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Entry: The Neocons and Charles Maurras Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/leo_strauss_the_neocons_and_charles_maurras#6640 Post contents: It is difficult to know how to respond to you, Mr. Cundiff, or even whether or not to respond. Your tone seems preemptive and smug, but perhaps a more charitable and accurate characterization would be battle-worn: you write like someone determined to blurt out his piece before the next blow falls. I wonder which school of personalism you follow. Is there any that doesn’t value dialogue as a fundamental to what it means to be a person? (One thinks for example of the personalist classic “I and Thou” by the Austrian Jew Martin Buber or the work of Fr.Auguste Brunner on interpersonal dialogue, two thinkers that you might include in what you call the “German-Polish school.”) Does the style of your posts encourage reasoned dialogue? Charles De Koninck wrote against the personalism of Maritain and Simon. There are certainly many different doctrines that go by the name of “personalism”, just as there are many different doctrines that go by the name of “Thomism”, and it is a matter for reasoned debate as to what the virtues or defects of each school may be. In Western philosophy, merely invoking a name, such as “Wojtyła”, does not qualify as such debate. If philosophical debate were won by such means one could just as easily invoke the name of "Sarto." (An interesting, reasonable, and favorable examination of the personalism of Pope John Paul II and position of Charles De Koninck on the common good can be found here: http://iti.ac.at/publications/pdfs/Waldstein_common_good.pdf) The sophomoric, pontificating tone you adopt towards St. Pius X and the encyclical Notre Charge Apostolique would be shameful if it were not so ludicrous. One would think you were a petty, ideological Fascist the way you elide over difficulties to save your prized idea. There may be many reasons why this encyclical does not appear on the Vatican website, but if the reason is, as you say, that has been “repudiated or deemphasized” such a thing is shameful for whomever is responsible, and is a fine example the “hermeneutic of discontinuity” that Benedict XVI has spoken against. But you seem to have no problem employing such a hermeneutic when it serves your argument. Finally, whom exactly are you referring to by the loaded term “Clerical Fascists?” It is easy to set up such faceless straw men whom it is impossible to defend. Many brand Pius XII a fascist, (I am not implying you do.) yet it is well known that he authored "Mit Brennender Sorge." Sent at: 2008 05 16