Victor Davis Hanson, farmer and classicist, practical and intellectual, fighter and lover, beauty and truth, Bush and Cheney, admires Paul Johnson's recent polemic about Napoleon for much the same reasons I do.
" Paul Johnson has written a gripping biographic essay, whose ultimate message is a much needed moral reminder: 'We have to learn again the central lesson of history: that all forms of greatness, military and administrative, nation and empire building, are as nothing—indeed are perilous in the extreme—without a humble and a contrite heart.' "
Given this conclusion - and the title of Mr Hanson's essay (The Little Tyrant) - I defy you to read the review without laughter. Over and over, I am amazed and inspired that the eternal verities array themselves so neatly - with armor gleaming and banners snapping in the wind - against Mr Hanson's enemies.
Go on, pull the mote from my eye . . .
" So what accounts for those who professed beauty but worshipped evil? It was not merely the romantic naïveté of artists and men of letters; ... some intellectuals, cut off as they are from the practical life, are impatient with the clumsiness of republican government. They yearn for the enlightened autocrat, the philosopher-king who can by fiat do le peuple 'good.' As Napoleon put it, 'The people must not be judge of its own rights.' "Posted by Martial
Wow! In many ways, a great essay. I won't dispute his assertions about tyrant-woshipping lefties nor apologize for them. In fact, I have lost many a night sleep after trying to argue Stalinists down from their trees. But I do think he piles it on too one-sidedly. There are plenty of conservative intellectuals and pundits who fawn for The Great Man of Power —indeed, why cite Pound's flakking for Mussolini when I can open any newspaper to find a press servile to the currently relentless administration?
Anyway, his essential point, which he cribs from Johnson, is true: "....some intellectuals, cut off as they are from the practical life, are impatient with the clumsiness of republican government." Some intellectuals still hurt from being picked last for volleyball and so perversely, via self-loathing and masturbatory needs of self-valoration, project their virility-obsessed fantasies on the school jock-cum-Great Man.
Posted by: Kevin Moore on June 23, 2003 07:30 PM