Intercollegiate Review Archive — Volume 40, Number 1; Fall/Winter 2004
(Click on the cover for a larger image)	Essays Two Becoming One Flesh: Marriage as a Sexual and Economic Union Allan C. Carlson Still Bowing to the God That Failed Lee Edwards Eric Voegelin and Christianity Glenn Hughes Translating Tolkien’s Epic: Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings Claire Valente Review Essay Re-Visioning Conservative History Ted McAllister Reviews Republican Virtue, Imperial Temptations, a review of Claes Ryn’s America the Virtuous Richard M. Gamble Valedictory Voyage, a review of William F. Buckley's Miles Gone By William F. Meehan, III The Fall of the Modern Age?, a review of Chantal Delsol’s Icarus Fallen Neil G. Robertson
Backcover: The past cultures I admire—Periclean Greece, the city-states of the Italian Renaissance, Elizabethan England, are examples—have mostly been produced by communities, and remarkably small ones at that. Also remarkably heterogeneous ones, riven by faction, stormy with passionate antagonisms. But . . . [a] mass society, like a crowd, is inchoate and uncreative. Its atoms cohere not according to individual liking or traditions or even interests but in purely mechanical ways, as iron filings of different shapes and sizes are pulled toward a magnet working on the one quality they have in common. Its morality sinks to the level of the most primitive members—a crowd will commit atrocities that very few of its members would commit as individuals—and its taste to that of the least sensitive and the most ignorant. —Dwight Macdonald

Back to IR Archive