Claude Polin

Claude Polin (1937-2018) was professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Paris-Sorbonne. He was a French political, academic and essayist philosopher. Legitimist royalist, he was a specialist in totalitarianism and liberalism, of which he was also an opponent.

Latest by Claude Polin in Chronicles

Results: 44 Articles found.
  • Impossible Dreams: The West’s Undying Love Affair With Marx
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    June 2018

    Impossible Dreams: The West’s Undying Love Affair With Marx

    Is Marxism Dead? If the average citizen of a Western society were asked that question, it seems to me he would readily answer that Marxism is indeed a very dead idea surviving only in improbable boondocks like North Korea or Cuba, and even there losing ground, as has been happening in the last great country still nominally communist: China.

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  • Love Thyself: The West’s Fatal Flaw
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    November 2017

    Love Thyself: The West’s Fatal Flaw

    What used to be Western civilization is indeed threatened today with progressive extinction at the hands of Muslim immigration, which considers the West as a worthless relic of a useless past, at best, or, in the minds of Islam’s more or less hidden leaders, as a hostile multisecular force to be destroyed, either by sheer violence or by submerging it under a demographic tsunami.

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  • The Meaning of Macron—and the “Right” in the West
    Correspondence
    September 2017

    The Meaning of Macron—and the “Right” in the West

    “He is on the right.” “That party represents the right.” These are standard expressions that are familiar today in the West, including France. But as usual, few understand or even care about the precise meaning of the word.

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  • Blog
    April 24, 2017

    The Quintessential Democratic Politician

    Any ruler must somehow be subordinate to the nature of the society he rules. But in all societies other than democracies, the rulers have some leeway, precisely because as rulers they set the course that the body of citizens must follow.

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  • Blog
    November 14, 2016

    Trump Election: Democracy Versus Populism

    Democracy is just a tool in the hands of a more or less hidden “elite,” organizing disorder so as to monopolize power, while distributing the wealth accumulated by the common man to their would-be electors.

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  • On Terrorism in the West Today
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    September 2016

    On Terrorism in the West Today

    Every time a bomb explodes in the West it is a boon for journalists. They photograph weeping people, tell us how implacable the government will be, and, without breaking stride, warn us that more is likely to come.

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  • Society & Culture
    June 2016

    An Essay on the State of France

    What follows is not an anthropometric description of France, but neither does it reflect the fancy of the author: It is what one can see of France from a certain distance, which blurs the finer details but allows the main features to stand out.

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  • The Agony of Nations in the West
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    February 2016

    The Agony of Nations in the West

    European history since the fall of the Roman Empire may be regarded as the slow forging, as if by a hidden hand as well as by human passions, of these particular forms of human collectivities called nations.

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  • Vital Signs
    December 2015

    Will the Middle Class Survive?

    Ever since human societies became a clear and definite field of inquiry, which for Westerners means ever since Greek antiquity, current wisdom holds that the best of imperfect, nonutopian human societies have always been those in which predominated what came to be dubbed a “middle class.”

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  • 1865: The True American Revolution
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    April 2015

    1865: The True American Revolution

    The standard opinion has it that, ever since they set foot on the new continent, the English settlers felt they were one people, Englishmen united by their common language, common origins, common enemies.

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  • News
    March 2015

    Charlie Hebdo: A Christ Befitting the Modern West

    Paris, January 7, 2015: Two men invoking Allah enter the office of a satirical magazine and shoot its staff, employees, and two policemen. Two days later, also in the name of Allah, a black killer opens fire on a kosher supermarket, bringing the total to 17 dead.

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  • Is Immigration Our Fate?
    Vital Signs
    January 2015

    Is Immigration Our Fate?

    Political correctness has it that immigration is a perennial phenomenon in Western countries. This is preposterous. Immigration as we know it today is an extremely recent phenomenon.

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  • Insecure Liberalism
    A Second Look
    January 2015

    Insecure Liberalism

    As I was reading my monthly Bible—guess what that is—I came across an enthusiastic review of a book, written by a French political philosopher, Pierre Manent, entitled Metamorphoses of the City. I rushed to buy a copy.

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  • Vital Signs
    November 2014

    The Quintessential Democratic Politician

    Any ruler must somehow be subordinate to the nature of the society he rules. But in all societies other than democracies, the rulers have some leeway, precisely because as rulers they set the course that the body of citizens must follow.

    Read More
  • World War I and the Modern West
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    July 2014

    World War I and the Modern West

    History may be a series of more or less contingent events, whose only connection to the preceding or following ones is that men react to what others do.

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  • Playing at God
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    June 2014

    Playing at God

    Is the development of the modern sciences and related technologies a good or a bad thing? The question is by no means a recent one.

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  • Suicide of the West (Revisited)
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    February 2014

    Suicide of the West (Revisited)

    Fifty years ago James Burnham warned Westerners: Trying to come to terms with communism instead of resolutely fighting it amounts to committing suicide.

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  • You Shall Be as Gods
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    January 2014

    You Shall Be as Gods

    “It’s awesome”: A young relative of mine loves the word and uses it profusely. Since she applies it to a restaurant or a vacuum cleaner she finds extraordinary, I doubt she realizes its real meaning. This is a typical instance of the degeneracy of a word caused by the search for quick superlatives, and mainly by the loss of the idea it used to convey.

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  • Moderate Islam?
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    November 2013

    Moderate Islam?

    “Teachers who teach Western education? We will kill them! We will kill them in front of their students and tell the students to henceforth [sic] study the Koran,” declared Abubakar Shekau, leader of the Nigerian Islamist group Boko Haram, which killed 46 students in a boarding school on July 6 (Time, July 19).

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  • Paganism, Christianity, and the Roots of the West
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    May 2013

    Paganism, Christianity, and the Roots of the West

    I remember being taught as a student of the considerable, if not unbridgeable, gap between the polytheistic pagans and the monotheistic Christians who, though they may have borrowed from their predecessors, eventually delivered a civilization completely of their own.

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Results: 44 Articles found.



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