Luke Foster

C’est aujourd’hui le bicentenaire de l’impératrice Eugénie, née le 5 mai 1826. La dernière souveraine ayant régné sur la France fut souvent calomniée et mérite beaucoup mieux. Elle fit par exemple beaucoup pour de grandes causes: femmes, ouvriers, jeunes détenues, orphelins…

The official press release for my new book. hillsdale.edu/news-and-media…

The Shire is great but it is impossible and unsustainable without the military and political power of Gondor.

@JaycelAdkins Of course, thank you! Probably the greatest French novel on this. Do you know who's doing the translation?

Out next month in a new translation. I plan to do a private reading group on it with the readers I read Notre-Dame de Paris and Les Miserables with. If there are still openings after those invites go out, I’ll offer seats on twitter.

@yo101 I think the great historical accounts (De Staël, Michelet, Carlyle, Tocqueville, perhaps Furet) should probably be another course in themselves!

@gurueluke How do you define literary? Some may consider Carlyle’s “history” a literary depiction. The Charterhouse of Parma could also be an interesting addition for the Napoleonic period.

Who has taught a good course on the literary depictions of the French Revolution? Of course Tale of Two Cities and the Scarlet Pimpernel come to mind, as does Les dieux ont soif, but what else?

@davidbmcgarry I didn’t know of that one! Opening it up to opera creates a lot of possibilities. Le marriage de Figaro and Dialogues des carmélites would both be apt.

@gurueluke An interesting supplemental to such a course would be the opera Andrea Chénier, by Umberto Giordano.

If your marriage is like this, your perfection will rival the holiest of monks. “Never speak to your wife in a mundane way but with compliments, with respect and with much love. Tell her that you love her more than your own life, because this present life is nothing, and that your only hope is that the two of you pass through this life in such a way that in the world to come, you will be united in perfect love. Say to her, ‘Our time here is brief and fleeting, but if we are pleasing to God, we can exchange this life for the Kingdom to come. Then we will be perfectly one both with Christ and with each other, and our pleasure will know no bounds. I value your love above all things, and nothing would be so bitter or painful to me as our being at odds with each other. Even if I lose everything, any affliction is tolerable if you will be true to me.’ Show her that you value her company, and prefer being at home to being out at the marketplace. Esteem her in the presence of your friends and children. Praise and show admiration for her good acts; and if she ever does anything foolish, advise her patiently. Pray together at home and go to Church; when you come back home, let each ask the other the meaning of the readings and the prayers. If your marriage is like this, your perfection will rival the holiest of monks.” St John Chrysostom

How was America able to integrate immigrants in the past? A big reason is that the birthrate was high. Even in the peak Ellis Island year of 1907, the number of immigrants was less than half of the number of births. How does that compare to today? See my newest article!

@EGennings Yes--the irony in all of this is that standardized testing has failed by succeeding.

@gurueluke The latter task is crucial but also deeply difficult. Determining the impact of curriculum on narrow objective but less deep considerations is a difficult challenge. Selection effects swamp treatment effects. Thus very careful work is needed to distinguish them.

Exactly right. Reforming the academy will require simultaneously changes of heart in elite institutions, compelling alternative models, and constructive political pressure. These are not mutually exclusive.

.@POTUS: "Honoring the British King might seem an ironic beginning to our celebration of 250 years of American independence — but in fact, no tribute could be more appropriate. Long before Americans had a nation or Constitution, we first had a culture, a character, and a creed. Before we ever proclaimed our independence, Americans carried within us the rarest of gifts: moral courage, and it came from a small but mighty kingdom from across the sea."

We sit down with hereditary peer Charles Courtenay, the 19th Earl of Devon, as he prepares to be removed from the House of Lords. He argues that his long lineage and the fact that his ancestors fought in the Crusades provide Parliament with a valuable connection to our past.

We walk together in majesty, in justice, and in peace. 🇺🇸🇬🇧 President Trump welcomes King Charles and Queen Camilla for a historic State Visit this week.

Weighing in the Amazon ban, the great @DrDominicGreen has published one of the best essays on The Camp of the Saints in @dcexaminer.

