Vic Hanson has a new piece in City Journal, Why History Has No End, that ranges widely over foreign affairs and the European-American relationship. Two things that caught my eye. First:
Europeans say that sober reflection on their own checkered past has taught them to reject wars of the nation-state, to mediate, not deter, and to trust in Enlightenment rationality instead of primitive emotions surrounding God and country.
& then:
The Founders saw the café theorizing of Continental elites and French philosophers as a danger to good government, which requires not some grand, all-encompassing blueprint but rather institutional checks and balances and a citizenry of perennially vigilant individual citizens.
On the first point, I find it ironic that Victor Davis Hanson sneers at the Enlightenment. His philo-Hellenism and relative neglect of Rome and unified Catholic Christendom in the formation of our civilization falls into the classic pattern of historians like Will Durant who conceived the history of the West as a great Dark Age after the decline of Greece (specifically Democratic Athens) and before the 18th century Enlightenment. Secondly, the system of checks & balances that the founders enacted owes much to the French political philosopher Montesquieu. I assume Vic Hanson knew this-but couldn’t resist the one-liner. From what I can see, even if Victor Davis Hanson is a sage whom conservatives look to to justify their policies (though he remains a registered Democrat), he certainly lacks a conservative temperament and espouses the views of mid-20th century liberal historians.
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