Willmoore Kendall contended that the conventional interpretation of John Locke, depicting him as an exponent of individualism and natural rights which transcended majority sentiments, was in error. By any reasonable standard of measurement, Willmoore Kendall would have to be included in a list of the most important political scientists of the post-World War II era. [...]
Against a modern age that denied notions of meaning, purpose, and truth, Richard Weaver articulated a conservatism of hope and affirmation based on the Platonic-Christian heritage and its manifestation in the American South. Richard Weaver reasoned it was the emergence of nominalism, the departure from Platonism and Christianity, which produced the intellectual heresies leading to [...]
Confronted with choices between evil and good, man frequently chooses evil with its accompanying anguish. Would not wisdom and prudence dictate that man ought to be modest, restrained, and humble—in a word, pious? Born in Weaverville, North Carolina in 1910, Richard Malcolm Weaver was raised in Lexington, Kentucky. Elected to Phi Beta Kappa, Weaver graduated [...]
It is from careful textual analysis of “The Federalist” that the basic symbols of the American political tradition, and indeed the conservative tradition, may be found. III In his analysis of the Socrates of the Apology, Willmoore Kendall was hinting strongly at the probability that the contemporary John Stuart Mill-Karl Popper school in the United [...]
St. Augustine observed, “To begin with, there never has been, nor, is there today, any absence of hostile foreign powers to provoke war.” Evil men lusting after power—aggressors—are endemic to human history, and noted Augustine, “When they go to war what they want is to make, if they can, their enemies their own, and then [...]
(This essay is the fourth in a four-part series; the first may be found here, the second here, and the third here.) It is clear that Publius’s deliberative process, with its emphasis upon accommodation, harmony, and consensus, is antithetical to the conflict-oriented majoritarianism of the egalitarians. As a corollary proposition, it is essential to note that [...]
II The related problems of “the public orthodoxy” and “the open society” were major concerns of Willmoore Kendall throughout his professional career. In his reappraisal of John Locke in 1941, Kendall’s Locke emerged as an exponent of the public orthodoxy as expressed through the majority. As Kendall sees it, in Lockean thought, “In consenting to be a member [...]
IV Eric Voegelin’s affection for the Hellenic, Judaic, and Christian heritages can be easily documented. They are the crucial strands in the forming of his thought. Yet the matter goes deeper than that. Subtly, but irrefutably, in the corpus of his writing, Christianity emerges as the preeminent achievement of the Western experience. For example, Voegelin [...]
Eric Voegelin was born in Cologne, Germany in 1901. Receiving his doctorate from the University of Vienna in 1922, he served on the law faculty of that institution. To escape the Nazi regime, he came to the United States in 1938. Subsequently, he taught at Harvard University, Bennington College, the University of Alabama, and Louisiana State [...]
Leo Strauss (1899-1973) was a native of Germany. "I was," he reported near the end of his life, "brought up in a conservative, even orthodox Jewish home somewhere in a rural district of Germany."[1] Strauss received his doctorate from Hamburg University in 1921. In 1938, he emigrated to the United States and commenced teaching political [...]
It is surprising that contemporary political thinking has paid relatively scant attention to St. Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo. It may be true, as some say, that we live in the post-Christian era. It certainly cannot be gainsaid that we live in an age of pervasive secularism in which a name such as Augustine seems [...]
Ultimately in Russell Kirk’s thinking one is confronted with the fundamental differences between the pridefulness of secularism and the transcendent, enduring, and sacrificial love of the biblical view. This accounts for his powerful dissent on any proposition that conservatism and libertarianism are theoretically compatible. Born on October 19, 1918, in Plymouth, Michigan, the son of [...]