Now, a full century after the middle of his life, Albert Jay Nock remains an enigma, but he also remains one of the most politically-incorrect and least fashionable man of any era, and, of course, an inspiration to those who proclaim the name of Imaginative Conservative. Recently, to prepare for a lecture I’m giving, I [...]
In stressing the importance of beauty and formality, the young fogey movement provides an antidote to modernity’s utilitarianism and narcissistic childishness. Looking into the life of a contemporary English writer, I happened upon a reference to the “young fogies” of 1980s England, an assortment of men then in their first decade or two of adult life [...]
What National Review has always been for is limited government, authentic federalism, limited spending, a strong national defense, a respect for cultural pieties, civility and civil order, religious freedom, the Constitution properly construed, and mostly just leaving people alone, as well an understanding that to be free first you have to be born. William [...]
Robert A. Nisbet rooted his eleven ideas of conservatism in contributions from sociology as an academic discipline. Sociology, in contrast to liberalism and radicalism, had merely focused on the aspect of being social and had thus best reflected the more obscure aspects of nineteenth-century conservatism. That conservatism, though, reflected some of the most important concerns [...]
Today the idea that the cultivation of manners should be an essential part of one’s education has been lost almost entirely. Proof of the demise of manners is all around us, and thus one of the main pillars of civilization is crumbling before us. On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee met General Ulysses [...]
Unless we conservatives make an effort to engage in a sustained and regular way with all legitimate developments of the artistic tradition, we will contribute not to the preservation of the tradition but to its ossification into a relic of the past, admired by an increasingly marginalized subculture. Ask a conservative why conservatives tend to [...]
Moral indolence and apathy, both Babbitt and Weaver stress, must be surpassed if one is to fly beyond the nets of naturalism and temperamental excesses. Character and Culture: Essays on East and West, by Irving Babbitt, with a new Introduction by Claes G. Ryn Visions of Order: The Cultural Crisis of Our Time, by Richard [...]
In his “Reflections,” Edmund Burke constructs a powerful myth of English history, defending the consolidated results of the English Revolution of the seventeenth century. In his poem “Blood and the Moon,” Yeats writes of “haughtier-headed Burke that proved the state a tree.” Edmund Burke would have relished the line, having proved nothing of the sort. [...]
A conservatism at the mercy of hollow men is inconceivable, and yet cruelly possible, which ultimately makes it necessary to protect and to conserve the soil of conservative thought and consciousness. That the canons of conservatism must beg to be defended against present-day pretenders who mask their ambitions and antinomies under the rubric of conservatism [...]
Ben Jonson’s “To Penshurst” has received very little attention, no doubt because of the well known circumstance that Jonson himself is more honored than read. Yet “To Penshurst” is a memorable poem, and perhaps a great one. Civilization is memory. –Hugh Kenner I cannot do my duty as a true modern, by cursing everybody who [...]
John Dryden was, for the most part, a man of quiet temperament; yet he presided over a literary revolution. As a poet and critic he destroyed the principal seventeenth-century literary modes and created the style and the methods that would characterize the eighteenth. The rise in John Dryden’s reputation, commencing a generation or so ago, [...]
Russell Kirk would agree that what is happening these days is civil liberty (gone astray) prioritized over public morality. Kirk urged the rising generation to take up the defense of the moral order and the social order, the order of the soul, and the permanent things. It’s a faith worth fighting for. In the opening [...]
If culture can neither thrive nor survive without religion, then a cultural conservative, which Russell Kirk claims is the most imaginative of conservatives, must fight to preserve the religious foundations of his culture. Apropos of the title of this online journal, I think it appropriate to offer a few Russell Kirk—inspired refections as to what [...]
To rebuild their movement and society, and to rebuild a viable culture, conservatives must embrace the conservative populism championed by two men: filmmaker Frank Capra and scholar Willmoore Kendall. Pursuing this path will be challenging, for populism has become a bogeyman for the powers that be. Last December, my wife and I motored a couple [...]