What Matthew Arnold called “an epoch of concentration” seems to be impending over the English-speaking world. The revolutionary impulses and the social enthusiasms which have dominated this era since their great explosion in Russia are now confronted with a countervailing physical and intellectual force. Communism, Fascism, and their kindred expansive ideologies all in their fashion [...]
Statecraft as Soulcraft: What Government Does, by George Will. Simon and Schuster. 186 pp. Suffused with the thoughts of Burke and Tocqueville, George Will’s slim book is an exhortation demanding political views imaginative and humane. Hobbes and Locke, self-interest and individualism are abhorred by Will; he advocates “conservatism with a kindly face.” “Liberal democratic societies [...]
No man of his time defended more passionately the cause of sanity and “centricity” than did G. K. Chesterton—despite his aversion to watches and his uncalculated picturesqueness of dress. Yet no imaginative writer touched more often than did Chesterton upon lunacy, real or alleged: a prospect of his age with the madhouse for its background. “It [...]
In this stubborn old college and at this pleasant old town of Hillsdale, the young ladies and gentlemen, who are being graduated today, have enjoyed four years of sanctuary from the hurly-burly of our era; four years of immunity from the violence and fraud of an age that some call “the post-Christian era.” That four [...]
T.S. Eliot One hundred years ago, Thomas Steams Eliot was born into an intelligently conservative family in St. Louis. His grandfather, a Unitarian minister and a man of mark, founded the Church of the Messiah and Washington University; the Eliots of St. Louis were Republican reformers, active in good causes, pillars of order. [...]
Some years ago, I walked across the braes from Old Cumnock, in Ayrshire, to the village of Ochiltree. Now Ochiltree is the “Barbie” of George Douglas Brown’s grim realistic novel The House with the Green Shutters. And the Scottish village of Ochiltree is dying. Brown described the changes that began to descend upon little Barbie [...]
Dugway Proving Ground, UT Like an emerald dropped by Sinbad’s roc into the Valley of the Serpents, Camp James Wilkinson, amidst the sand, sparkled from the red sun that was setting in Nevada across the salt flats. The serpents were literal enough, since rattlesnakes crushed by wheels of military trucks lay dead every [...]
We propose to publish a bi-monthly magazine, The Conservative Review. More people are literate in America than in any other country; we have several times as many college graduates as we had at the beginning of this century; and yet probably there is less serious reading, per head of population, than in any other great [...]
What defenders of the permanent things should seek is not a league with some set of old-fangled or new-fangled ideologues, but the politics of prudence, enlivened by imagination. “Capitalism” and “socialism” both are 19th century ideological tags; they delude and ensnare, as do all ideologies. Zealots for “democratic capitalism” seem to have forgotten that it [...]
The political and moral attitude called conservatism does not come out of a book; indeed, some of the most conservative folk I have known have been distinctly unbookish. For the sources of a conservative order are not theoretical writings, but rather custom, convention, and continuity. Edmund Burke could imagine nothing more wicked than the heart [...]
Russell Kirk “The conservative is concerned, first of all, with the regeneration of the spirit and character—with the perennial problem of the inner order of the soul, the restoration of the ethical understanding, and the religious sanction upon which any life worth living is founded. This is conservatism at the highest.” – Russell [...]
“It is imagination that governs the human race.” No professor of literature wrote those words: that is an aphorism of the master of the big battalions, Napoleon Bonaparte. In a time when we Americans ought to be entering upon an Augustan age, we seem enervated. A feeling of powerlessness oppresses many Americans. Even the [...]
Russell Kirk “A poor man, if he has dignity, honesty, the respect of his neighbors, a realization of his duties, a love of the wisdom of his ancestors, and possibly some taste for knowledge or beauty, is rich in the unbought grace of life.” -Russell Kirk […]
Universities were founded to sustain faith by reason—to maintain order in the soul and in the commonwealth. My own university, St. Andrews, was established in the fifteenth-century by the Scottish Inquisitor of Heretical Pravity to resist the errors of the Lollards, the levellers of that age. The early universities’ teaching imparted both order and freedom to [...]