You are essentially asking why there is no arc that leads to redemption in the modern Arabic novel. That is an excellent question. There are two established frameworks for answering it. The first is postcolonial: the darkness of the Arabic novel is the darkness of colonized peoples working through historical trauma. The second is civilizational: Arab and Muslim culture lacks a moral architecture for redemption and falls back on ruthlessness and darkness. Both are grand, sweeping, and, in my humble opinion, mostly wrong — or rather, mostly ideological. Each reproduces its own premise as its conclusion. You cannot accept the postcolonial answer without first accepting a Leninist analysis of imperialism and culture. You cannot accept the civilizational answer without first accepting a developmental schema in which the Arab world is measured by what it lacks relative to Europe. Neither explains; both presuppose. What if the answer is simpler? What if, instead of reaching for macro-historical frameworks, we look at the men who actually wrote these novels? Given an understanding of how Western elites led their own society into a trajectory of kitsch and ugliness, one should be sympathetic to the idea of an elite-led cultural collapse, which is what I believe happened in the Middle East. The major Arab novelists of the twentieth century belong, almost without exception, to a single class: the radically secularized cultural elite. Many are radical atheists. They passed through European or European-style education and emerged having internalized a very specific moment in European intellectual history — its most spiritually nihilistic moment, usually through France and Germany. They absorbed existentialist despair, naturalist determinism, and post-Enlightenment nihilism. They did not arrive at darkness through the pressure of their own civilizational or colonial experience, etc. They adopted it, consciously, from a European literary discourse that was itself already a symptom of spiritual crisis. Here one must invoke René Girard's concept of mimetic contagion, because what happened next is textbook mimetic dynamics. The first generation were still imitating Europe directly. They had read their Flaubert, their Camus, their Dostoevsky-without-the-Christianity, and they wrote in conscious dialogue with those models. But the imitation did not remain at this level. What emerged very quickly was a self-referential, closed literary discourse in which Arab novelists began imitating each other. The model was no longer Europe itself but the image of Europe already internalized by the previous Arab novelist. Darkness became the mark of seriousness. Nihilism became the credential of literary authenticity. The bleaker the novel, the more "realistic" it was judged to be — where "realism" had long since ceased to describe any actual relation to reality and had become instead a term of prestige within the closed circle of the discourse itself. It became pure unreality. This, of course, applied to the modern history of European aesthetics as well. Realism means ugliness, for some degenerate reason. This is mimetic rivalry in its purest form. Each new novelist must outdo his predecessor in despair in order to be recognized as serious. Rape, dismemberment, political torture, sexual degradation — these escalate not because Arab reality is uniquely brutal (it actually became so brutal largely as a result of this tradition, in my opinion) but because the internal logic of the literary discourse demands perpetual intensification. The audience for this literature is not the broad Arab public, which largely does not read these novels. The audience is the discourse itself: other novelists, critics, prize committees, translation editors in Paris and London who have their own mimetic investment in the image of the Arab world as a theater of darkness. The award-selection algorithm is the mechanism by which the mimetic cycle reproduces itself. The prizes reward the darkness, the darkness attracts the prizes, and the entire circuit operates at a comfortable distance from any lived reality — which contains, as all human reality does, suffering and joy, cruelty and tenderness, despair and faith. One must then ask: what is the expected result when such dispositions are crowned at the top of a semi-literate and developing society? One may even go deeper and suggest that later Arab real-world nihilism, political and religious, is related to this. Dickens does not write humane novels because Victorian England was a kind or gentle place. It was monstrous. He writes humane novels because he writes from within a Christian moral structure that remained functional even as it was being secularized — a structure in which characters can change and redemption is a live possibility. The same holds for Tolstoy and George Eliot. The Arab novelists in question do not work within any equivalent — not because Arabic or Islamic civilization lacks one, but because these writers personally rejected the one available to them and replaced it with borrowed European despair. They were writing a century after Dickens. Dostoevsky was, of course, a revolutionary nihilist who became genuinely Christian, and that is why his works trace an arc through the deepest despair and onward to redemption. The last major European work that attempted to reach redemption at all was, I believe, Richard Wagner's Parsifal — which Friedrich Nietzsche hated profoundly, writing: "I despise everyone who does not experience Parsifal as an attempted assassination of basic ethics... an outrage upon morality." It is not an accident that the last work Roger Scruton wrote before he died was a monograph on Parsifal. I am here only right, of course, if we exclude redemptive works like Tolkien's Lord of the Rings — which was in many ways a response to Wagner and late Romanticism — from the canon of high culture, which the Western cultural elite indeed does exclude. The darkness of the Arabic novel is the voice of a specific class of intellectuals who chose the most despairing available version of European modernity and made it the dominant register of serious Arabic literature. The redemption is absent because the men who write have decided, as a matter of intellectual conviction, that redemption is no longer a serious category. Nietzsche himself wrote that "redemption" is one of the most repulsive words. The great partial exception is Naguib Mahfouz. His career begins in social realism — the Cairo Trilogy is a genuine attempt at the Dickensian novel, and it nearly succeeds. It then passes through crisis: Children of Gebelawi is the patricide, the allegory in which God is killed. But Mahfouz, unlike his contemporaries, could not rest in the nihilism. His late work represents a sustained effort to retrieve faith and redemption from within the wreckage. His oeuvre is really to be read as one man's journey out of post-Christian nihilism. He is the one major Arabic novelist who turned back. That is what makes him the greatest of them, and it is also what is most consistently missed in how he is read. He began his career writing as his peers wrote. Then he separated from them, and spent the remainder of his life writing allegories about seeking the Father who had been murdered or forgotten.

