The Loss and Recovery of Truth: Selected Writings of Gerhart Niemeyer

Gerhart Niemeyer (1907–1997), a prominent twentieth-century Conservative thinker, immigrated to the United States from his native Germany in 1937. He taught at Princeton and Oglethorpe Universities and worked at the State Department and the Council on Foreign Relations before accepting a teaching position at the University of Notre Dame in 1955, where he taught until 1992. Between 1976 and 1982 he also taught at Hillsdale College in Michigan. An expert on international law and on Communist Ideology he was the author of An Inquiry into Soviet Mentality, Handbook on Communism, Deceitful Peace: A New Look at the Soviet Threat, Between Nothingness and Paradise, and Law Without Force: The Function of Politics in International Law, as well as numerous essays and book reviews.
Michael Henry studied political theory under Gerhart Niemeyer at the University of Notre Dame, where he received his doctorate in 1974. Since 1977 he has been teaching philosophy at St. John’s University in New York. He is also the Series Editor of The Library of Conservative Thought of Transaction Publishers.

1. From Europe, With Love
2. Letters
3. What, to a Christian, is the Meaning of a “Changing, Technologically Oriented, Frustrated, and Fragmented World”?
4. The Hospice Movement and the Problem of Death (excerpts)
5. How to Talk to Mature People About Death
6. This Terrible Century
7. Forces that Shape the Twentieth Century
8. Loss of Reality: Gnosticism and Modern Nihilism
9. Variations on a Theme
10. Ideologies, Political Theories, and Societies
11. The Communist Mind (excerpts)
12. Will the Soviet Reality Please Stand Up? (excerpt)
13. The Tourist’s Soviet Russia
14. Ethics and Politics in Communism (excerpts)
15. The “Autonomous” Man
16. Confrontation of Opinions or Dialectic Discussion?
17. E Nobilissima Visione Regna Inferna
18. Beyond “Democratic Disorder”
19. Two Socialisms
20. Anti-Communism Old Hat?
21. Common Sense
22. Counterculture?
23. Moral Dishonesty?
24. Rulers Without Power
25. See No Evil
26. The Reality of Totalitarian Despotism
27. What Happened to Morality?
28. Language and Action
29. Modern Politics
30. Of Human Dignity
31. States Without Citizens
32. The State and the Citizen
33. The Evil Society
34. Aliens In Their Own Nations
35. Toward Totalitarian Simplicity?
36. Public Interest and Private Utility
37. Structures, Revolutions and Christianity
38. Systems of History and Public Policy Goals (excerpts)
39. The Church and the Ideological Temptation
40. A “Church” Without a Name? (excerpts)
41. Beyond Institutions of Power and Patterns of Profit (excerpts)
42. On Authority and Alienation: A Meditation
43. A Reappraisal of the Doctrine of Free Speech
44. Stewardship—Theory and Practice
45. What Price Politics?
46. Humanism, Positivism, Immorality
47. What Price “Natural Law”?
48. The Loss and Recovery of History
49. Foreign Policy and Morality: A Contemporary Perspective (excerpts)
50. Risk or Betrayal? The Crossroads of Western Policy
51. National Self-Defense and Political Existence
52. Nations, Myths, and Mores
53. Ideas Have Also Roots
54. Limits of the Law
55. The Commitments of Political Education
56. Crisis and Renewal
57. The New Need for the Catholic University
58. Christian Studies and the Liberal Arts College
59. Letter to Rev. James T. Burtchaell, C.S.C.
60. The Glory and Misery of Education
61. Russell Kirk and Ideology (excerpts)
62. The Prophetic Calling of Solzhenitsyn
63. Conservatism and the Modern Age
64. Conservatism and the New Political Theory
65. The Burkean View of Politics
66. Review of Conservatism in America by Clinton Rossiter
67. Is There a Conservative Mission?
68. Too Early and Too Much
69. Two Commencement Addresses
70. The Recovery of “The Sacred”?
71. The Church, the Shepherds, and the Spirit of Our Time
72. Christianity in Public Life: Real vs. Counterfeit Hope
73. The Politics of Hope
74. Guilt and History
75. Reason and Faith: The Fallacious Antithesis
76. History and Civilization