Classical Liberalism

Lord Acton and the American Civil War

Lord Acton believed that the wrong side won the American Civil War. Such a judgment could hardly be said to be a minor detail of someone’s historical worldview, yet this judgment has somehow been obscured... “Power...

Four Sides of a Cube: The Way of Great Books

We turn to the Great Books so that the encounter with them might do for us what they did for past generations. We turn to them as world makers, that they might aide us in understanding the world they were instrumental in bringing about, our world...

Edmund Burke: Old Whig

Edmund Burke, like his Whig forebears, believed in the existence of a higher moral law to which all valid positive law must conform, a universal law which manifests itself in diverse concrete forms, in the great variety of legal codes and customs that constitute particular cultural traditions... Today’s...

In Defense of the Old Republic: Reclaiming the Common Good

The problem of political unity is a perennial question of political philosophy because it is always timely. How do the many become and remain one body politic? In other words, how can a plurality of individuals,...

Edmund Burke: Old Whig

Edmund Burke, the passionate defender of the "ancient principles" of his forebears, might be surprised to discover that he originated a new school of political thought. By all accounts, however, Burke is the "modern founder of political conservatism,"...

All’s Well That Ends Well?: Reflections on Liberalism and Race

To study the past requires a sense of tragedy and perhaps a belief in original sin, “the imagination of disaster” as Henry James called it. The celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, our...

The Gold Democrats

N.B.  This is a piece I wrote in the early 1990s. I had forgotten completely about it until I came across it by accident today (Wednesday, August 22). It was my first attempt at a dissertation proposal, and I wrote it...