A Slow Death or, the Silence of the Old World

It has been now two hundred thirty-one years since Edmund Burke wrote of the materialistic revolutionaries in France: "The age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever." The passage of time has long since rendered the verdict that those were vatic words rather than reactionary contrivances, nearer to the spirit of Cassandra than to those of the last Pisistratids. In A Slow Death or, The Silence of the Old World, Alexander Ford and Jack Parnell unveil a no-holds-barred assault on the citadels of Burke's sophists, revealing that modernism and all of its progeny are essentially linguistic phenomena. What emerges from two centuries of academic haze is a lucid and elemental picture of the metaphysical disposition which defined the pre-industrial world. In this collection of swift essays and striking aphorisms, Nietzsche and Cioran talk to priests, Wittgenstein and Dugina face the eschaton, Krier and Evola critique consumerism, and Soviet and American Housing are haunted by the spirits of the home. A Slow Death is a dramatic confrontation too long in the making, an urgent questioning, and a radical answering.