noble man.

[Jack Fowler]

Very good. Dan, I want to say two biographical things. One, about your Irishness. Your grandfather was the chief of detectives in New York City. And there weren't no Italians doing that back in the day. And he was the prototype for the Barry Fitzgerald character in the Naked City, the great movie. Yeah.

[Daniel J. Mahoney]

So you extensively. As background for that movie and TV show.

[Jack Fowler]

Yeah. So that's a great claim. And on the. You mentioned Algae Hiss before. And just for people to know, I think it was 1981. Alger Hiss came to Holy Cross, where Dan and I were classmates. And he spoke there. And Daniel J. Mahoney confronted that commie SOB in front of an audience of shocked people. And not many people can say, I believe 21.

[Daniel J. Mahoney]

I had read My Witness. I had read Alan Weinstein's book Perjury. I had read Sidney Hook and Encounter on the case. I was ready. I knew this was a liar and a scoundrel trying to piggyback over the discrediting of Nixon over Watergate. And I was one of 500 in that room. It was a famous moment.

[Jack Fowler]

Someday, when the autobiography comes out, I will share with everyone.

[Daniel J. Mahoney]

I say this with some comic effect, but it's a memorable moment because where else do you get a chance to tell a public audience who else is and why? Your adulation of him is a sign of deep and abiding corruption.

[Jack Fowler]

Amen. Well, Dan, I'm so deeply appreciative that you came here today. I know Victor is also you. And I spoke to Victor. I think it was the day before he went into surgery. That was pretty cool. So, thanks. Thanks for all the recommendations.

[Daniel J. Mahoney]

I found a book by Victor in my car today. I was cleaning out my car and I found his wonderful book on the Peloponnesian War, A war like no other. And now I'm going to have to reread it since it's been rediscovered.

[Jack Fowler]

Amen. Okay. Well, again, thanks for all the recommendations you made. Thanks to the Daily Signal for carrying Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. And, folks, for watching and listening. Thank you, you. And we will be back soon with another episode of Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. Bye bye. Thank you for tuning in to the Daily Signal. Please like share and subscribe to be notified for more content like this. You can also check out my own [e-mail] and subscribe for exclusive features in addition. Well, the holidays have come and gone once again. But if you you've forgotten to get that special someone in your life a gift, well, Mint Mobile is extending their holiday offer of half off unlimited wireless. So here's the idea. You get it now, you call it an early present for next year.

[Daniel J. Mahoney]

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[Jack Fowler]

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[Daniel J. Mahoney]

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