FeaturesMarch 2010 Christopher Dawson & the coming conflict On the role of religion in culture. In 1938, fascism was on the rise in Europe, and Communism held a strong attraction for some Western intellectuals. Some believed that the establishment of totalitarian government in what is now called the Anglosphere was only a matter of time. The British historian Christopher Dawson disagreed. He thought that a different kind of state was more likely: equally authoritarian, perhaps, but backed by the coddling of a welfare state instead of brute force. Pure popular democracy presents the possibility of a different yet critical danger to the kind of free society that had been characteristic of Western political history: “It may be harder to resist a totalitarian state which relies on free milk and birth control clinics than one which relies on castor oil and concentration camps.” Resistance would be even more difficult because such states use language that is comfortable to democra ... This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchaseSubscribe to TNC (Print and Online editions) Subscribe to TNC (Online only) This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 28 March 2010, on page 14 Copyright © 2012 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Christopher-Dawson---the-coming-conflict-5178
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On David R. Slavitt's translation of the Theban plays of Sophocles. Christopher, for better & for worse On the critic, polemicist & raconteur Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011).
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