Author: Emanuel Paparella

Neoconservative thinker Robert Kagan, originator of the popular slogan and rather naïve caricature “Americans from Mars, Europeans from Venus”, has suggested in his book Of Paradise and Power that the United States throughout its history has tended to view itself as an “exception” of sorts to international law; that at times it has been willing…

Kafka’s hero is, above all a hero for our time, a godless age in which power endowed with a higher meaning has been replaced with a vacuous power of tradition and legal and bureaucratic norms, that is, by human institutions. Man, deprived of all means and all weapons in his effort to achieve freedom and…

What is urgently needed in the debate on the future of Europe is the substitution of old Machiavellian paradigms based on “real politick” considerations with new imaginative ones based on humanistic considerations. Unless we manage that substitution we shall end up pouring new wine in old putrid wineskins. One of the cultural guides for discovering…

The term “Dark Ages” was once erroneously applied to the entire millennium separating late antiquity from the Italian Renaissance (500-1500 AD). Today’s scholars know better. There is a widespread acknowledgment among them (see David Knowles’ The Evolution of Medieval Thought, London: Longman, 1988) that the 14th century i.e., the century of Dante and Petrarca’s Humanism,…

European liberty is founded on the antithesis of the secular world and transcendence, science and faith, material technology and religion.” –Karl Jaspers There is little doubt that Europe finds itself at a paradoxical turning point. The rejection of the proposed Constitution is a mere symptom of a deeper malaise. Europe’s institutions have so far failed…

In 1932 Christopher Dawson published a book titled The Making of Europe which had enormous success and established his reputation as a scholar of incredible range and erudition who could communicate with great clarity and elegance. He had previously written two other books: The Age of the Gods (1928), and Progress and Religion (1929) but…

Ivan Illich, a great advocate for intercultural communication, gifted us with a great insight. It is found in his book Tools for Conviviality. He wrote there that foreign languages ought to be pursued not so much to communicate with those native to them, but rather, so that we may listen to the particular silences found…

Klaus Held, from the University of Wuppertal, has recently written a brilliant essay on the identity of European culture. It was translated into English by Sean Kirkland of Goucher college. It can be found in the journal Epoche’, Vol. 7, issue 1 (Fall 2002) and its title is The Origins of Europe with the Greek…