In “The Social Group in French Thought,” Robert Nisbet explains that social philosophers such as Bodin, Hobbes, and Rousseau undermined and sabotaged private law and intermediary institutions. Their thought culminated in the French Revolution and in its radical and nationalist legislation. Robert Nisbet’s dissertation began by lamenting that the history of freedom has been written [...]
Robert Nisbet had written and completed his dissertation, “The Social Group in French Thought,” rather speedily, beginning it in January 1939 and finishing it a mere six months later. Though Nisbet would publish his most famous work, “The Quest for Community,” fourteen years later, that book would not have been possible without the dissertation. When [...]
In his book “The Year of Our Lord 1943,” writing on Christian humanism, Alan Jacobs considers the fears and desires of five major but seemingly disparate figures in 1943 as they envision a post-war world after an allied victory: W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot, C.S. Lewis, Jacques Maritain, and Simone Weil. The Year of Our Lord [...]
Growing up in Maricopa, the young Robert Nisbet fell deeply in love with libraries. Almost as soon as he learned to read—sitting on his mother’s lap as she read to him—the young man began to devour books voraciously, loving the literature of the Age of Coolidge. Though proudly possessing the Confederate soul of a southern [...]
From the beginning of their friendship, Franklin D. Roosevelt could not see Joseph Stalin as anything other than an ally, an anti-imperialist and proto-democrat, representing all that was modern and rational and equalitarian. Robert Nisbet concludes that Roosevelt’s arrogant blindness was the key to Soviet mischief. World War II—especially the European theatre—intrigued Robert A. Nisbet [...]
Going back to the first principles of the Founding, one finds that the Founders talked unceasingly about rights. Rights language became a critical part of the cultural landscape when James Otis delivered his oration on the nature of rights, the common law, and the natural law. Feel free to call me a conservative (I won’t [...]
Robert Nisbet was greatly influenced by his professor Frederick Teggart and his many ideas. Teggart was a brilliant scholar and historian, one of University of California Berkeley’s most successful lecturers, and “an impressive stretcher of minds.” “I have met no one since then who has approached him in range, diversity, and depth of knowledge,” Robert [...]
We live in a world that desperately needs Thomas More’s wisdom. We need his understanding of God, his understanding of virtue, and his understanding of the complexities of the human person. “The Essential Works of Thomas More” is the best book of 2020 and is the book most needed in 2021. The Essential Works of [...]
As the old year ends and the new year arrives, The Imaginative Conservative looks back at some of its finest essays of 2020. —Editors In the late 1950s, as Russell Kirk considered what needed to be conserved in the Western tradition as well as what needed to be discarded, he lamented that much of what [...]
The progressive vision of history should give any intelligent and humane person pause. The progressive vision demands conflict; in its understanding, history is made up of winners and losers. This flies directly against the long tradition of republican and Judeo-Christian thought that calls for the “common good,” not the greater good of those with might. [...]
The philosophy and way of conservatism arose sometime in the 1880s or 1890s. This is not to suggest that conservative acts had not occurred previously in Western civilization. Indeed, some of the finest and most important moments in Western civilization occurred upon and with the act of conserving something good. From Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and [...]
Several things define the conservatives of America, whether they be those of 1898 or 1924 or 1953 or 1964 or 1989 or 2021. First, conservatism by its very nature is reactionary and reactive. Rather than being a positive force for change, it is a restraining force. As such, conservatives almost everywhere make the best critics. [...]
In the year 793, Catholic monks made the following report, all of it disturbing: In this dire year portents appeared over Northumbria and sorely frightened the people. They consisted of immense whirlwinds and flashes of lightning, and fiery dragons were seen flying in the air. A great famine immediately followed those signs, and a little [...]
James Matthew Wilson’s collection of poems, “The Strangeness of the Good,” by acknowledging illness and disappointment and death, tries to see through it, to the mystery beneath. Seeing the mystery leads to the unveiling of the reality, the thing standing beneath all feelings and appearances that alone can make them genuinely good in themselves. Bradley [...]