The American Founders knew from history that a curriculum successful at teaching its graduates to think, communicate, and lead could produce anarchy or tyranny instead of ordered liberty, unless those skills were practiced by leaders committed to virtue and the love of liberty. The classical education of the American Founders was “Inspired by Liberty and [...]
It is impossible to love both the victors and the vanquished, as the Iliad does, except from the place, outside the world, where God’s Wisdom dwells. Published originally during the Second World War, Simone Weil’s The Iliad, or the Poem of Force and Rachel Bespaloff’s On the Iliad are two of the last century’s finest discussions [...]
Demonstrations that are political possess a tendency to be governed by loudness and force rather than by reflection and thought, and thus bear the shrill dictates of power instead of being willing servants to truth. And above all, we should remember that there is simply no point in winning the argument if we know we [...]
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 [...]
J.R.R. Tolkien’s love of the Anglo-Saxon language and culture is legendary among both Tolkien scholars and aficionados, as is his hatred of all things French. His biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, wrote that he suffered from “Gallophobia.”[1] His student and friend, George Sayer, commented that when Tolkien stayed with him and his wife, he very politely ate [...]
The effect of actions based on self-interest turned loose from any anchor in morality is not an adequate basis of economic or social organization. The sphere of legitimate market activity must be limited so that it harmonizes with the rest of the community and with other values. Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords [...]
What did Rome mean to the original Americans? What counsel did its early history contain? And what must we conclude about our forefathers from their somewhat selective devotion to the Roman analogue? The Federal District of Columbia, both in its formal character as a capital and also in its self-conscious attempt at a certain visual [...]
What defenders of the permanent things should seek is not a league with some set of old-fangled or new-fangled ideologues, but the politics of prudence, enlivened by imagination. “Capitalism” and “socialism” both are 19th century ideological tags; they delude and ensnare, as do all ideologies. Zealots for “democratic capitalism” seem to have forgotten that it [...]
Convocation speeches do not always come as naturally to me as you might expect of someone who has been delivering them for more than twenty years as a college president. A few years ago, I was having difficulty writing a mid-winter address. Unable to find an anchor for the address, I went to bed wondering [...]