Post-war conservatism arose as a protest against the tapioca conformity of mass man and mass society. Any revival of conservatism will thus demand a recognition of true diversity and human dignity... For many Americans of my generation, conservatism represented the best hope for a truly diverse America, a country that valued individual persons against the [...]
What would Edmund Burke do? What would he say should be done to save our Constitution and help us recover our republic? This past week I spent some time at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal. The incomparable Annette Kirk was hosting a group of students, scholars, and men and women of letters. We [...]
Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman’s Crusade, by Donald T. Critchlow (Princeton University Press, 2005) Donald Critchlow, a political historian at Saint Louis University, has shattered the historical barrier, providing a well written, impressively researched, and sympathetic study of the importance of grassroots activism in the formation of modern American conservatism. Critchlow shows how [...]
Should one generation ever consider itself greater than any other generation, past or future, Edmund Burke warned in his magisterial Reflections on the Revolution in France, the entire fabric of a civilization might very well unravel and, ultimately, disintegrate. Our modern ears have no right to discount Burke’s argument as simple hyperbole. What takes centuries [...]
In what was, perhaps, Edmund Burke’s best writing, the Anglo-Irish statesman had argued in favor of the moral imagination, a way by which one sees the reflection of God’s glory in another. He then concluded that section of the Reflections on the Revolution in France by noting that “to make us love our country, our [...]
The ancient rhetoricians, who knew their business, taught that the way to begin a speech, the more so a breakfast talk, was with what they called a captatio benevolentiae, a “capturing of goodwill.” I’ll try that on you—I’ll try to snaffle your benevolence by claiming that we are likely to have this in common: a [...]
For those of us who love Russell Kirk, T.S. Eliot, and Irving Babbitt, the extravagantly convoluted term, “the moral imagination,” rolls readily off the tongue and warms the heart like few other things. Yet, most of our closest allies on the right scratch their collective and individual heads in confusion. “What is this moral imagination,” [...]
As Edmund Burke continued his ferociously intellectual and spiritual attack on the French Revolutionaries in the earliest and least violent days of the Revolution, he noted critically that no one could ever attain or realize the virtues without struggle. […]
Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Gerhart Niemeyer as he explores the role and nature of ideology as applied to politics, through the lens of Russell Kirk. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher Russell Kirk “Philosophy”—love of wisdom—is a word first used by Heraclitus. “Sophia” as listed [...]
When Edmund Burke surveyed the names of those leading the French Revolution in its first half year of existence in 1789, he despaired. Several were certainly good men, he noted, and many were quite accomplished. Yet, not a single man possessing any necessary experience in the world appeared on the list. “The best,” he lamented, [...]
The real goal of political society, Edmund Burke claimed in his arguments against the French Revolutionaries, is not to create new laws or new rules, but “to secure the religion, laws, and liberties, that had been long possessed.” If one creates a law out of theory, he will explain much later in his Reflections on the [...]
Two decades ago, George Nash, in his The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945,[1] told the story of how American conservatism was forged rather uneasily as a political movement from three intellectual groupings: traditionalists, libertarians, and anti-communists. Today on the conventional “Right,” however, we find many libertarians who argue as vigorously against the opponents of [...]
In the first essay of this series, I discussed the three things that one must know about Edmund Burke in order to understand the cohesiveness of his vision, a vision which spanned his adult life. While he developed this vision, he never radically altered it, as many of his opponents claims. These opponents simply could not understand how [...]
Every now and again a left wing academic (pardon the redundancy) states his prejudices so baldly and unselfconsciously that he provides a highly useful insight into the mind of his class. Such is the case with an essay published in the Raleigh News & Observer by William Snider, a professor in the department of neurology [...]