The problem Illich diagnoses is not that the modern world has abandoned Christianity, but that institutionalized Christianity, in the centuries after Christ, initiated destabilizing tendencies that would be radicalized in the modern world. The result was a “temptation to try to manage and, eventually, legislate this new love. . . . This power is claimed first by the Church and later by the many secular institutions stamped from its mold.” Education, medicine, and NGOs promoting development, he argued, are all the Church’s unrecognized offspring.

Contemporary social critics, having no recourse to older con­cepts such as honor, must of necessity argue that insulting utterances have the power to cause literal harm to their targets (rather in the manner of a magical incantation); hence the predictable assertion, com­monly heard among modern academics, that words constitute “vio­lence”…

The tensions introduced by the prominence of a still partially medieval institution in modern society can only be resolved in two possible ways: the creation of institutions of education and knowledge production on a more modern model; or a partial neo-feudalization of the modalities, if not the class structure, of modern society, a process already underway…

In The Triumph of Broken Promises, Fritz Bartel convincingly demonstrates that the West won the Cold War because it was better at imposing economic discipline than authoritarian state socialism. But did the process of “breaking promises” end up breaking democracy too?…

The Russian invasion of Ukraine seems to have answered the question of the European order by reinstating the model, long believed to be history, of the Cold War: a Europe united under American leadership as a transatlantic bridgehead for the United States in an alliance against a common enemy…