Benda placed particular hopes in "New endeavors such as underground educational seminars." In the 1985 essay, he highlighted how the totalitarian state would self-consciously have to destroy these new civic initiatives.
In essay after essay, Benda lamented the failure of his co-religionists to bear full witness to their civic obligations.
In a thoughtful companion essay called "Responsibility in Politics and for Politics", Benda affirms the Aristotelian idea of a human being as a zoon politikon, a political animal, even as he acknowledges that the great imperative to love one's neighbor as one loves oneself necessarily goes beyond the territorial and material limits of the polis.
Benda wants to remind his fellow Christians that "The political or social dimension of human life is at least as rich and complicated as the private sphere." Totalitarianism politicizes everything, yes, but in the deepest sense it mutilates the polis and the civic common good.
Interested readers might also see Havel's suggestive 1985 essay, "The Anatomy of a Reticence", which straddles the fence between Scruton and Benda on whether dialogue ought to be pursued with such groups who.
The Benda of these essays, written between 1977 and 1989, is a consistent foe of the mixture of totalitarianism, passivity, and moral nihilism that has done so much damage to political life and individual souls in the East and West.
Benda will remain a guide for those opposed to the totalitarian temptation, who want to think deeply and seriously about a polis worthy of human beings and the civic witness appropriate to Christians seeking to sustain the civic common good.
https://www.city-journal.org/vaclav-benda-16171.html
In essay after essay, Benda lamented the failure of his co-religionists to bear full witness to their civic obligations.
In a thoughtful companion essay called "Responsibility in Politics and for Politics", Benda affirms the Aristotelian idea of a human being as a zoon politikon, a political animal, even as he acknowledges that the great imperative to love one's neighbor as one loves oneself necessarily goes beyond the territorial and material limits of the polis.
Benda wants to remind his fellow Christians that "The political or social dimension of human life is at least as rich and complicated as the private sphere." Totalitarianism politicizes everything, yes, but in the deepest sense it mutilates the polis and the civic common good.
Interested readers might also see Havel's suggestive 1985 essay, "The Anatomy of a Reticence", which straddles the fence between Scruton and Benda on whether dialogue ought to be pursued with such groups who.
The Benda of these essays, written between 1977 and 1989, is a consistent foe of the mixture of totalitarianism, passivity, and moral nihilism that has done so much damage to political life and individual souls in the East and West.
Benda will remain a guide for those opposed to the totalitarian temptation, who want to think deeply and seriously about a polis worthy of human beings and the civic witness appropriate to Christians seeking to sustain the civic common good.
https://www.city-journal.org/vaclav-benda-16171.html
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