Edmund Burke: Volume 1, 1730-1784 by F. P. Lock, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Thomas Copeland, the editor of The Correspondence of Edmund Burke and a central figure in Burke’s twentieth-century revival, once observed that of all the books written about Burke the most important was the work never written: his “official biography.” Unfortunately for posterity, Burke’s literary [...]
The most recent one, from James Kurth, we at The Imaginative Conservative must take seriously. Dr. Kurth is a veteran teacher and writer, not about the ephemera of American politics (aren’t you sick to death of “pundits” and other self-important journalists?), but about serious matters of national defense, military and strategic affairs, international politics, always [...]
Those of us who identify in various ways as “conservative,” especially in academic settings, have a story that we like to tell. It is a story wherein we are the heroes, and the villain bears the name “relativism.” We all believe in truth, while it seems like a great many scholars nowadays do not, at [...]
William F. Buckley, Jr., Flying High: Remembering Barry Goldwater (Basic Books, 2008). Buckley’s book, Flying High, is much more a memoir of the conservative movement in the early 1960s than it is a biography of Goldwater. Indeed, without the subtitle and the book dust jacket bearing a picture of Goldwater campaigning in 1964, this might very well have [...]
It is “dearest to my heart and dearest in my convictions,” the dying James Madison said, “that the Union of the States be cherished and perpetuated.” It was this Union, conceived, framed, ratified, explained, implemented, defended, and cherished by Madison, that Kevin Gutzman cogently and rightly sees as the essential “making of America.” James Madison [...]
I'd say a conservative is a person who prefers the devil he knows to the devil he doesn't. He knows there are always ills and devils in the world, and he would rather get along with present imperfections than dash into some ruinous and impossible scheme of perfectibility. Editor's Note: This interview, conducted in the [...]
Cant and equivocation dismissed, it seems to me that there are three great bodies of principle and conviction that tie together what is called modern civilization. The first of these is the Christian faith: the theological and moral doctrines which inform us, either side of the Atlantic, of the nature of God and man, the [...]
It is the best of times, it is the worst of times. It has the best of times for HSBC, the giant British bank caught using American personnel and facilities to launder money for Mexican drug cartels and various rogue states. How so? HSBC’s stock value has continued to rise since the U.S. government announced a [...]
Richard Weaver In his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams (1907), Adams tells us that he was born into one world in the nineteenth century and lived on into another. Born in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1838, he lived to see the emergent twentieth century—a world in which a secular Dynamo replaced Venus and the [...]
Virtue and the Promise of Conservatism: the Legacy of Burke and Tocqueville, by Bruce Frohnen. Conservatism lives. It continues to exercise its power over bright young minds. It also shows us a way of life, how to live. For these assertions there could be no better evidence than Bruce Frohnen’s Virtue and the Promise of Conservatism. Conceived [...]
In my last post about teaching in an age of ideology, I proposed that one needs to illuminate to students about how to live according to the true, the beautiful, and the good. Now what exactly constitutes these goods has elicited an array of different responses from some of the most prominent thinkers as teachers in this [...]
Humanism and Religion: A Call for the Renewal of Western Culture, by Jens Zimmermann, Oxford University Press, 2012. As a number of books from important thinkers (Etienne Gilson, Jeffrey Burton Russell) have sought to educate open-minded readers to a most enlightened Middle Ages, Zimmermann seeks, in part, to challenge some misinterpretations and terrible damage done to [...]
The concept of federalism has been one of the principal casualties of modern American history. One has to look far and wide to find American historians and political scientists who do not believe, with the smugness and tenacity of dogma, that our federal institutions are lumbering relics of a past we outgrew over a century [...]
Russell Kirk To condense into a short essay the reason I’m a conservative is no mean feat. From my perspective, in order to represent my reasoning, I need to address not only what it is about conservatism that first captured my attention, but also how I believe that the principles of conservatism best [...]