The rich soil of faith, family, and friends is where community is formed, where relationships flourish, where roots go down that nourish us. This is where those of us who are rooted in Christ seek to walk out our faith in tangible deeds of sacrifice, loyalty and love, in relationship with people whose names we [...]
Was Albert Jay Nock correct in saying that the educated man is a superfluous man in modern society? One of the greatest intellectual pleasures of my summer has been the discovery of the writings of Albert Jay Nock. Well, really, the re-discovery. I had twice read Nock’s Our Enemy, the State, but I’d never found [...]
The divide between conservatism’s old elements may represent the “end” of the fusionism that built the “conservative movement” and, after a half-century, of the dominance of this thinking within one of America’s major political parties. The intellectual battle between the factions claiming the brand “conservatism” has become “the fight over, well, everything” perceives even outsider [...]
Frank Meyer was a man looking desperately for faults in the philosophy to which he was most attracted: traditionalism. Finding none, he simply made up another philosophy: fusionism. But instead of coopting the energy and scientific rigor of libertarianism for the traditionalist cause, he simply empowered the former at the latter’s expense… American conservatism originates [...]
One of the most important lessons of Mr. Trump’s electoral victory was that classically-liberal rhetoric and positions were not very important to voters. It turned out that they wanted a candidate who promised to help, not one who knew his Hayek… Six months of the Trump Administration have turned conservatives into Alices peering through the [...]
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 for one of my favorite graduate school professors, Dr. Russell Hanson. He probably doesn’t remember me, [...]
In this paper I argue one cannot be a Christian and libertarian with any pretense of consistency. The argument comes in three major parts: the theological, the logical and the historical. The theological argument identifies and examines the significance of the concept of transcendence underlying three major social encyclicals that deal with economic matters, Rerum [...]
Conservatives value individual liberty as much as libertarians, but they deny that freedom from coercion is the only form of liberty. It cannot be repeated often enough: The issue dividing conservatives and libertarians is not whether there should be a public philosophy by which we are governed, but which philosophy should govern us, conservatism or [...]
The contemporary Tea Party Movement, like its revolutionary ancestor, looks to principles for guidance. Yet an old but active fault line runs just beneath the surface of the movement that has the potential to cause a fatal rupture. Tea Partiers simultaneously promote both a conservatism based upon the principles of the American founding and a [...]
As I’ve frequently made clear in print and in lectures, I hold Larry Reed in the highest regard. I first had the opportunity to work with Larry in the fall of 1988 or 1989 (I can’t remember now!), and we hit it off instantly. Sitting our first evening together in a Vietnamese restaurant, Larry held [...]
The following are excerpts from a speech T.S. Eliot gave on April 19, 1955, at the London Conservative Union. I have typed verbatim what Time and Tide reprinted in its April 23, 1955 issue. One can find the full speech in T.S. Eliot, To Criticize the Critic and Other Writings (1965; Lincoln, NE: University of [...]
When Friedrich Hayek announced his personal political philosophy as an “unrepentant Old Whig” in his magnum opus Constitution of Liberty, he was reaching deep into the well of the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian traditions, even if he had originally spoken these words against his friend, Russell Kirk, in their famous Mont Pelerin debate of 1957.[1] While [...]
I read Bob Higgs’s book, Crisis and Leviathan, when it first came out in 1987. I was a college freshman or sophomore at the time, and it had a profound influence on me. I was already deeply libertarian, but mostly from instinct, a healthy Kansas fear of governmental authority, reading every dystopian science fiction [...]
Obligatory Navel-Gazing This summer, I’ve spent far more time with self-professed libertarians than I have with self-professed conservatives. Usually, it’s about 50-50, but this summer has been much more like 70-30. I’ve especially been influenced–directly and in person–by fine folks such as Larry Reed, Jim Otteson, Ed Lopez, Carl Oberg, and Ben Stafford. The former [...]