@kvallier The dispute then may be over what constitutes constructive political pressure” and over what the civics project should be—how much does it aim to be what the university as a whole should be vs how much does it see itself more modestly as providing another perspective among many.

@gurueluke No one on the right disagrees with that when stated at that level of abstraction. Robbie George and Yuval Levin, stalwart institutional traditionalists, have fought their battles on those terms. My opposition is to Rufo's version, but I actively support the civics project.

As reflected in many of my posts over the past few months, I have been reading (and re-reading) a lot of social theory. What strikes me is that most critics of “capitalism” (whatever “capitalism” might mean, and regardless of the value of those critiques) are really critics of modernity, understood as the organization of society around technology, formal institutions, and rational criteria. I teach the economic history of the Soviet Union and socialist China, and all the pathologies (pollution, reliance on fossil fuels, inequality, depersonalization, consumerism, alienation, you name it) that you can find in a poor neighborhood of 2026 Philadelphia appeared in the same way, or even more, in a factory in Leningrad in 1970 or on a collective farm in Jiangsu in 1978. Critics seem to lack a vocabulary (or, if you prefer, a cognitive framework) for distinguishing “capitalism” from modernity. For example, people everywhere tend to link personal relationships to displays of consumption. There are likely deep evolutionary reasons for this. De Beers did not invent spending a lot of money on a useless engagement ring: it rode a pre-existing disposition into a particular form of consumption. Couples in Leipzig in 1982 were as interested in conspicuous consumption as those in Chicago in 2026. Talking about “Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism” misses the point completely. Of course, you can try, as some of the more perceptive Trotskyists did, to argue that the Soviet Union or China were not truly socialist countries, but this is just a lazy application of the “no true Scotsman” fallacy, and, consequently, their complaints failed to gain much traction outside some departments of cultural studies. But this is not just a matter of poor analytic skills, as bad as those are. More importantly, it means that 99% of the policy proposals activists put on the table to correct the problems of “capitalism” are doomed to fail because they do not understand where the root cause of the phenomena they complain about lies. I see this at the university. Do you think the corporation you deal with is self-serving and incompetent? Wait until you need to deal with the Graduate School at a private Ivy League university. The incentive problems (asymmetric information, career concerns, lack of timely feedback, pressure toward conformity) that cause dysfunction in the former are even more pronounced in the latter because of the absence of a profit motive, the sharpest disciplinary mechanism. At a very fundamental level, Marx got modernity wrong; Weber got it right. Time to spend much less time with Marx and much, much more time with Weber.

In Angola, Pope Leo XIV warns against mixing traditional African religious practices with Catholicism: “Therefore, we must always be vigilant regarding traditional forms of religion certainly rooted in our culture but which, at the same time, risk confusing, and mixing in elements of magic and superstition. That do not help in their spiritual journey. Stay faithful to what the church teaches. Trust, your shepherds, and keep your eyes fixed on Jesus, who reveals Himself in the Word, and in the Eucharist.”