Stephen Hicks

Kierkegaard: A Christian must “relinquish his understanding and his thinking, and keep his soul fixed upon the absurd.”

Defending Christianity—and the legacy of Abraham in particular—Søren Kierkagaard concludes (approvingly) that one’s accepting it means “to relinquish his understanding and his thinking, and to keep his soul fixed upon the absurd.” Source: Kierkegaard, Søren. Fear and Trembling [1843]. Related: On the fuller context of Kierkegaard’s provocative claim: Related: On Kierkegaard’s place in the historical

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Syllabus for *PHILOSOPHY of POLITICS: From the French Revolution to World War II*

In this eight-lecture course, Professor Hicks takes us on a journey through the evolution of modern political philosophies, from the cataclysm of the French Revolution to the Second World War. Major thinkers covered include: Edmund Burke, Georg Hegel, Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, William James and John Dewey, Giovanni Gentile and Benito

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Is Woke “liberalism on steroids”? James Orr (Cambridge Univ.) debates Stephen Hicks (Rockford Univ.)

Professor James Orr: “I am convinced where he {Hicks] is not that wokus pokus is liberalism on steroids.” That is from Dr. Orr’s third essay, “Conservatism: Final Thoughts,” in this Reason Papers three-round debate with Dr. Stephen Hicks. Orr advocates and defends Conservatism; Hicks does the same for Liberalism. Links here: Conservatism or Liberalism? A Debate

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Nietzsche on his contemporary Germans

[This is Section 29 of Stephen R.C. Hicks’s Nietzsche and the Nazis.] 29. On contemporary Germans: the world’s hope or contemptible? While the Nazis put the German-Aryan racial type first, Nietzsche is almost never complimentary about his fellow Germans. In Nietzsche’s view, Germany has slipped into flabbiness and whininess. Germany once was something to be

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Socialism in practice: “Private land was 32.4 times as productive as public land in the Soviet Union”

 An economic historian on socialist Russia after WW II:  “The only sector of the economy which showed vigor was private farming: the 33 million private plots belonging to collective farm households, averaging 0.6 acre and constituting 1.5% of the country’s cultivated area, furnished the postwar Soviet Union with nearly one-third of its foodstuffs. In 1979,

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