Stephen Hicks

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 […]

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

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

 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,

Professor James Orr: “The atomisation of modern society, the tectonic contradictions of identitarianism, the shattering of civic and economic harmony, are not puzzling aberrations of liberalism but the outworking of its inner logic.” That is from Dr. Orr’s second essay, “A Conservative Critique of Liberalism,” in this Reason Papers three-round debate with Dr. Stephen Hicks.

Juneteenth celebrates a great achievement. Slavery had existed for thousands of year in pretty much every culture in the world. But a few brave and lonely voices began to challenge it in the 1700s and within a century—almost a blink of an eye in historical time—it had been eliminated in the civilized parts of the