Lawrence Klepp

How de Gaulle turned himself into a symbol.

Pius IX, the creation of modern Italy, and the transformation of the papacy.

There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of futurology, the utopian and the apocalyptic. In Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari, like the Book of Revelation, offers a bit of both. And why not? The function of imaginary futures is to deliver us from banality. The present, like the past, may be a…

There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of futurology, the utopian and the apocalyptic. In Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari, like the Book of Revelation, offers a bit of both. And why not? The function of imaginary futures is to deliver us from banality. The present, like the past, may be a…

The French director François Truffaut, who conducted a famous series of interviews with Alfred Hitchcock in 1962, said afterward that he had found him to be a “neurotic” and “fearful” and “deeply vulnerable” man, but this was precisely what had made him an “artist of anxiety.”

The French director François Truffaut, who conducted a famous series of interviews with Alfred Hitchcock in 1962, said afterward that he had found him to be a “neurotic” and “fearful” and “deeply vulnerable” man, but this was precisely what had made him an “artist of anxiety.”

Is religion a natural instinct that, when kicked out the door, comes back (as Groucho Marx would say) innuendo? Are even cocksure secularists furtively religious and superstitious in spite of themselves, primed by evolutionary imperatives to pay unwitting tribute to spirits and gods?

Philosophers once preached what they practiced. Socrates, Diogenes the Cynic, Epicurus, and the Stoics not only devoted themselves to living simple, abstemious lives; it was the essence of their philosophy. Some of the most important modern philosophers—Spinoza, Kant, Thoreau, Kierkegaard,…

Philosophers once preached what they practiced. Socrates, Diogenes the Cynic, Epicurus, and the Stoics not only devoted themselves to living simple, abstemious lives; it was the essence of their philosophy. Some of the most important modern philosophers—Spinoza, Kant, Thoreau, Kierkegaard,…

George Santayana remarked in one of his books that there is no good reason for a philosopher to make his living teaching in a university. He would probably be better off as the man who collects umbrellas and checks coats in a small, seldom-visited museum. And Santayana's onetime colleague at…

George Santayana remarked in one of his books that there is no good reason for a philosopher to make his living teaching in a university. He would probably be better off as the man who collects umbrellas and checks coats in a small, seldom-visited museum. And Santayana’s onetime colleague at…

The extremely fertile period of European intellectual history that runs from about 1749 (Rousseau becomes famous) to 1889 (Nietzsche goes mad just as he’s becoming famous) spawned nearly every idea that has bewitched and bedeviled us since. It also spawned a new social class entirely devoted to…

The most famous improvised lines in the history of the movies are the ones Orson Welles came up with while playing Harry Lime in The Third Man (1949): “In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and…

News addiction? Nothing new. “You cannot imagine to what a disease the itch of news is grown,” wrote an Englishman named John Cooper in 1667. At that time, newspapers had been in existence for just over 60 years. The first appeared in Strasbourg, in German, in 1605: the Strasbourg Relation, a…

One thing that Napoleon— who didn’t believe in God, ideologies, or progress—did believe in was his own destiny. The spectacular victories of his Italian campaign in 1796 made the 27-year-old general famous in France and throughout Europe, and, at that moment, he later said, “I no longer regarded…

Franz Mesmer (1734-1815), the spellbinding celebrity healer of late-18th-century Vienna and Paris, is one of those mercurial, charismatic characters who can only be described as, well, mesmerizing. Not everyone gets to be a verb and an adjective. For Henri F. Ellenberger, in his massive history of…

In Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall, there’s a wistful character named Prendergast, who had been a contented rural curate until he was suddenly beset by  “Doubts”—not about God’s existence, but:  “I couldn’t understand why God had made the world at all.” His bishop tries to reassure him, saying that…

World War I, the great wrong turn of modern history, began with a wrong turn. It was made by the driver of the open car carrying the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his wife on their visit to Sarajevo in June 1914. The driver stopped the car, intending to turn…

After pretending to study law, and abandoning a brief attempt to work for a sugar importer in Bristol, David Hume, the second son of a prominent Edinburgh family, decided to return home and live with his mother, sister, and brother. He was then in his early twenties, and his mother had this to say…

Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) has long appealed to skeptics and secularists. In the 18th century, “Spinozism” was a synonym for atheism. Shelley channeled him in his own arguments for atheism, George Eliot translated him, Hegel and Marx admired him, and he was one of Nietzsche’s favorite philosophers.…

Reading an essay by Montaigne is like strolling through a labyrinthine flea market. You are likely to find all sorts of things there, except maybe logic, and you are likely to get, like the author, a bit lost. His essays, ruled only by curiosity, wander, wonder, sidestep, and circle, accumulate…

The Immortalization Commission

The Fourth Part

The Ninth

1848

Cynics

The Raven King

The Lost Art of Walking

Revolution in Mind

Tradition

There Is a God

A Natural History of Time

Passions and Tempers

The Ice Museum

The Immortal Game

Pessimism

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Edvard Munch

Friedrich Nietzsche