Irving Babbitt believed that man defined himself not by his rights, but by his duties, and particularly how willing he was to restrain his darker impulses and sacrifice himself for another… Famously, when Paul Elmer More and Irving Babbitt were debating one another while on a walk, the former, exasperated, asked: “Good God, man. Are [...]
The constitutional inheritance is not merely a gift to be expended or consumed; it is a responsibility to be stewarded. This sense of intergenerational obligation—debts to the past and future—is the most solid and powerful grounding for originalism and respect for constitutional form… The essential question confronting American conservatism is what, precisely, it aspires to conserve. [...]
Edmund Burke’s principle of order is an anticipatory refutation of utilitarianism, positivism, and pragmatism, an affirmation of that reverential view of society which may be traced through Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, the Roman jurisconsults, the Schoolmen, Richard Hooker, and lesser thinkers. It is this; but it is more. What Matthew Arnold called “an epoch of concentration” [...]
While the West has made more than its share of mistakes, it has also done some things better than any other civilization, or, at the very least, introduced things to the world that the world then claimed for all of humanity. For those of us who still love Western civilization and consider ourselves loyal patriots [...]
There is a divine order of being of which we must be a part. To reject this order and our part therein is to choose madness and make any decent life impossible. As a literary critic, George Panichas shed great light on the relationship between this recognition of the order of being and our ability [...]
T.S. Eliot reminds us that the answers to our soul’s depravity are all around us, in our collective culture—the books we read, the places we inhabit, the music we listen to—but also that culture can only survive if we remember it and keep it alive. “These things I do within, in that vast chamber of [...]
Education in the liberal arts is an ancient tradition that has slowly been eroded through our increasing attachment to approaching the world scientifically and pragmatically. The language of man reveals something significant about his nature and his relationship with the world. Language is so close to man’s nature that if it suffers a drastic change, [...]
The story of Beauty and the Beast is the oldest story in the Christian world. It’s the story about love, sacrifice, and redemption… Several nights ago, I reluctantly watched Disney’s 2017 live version of Beauty and the Beast. I must admit three things before I get into the heart of this essay. First, I’ve never [...]
Conservatives must once again put contemplation before action, or else their energies will be wasted. They cannot continue to trim the upper branches of politics while the roots of culture wither and die from inattention… There is an aspect to the conservative abandonment of culture I find distressing: the increasing politicization within the conservative movement. [...]
The left owns the microphone and is not going to give it up. Conservatives need to buy their own microphones… If you want to reach the mainstream population with the message of conservative values, then you have a very difficult task before you. How is the conservative voice heard when the microphones of the mainstream [...]
There is no escape from historical existence. With all its contingencies, unexpected happenings, and mysteries, historical existence offers opportunities for grasping the great drama of life. Conservative intellectuals have long been suspicious of the pressures that political ideologies place on the writing of history. Most famously, Herbert Butterfield, in his classic work, The Whig Interpretation [...]
As Paul Gottfried explains in “Revisions and Dissents,” the real division between right and left cuts not between finance capitalists and welfare statists, but “between those who wish to preserve inherited communities and their sources of authority and those who wish to ‘reform’ or abolish these arrangements.” Complaints about Donald Trump’s “divisiveness” strike Paul Gottfried [...]
The future is bright for conservatives. If conservatism is understood as somehow a post-modern phenomenon, we will no longer labor under the tiresome accusation that we are on the wrong side of history and therefore irrelevant… In the late 1970s, if you had asked someone what a conservative was, the answer would have been easy. [...]
Leo Strauss and the American Right has little to do with Leo Strauss and everything to do with liberal fear of attempts to reintroduce standards of religious morality to public conduct… Leo Strauss and the American Right by Shadia B. Drury (St. Martin ’s Press, 1997) Shadia Drury’s first book, The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss (1988), was [...]