Sparks Commentary

I have long had a fair number of friends who identify as “Marxist” or “socialist.” But I freely admit that relatively few of my friends ha...

“Rather, they cling to the dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook , which can be summar...

I was expecting something very different from this audiobook. Specifically, I was expecting to get an overview of  agnostics ,  atheists , a...

I already thought that twentieth-century Western philosophy was a vast wasteland, before I ever listened to this audiobook. But I listened t...

I had heard only a little about  Alexis de Tocqueville  before I listened to this audiobook. I knew that he was from France , and that he ha...

This is a follow-up to a blog post from 2014 . (For this earlier post, click here .) I wrote a post some years ago about my experience with ...

“Amongst the novel objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, nothing struck me more forcibly than the general...

Wikipedia argues that Rousseau influenced the Founding Fathers … I have often heard people claim that Rousseau “influenced” the Founding Fa...

“ Cogito, ergo sum .” (“I think, therefore I am.”) – René Descartes, in his works “Discourse on the Method” (1637) and “Principles of Philo...

“I believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church. I confess one Baptism for the forgiveness of sins and I look forward to the resurre...

So I recently finished an audiobook about Léon Walras (pronounced “Valras”), a  French  economist who was alive from the years 1834 to 1910...

Étienne de la Boétie When “Discourse on Voluntary Servitude” was first published in 1577, its author had been dead for more than a decade. ...

I’ve read  Rousseau’s “The Social Contract” itself  in the original French . Thus, you might expect me to be something of a “fan” of this wo...

Voltaire and Rousseau disagreed with each other on many issues. Nonetheless, they do have at least one thing in common, which is that they w...

“Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they. H...

“The first man, who, after enclosing a piece of ground, took it into his head to say, 'This is mine,' and found people simple eno...

"The political liberty of the [citizen] is a tranquillity of mind, arising from the opinion each person has of his safety. In order t...

It is well-known among my friends that I am a foreign language buff. Some of my friends also know that I am a  philosophy  buff as well. ...