As I’ve frequently made clear in print and in lectures, I hold Larry Reed in the highest regard. I first had the opportunity to work with Larry in the fall of 1988 or 1989 (I can’t remember now!), and we hit it off instantly. Sitting our first evening together in a Vietnamese restaurant, Larry held [...]
The following are excerpts from a speech T.S. Eliot gave on April 19, 1955, at the London Conservative Union. I have typed verbatim what Time and Tide reprinted in its April 23, 1955 issue. One can find the full speech in T.S. Eliot, To Criticize the Critic and Other Writings (1965; Lincoln, NE: University of [...]
When Friedrich Hayek announced his personal political philosophy as an “unrepentant Old Whig” in his magnum opus Constitution of Liberty, he was reaching deep into the well of the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian traditions, even if he had originally spoken these words against his friend, Russell Kirk, in their famous Mont Pelerin debate of 1957.[1] While [...]
The following quotes are all from Russell Kirk, “Return to Principle in Politics: Conservatives and Liberals Take Thought,” Southwest Review 41 (Spring 1956): 142-152. “Ever since the Civil War, political thought has languished in the United States. For original political theory almost always is developed out of a time of troubles, when thinking men, forced [...]
The following quotes are all from a speech (his second) Kirk gave to national convention of the Chi Omega sorority in 1956 and reprinted as Russell Kirk, “On the Shoulders of Giants,” The Eleusis of Chi Omega 58 (September 1956): 417-430. “Thus there cannot be brothers and sisters in a mystical sense without a mystical [...]
In the fall of 1957, the issue dated Michaelmas (September 29), The Newman Review published one of Kirk’s wittiest and most insightful articles on the nature of Truth. Vigorously Platonic, Stoic, and Christian all at once, Kirk noted that the true scholar rarely, if ever, conforms to the standards and values of his day, but [...]
Dear Imaginative Conservative Reader, As you prepare for the annual American ritual of year-end giving, please consider donating—at whatever level you can—to the sponsor of The Imaginative Conservative, The Center for the American Republic (CAR), a program of the Free Enterprise Institute (FEI). If you enjoy our articles, reviews, discussions, rants, debates, and general thinking [...]
In February 2005, Winston Elliott and I hosted a two-day conference at Hillsdale College commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Russell Kirk’s deeply profound and philosophical work, Academic Freedom. Sadly, the book is little remembered, though it’s probably the most Christian Humanist of all of his works. Gleaves Whitney offered the keynote address, [...]
With the Senate passing the National Defense Authorization Act on a vote of 87 to 13 yesterday, something fundamental seems to have changed in the very existence of our republic, if we can even employ this noble term any longer. For a year and a half, under Winston’s excellent editorship, The Imaginative Conservative has been examining in [...]
Russell Kirk Dear Imaginative Conservative Readers, I’m roughly half done with chapter five—“Deconstructing and Reconstructing Liberalism”—of the Kirk book. At this point, I’m on my third or fourth title for the book as a whole, “The Age of Kirk.” As you can tell, I’m starting to lose count of titles, and I’m sure this [...]
In a generation like ours, which has forgotten the natural law and has knelt to Leviathan, Antigone takes on a meaning little understood during the nineteenth century. . . . There exist in human nature, common to the Greeks of the fifth century and to us, certain constant qualities. Of these qualities, among the rising [...]
Even a frontier newspaper got right what our current commodifiers of “conservatism” don’t understand. In fact, not only do they not understand, they don’t even know they don’t understand. I’m not sure they know much of anything. Well, they know about getting people riled up and getting better ratings. I, of course, exclude the ever-excellent [...]
Dear Imaginative Conservative Readers, If you need a last-minute Christmas gift, please keep in mind the artwork (calendars, etc.) of Tolkienian artist Jef Murray. Not only is Jef excellent at his craft, but he’s also—in every way—one of us, an imaginative conservative. Indeed, he and his wife, Lorraine Viscardi Murray (a highly published novelist and essayist) [...]
Last Friday, I flew to Salt Lake City to meet with my two brothers for what we call a “brother get together.” My oldest brother is 8 years older, and my older brother is 5 years older. We grew up together—roughly, considering the age differences—in Kansas, but we now spread out across the country. Me—Hillsdale, [...]