The Uses of Pessimism: And the Danger of False Hope by Roger Scruton. In the excitement (and disappointment) of the politics of hope and change, surely a conservative’s responsibility must be to remind us that change is not the substance of things hoped for, and that reasonable hopes for those concrete goods really within human [...]
In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government by Charles Murray Throughout his long and highly productive career, Charles Murray has done the seemingly impossible. He has melded his strong libertarianism with respect for, and insights from, the work of Robert Nisbet and Russell Kirk. He has trained as a social scientist, worked for the Peace Corps, [...]
What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us.—Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue MacIntyre’s brilliant critique of modernity and its many failings was published almost thirty years ago. Its many [...]
In the retrospect of forty years I can see my book, The Quest for Community (first published by Oxford University Press in 1953), as one of the harbingers of what would become by the end of the 1950s a full-fledged renascence of conservatism. There had been authentic and forthright individual conservatives before the 50s; among [...]
“Where,” asks the editor, “will your town get the money to build new school rooms, and pay better salaries to more teachers? Thousands of communities are wrestling with this problem, or will soon be faced with it. We offer a suggestion.” It is really quite simple. Everyone, from the PTA to the local Rotarians, should [...]
There will be ample disputation at this week’s and next’s presidential nominating conventions, but one point is virtually sure to unite them: a rhetorical commitment to the “War on Terror” and, particularly, to the troops fighting it. Already, Paul Ryan has offered up the obligatory salute to the troops who have “defended our freedom”—which is, [...]
Laurel Good with her son Sam My son Sam was fourteen months old when he first felt the sensation of grass beneath his feet. I lay him on his back on a blanket under a tree so he could watch the wind in the leaves, and he kept his heels in the air [...]
Russell Kirk Thirty years ago, Irving Babbitt wrote that the highest order of true work is an ethical working, labor of the spirit; and that no important problem of economics or politics can be solved within its own terms. “When studied with any degree of thoroughness, the economic problem will be found to [...]
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 [...]
Robert Nisbet Unlike Max Weber or Emile Durkheim, Robert A. Nisbet has not produced a remarkably original theory that has shaken the sociological world or revolutionized its concepts and methods of analysis. What Nisbet has done over the period of a long career in American sociology is to act as a consistent, and [...]
Robert Nisbet The family, religious association, and local community—these, the conservatives insisted, cannot be regarded as the external products of man’s thought and behavior; they are essentially prior to the individual and are the indispensable supports of belief and conduct. Release man from the contexts of community and you get not freedom and [...]
Originally published in 1986, Robert Nisbet’s recently reissued study of the history and prospects of both conservative thought and political conservatism from Edmund Burke to Ronald Reagan is as relevant today as it would have been over the course of many yesterdays and as it will be for many tomorrows. No doubt intended to shore [...]
Winston Elliott III Yesterday, on the third floor of a west Houston office building, I had the opportunity—well the blessing, really—of being with some truly wonderful persons, discussing one of my favorite books, Russell Kirk’s Prospects for Conservatives. The roll call of participants: Father Donald Silvio Nesti, John Hittinger, John Rocha, Clint Brand, Bob [...]
Most of us learn about friendship from our families, just as we learn about everything else worth knowing from our families. Mine is an old New England family, farmers and preachers and doctors and lawyers, and tradesmen, not many in commerce. Nobody up to my generation was ever rich, nobody particularly poor, so there was [...]