Permit me to offer you some desultory reflections concerning the effect of the electronic computer upon the reason and the imagination. We are told by many voices that the computer will work a revolution in learning. So it may; but that accomplishment would not be salutary. The primary end of the higher learning, in all [...]
Literature in Revolution. Edited by George Abbott White and Charles Newman. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston-Triquarterly Book, 1972). Time was when the study of humane letters stood central in formal education. Public men were brought up in a literary discipline, and “rhetoric” meant more than an orator’s style. The domination of the political order [...]
Russell Kirk In the franchise bookshops of the year of our Lord one thousand nine hundred eighty-one, the shelves are crowded with the prickly pears and the Dead Sea fruit of literary decadence. Yet no civilization rests forever content with literary boredom and literary violence. Once again, a conscience may speak to a [...]
Novela/Nivola Miguel de Unamuno, translated by Anthony Kerrigan Princeton: Princeton University Press, Reprint 1987 Three Exemplary Novels Miguel de Unamuno, translated by Angel Flores New York: Grove Press, Reprint 1987 Ficciones: Four Stories and a Play Miguel de Unamuno, translated by Anthony Kerrigan Princeton: Princeton University press, Reprint 1987 Half a century has elapsed since [...]
In 1755, the year when there began the French and Indian Wars, George Mason, gentleman freeholder, commenced the building of Gunston Hall. Ever since I was a boy I have come upon pictures of this lovely house, at once homely and eye-catching; I have longed to visit it; and at last here I am, aged [...]
”I hope, then, that our resurgent American conservatism will not be truly new, looking toward a wave of the future, but rather a genuine revival of intelligent interest in the old liberties and duties of American society. I hope, moreover, that it will be not merely a shop-and-till conservatism, a conservatism of timidity, but instead [...]
The conservative is concerned, first of all, for the regeneration of 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 its highest. —Russell Kirk (The Conservative Mind) […]
(This address was given to an event sponsored by the Heritage Foundation in 1980. Should you wish to enjoy the video of Dr. Kirk making this presentation it is available on C-SPAN here. Ed.) In the United States, as in Britain, the passage of some three decades is required for a body of convictions to be [...]
Russell Kirk The conservative believes that the individual is foolish, although the species is wise; therefore, unlike the confident intellectual, he declines to undertake the reconstruction of society and human nature upon the scanty capital of his private stock of reason. The conservative believes that the world is not perfectible, and that we [...]
Nowhere are Roman ruins thicker than in Tunisia. For this, from the days when Scipio took Punic Carthage until the Vandals broke into the city, was the Province of Africa, wondrously rich and populous. St. Augustine was born in Carthage—of a patrician family—and died in neighboring Hippo, when the Vandals were at the gates. I [...]
Christopher Dawson A Historian and His Word: a Life of Christopher Dawson, 1889–1970 by Christina Scott. The Dynamic Character of Christian Culture: Essays on Dawsonian Themes edited by Peter J. Cataldo. “Years ago when I was an undergraduate your Ballad of the White Horse first brought the breath of life to this period for me when I [...]
There is a species of freedom peculiar to the academy: it is commonly called academic freedom, and has historically been linked with tenure and various forms of due process designed to ameliorate conditions of implacable dispute. Ideally, academic freedom is that freedom to examine, dissect, describe, and explore the validity, utility, and consequences of ideas, [...]
What Matthew Arnold called “an epoch of concentration” impends over the English-speaking nations. The revolutionary impulses and the social enthusiasms that dominated our century since their great explosion in Russia are now confronted by a countervailing physical and intellectual force. Fanatic ideology has been, in essence, rebellion against the old moral order of our civilization. [...]
Russell Kirk The moral imagination is the principal possession that man does not share with the beasts. It is man’s power to perceive ethical truth, abiding law, in the seeming chaos of many events. Without the moral imagination, man would live merely day to day, or rather moment to moment, as dogs do. [...]