Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, by Michael Oakeshott. New York: Basic Books, 1962. 333 pp. [rev ed. Liberty Fund, 1991] It is a pleasure to have Professor Oakeshott on my side, even though there are moments when I have trouble in understanding just where his verbal missile is directed. Curiously, his address in Madrid [...]
In introducing his new book, Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America, Paul Gottfried identifies a fundamental divide between neoconservatives and the traditional right. The divide is over the question: What is this nation, America? Straussians, writes Gottfried, “wish to present the construction of government as an open-ended rationalist process. All children of the [...]
In September 1974, the English philosopher Michael Oakeshott delivered the Abbott Memorial Lecture at Colorado College. Entitled “A Place for Learning,” Oakeshott’s lecture attacked the dominant model of education, a model predicated on the theories of the American educationist John Dewey. Learning, Oakeshott observed, should take place under “conditions of direction and restraint designed to [...]
“I no longer pretend to understand the world…The world I knew has come crashing down around my ears. The things we hold dear are reviled and spat upon….It’s an interesting age you will live in—though I can’t say I’m sorry to miss it. But it should be quite a sight, the going under of the [...]
[This essay serves as the introduction to The Legacy of Wilhelm Roepke: Essays in Political Economy series by Dr. Ancil that we will be publishing on The Imaginative Conservative. The essay was originally published in 1998.] Most folks missed an important date: June 20th, which marked the fiftieth anniversary of the “German economic miracle.” It [...]
Sophocles: The Theban Plays, translated by David R. Slavitt This is the most stripped-down version of the three Theban plays of Sophocles that I have read. As I write, I am surrounded by more than 15 translations retrieved from my shelves and the college library. David Slavitt’s book is by far the shortest and the [...]
BBT, English Electric. Forthcoming, September 3, 2012 An Interview with Greg Spawton We’re in the middle of perhaps the largest revival of progressive rock—that form of rock music which pursues the artistic and the mythic—since the genre became somewhat suspect as overblown and over-the-top in the second half of the 1970s with the [...]
Karen Klein, the grandmother/bus monitor whose bullying by a group of middle school students was captured on video and posted online, has become a bit of a celebrity over the summer of 2012. I have nothing but respect for this eminently decent woman. But the story of her ordeal has followed an all-too-common trajectory in [...]
by Robert Reilly When I was a child, I thought that living through a degenerate period would be great fun – one big party. Guns blazing, fast cars, beautiful girls, plenty of adult beverages – at least that was my idea of it from having watched movies about the Roaring Twenties with James Cagney. Now, [...]
On numerous occasions, Mortimer Adler wrote about the criteria that was used to determine which books of all the books written in the West would be placed within The Great Books of the Western World. Contrary to confusion and many misstatements I’ve read over the years, Adler says it was essentially three criteria and they [...]
Though deeply flawed as a person, Crazy Horse’s struggle was the fight of an Imaginative Conservative as he defended tradition, home, and family against nationalism, militarism, and progressivism. Our whole Indian policy is a system of mismanagement, and in many parts one of gigantic abuse. —The Nation, January 1867. With the end of the Civil War [...]
The Greening of Conservative America, by John R. E. Bliese The first thing to say about this fine book is that it is much better than its misleading title. Professor John R. E. Bliese does not really argue that conservatives should join the Green Party or Greenpeace. While true conservatives have always been conservationists, their [...]
[Excerpt from: William F. Byrne, Edmund Burke for Our Time: Moral Imagination, Meaning, and Politics (De Kalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 2011).] To the extent that there is such a thing as “Burkean conservatism,” we can get a glimpse of its true nature from a passage in the unfinished English History, a writing project [...]
[An excerpt from the In Search of the City on a Hill: The Making and Unmaking of an American Myth.] In popular culture, the phrase “city on a hill” has become so closely identified with Ronald Reagan and before him with John Winthrop that even Christians can forget that the words originated not with a founder [...]