Walter Lippmann believed that Natural Laws are the principles of right reason and behavior in the good society governed by Western traditions of civility. It is possible to organize a state and conduct a government on quite different principles, but the outcome will not be freedom and the good life. Thus the environment with which [...]
Instead of considering contemporary political issues, or politicians, Roger Scruton attempts to rebuild conservatism by looking seriously at its past. Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition, by Roger Scruton (176 pages, All Points Books, 2018) In his Conservatism, An Introduction to the Great Tradition (2017), long-time Anglo-American conservative champion and author Sir Roger Scruton says [...]
Many citizens today advocate “gun control.” If we restrict or eliminate gun ownership, their argument goes, we will reduce the number of murders. Nevertheless, the puzzle remains: Why were so few of our ancestors shooting one another when guns could be bought as easily as soap, shoes, and slipcovers? As I write these words, a [...]
While Robert Kagan basically dismisses church and community in the development of liberalism, can there be any sadder but more important concession than his own admission that “liberalism has no particular answer” for what can legitimize its rights? An essay is meant to be very, very important when it consumes four giant pages in the [...]
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 [...]
Half-knowledge is more victorious than whole knowledge: it understands things as being more simple than they are and this renders its opinions more easily intelligible and more convincing. –Nietzsche Several years ago, I heard a scientist being interviewed on NPR declare that humans are “just sacks of rapidly degenerating amino acids,” or something similar. I [...]
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, [...]
Edmund Burke was at once a chief exponent of the Ciceronian doctrine of natural law and a chief opponent of the “rights of man.” In our time, which is experiencing simultaneously a revival of interest in natural-law theory and an enthusiasm for defining “human rights” that is exemplified by the United Nations’ lengthy declaration, Burke’s [...]
One of the most surprising things to me since the inauguration of this site is our constant need to re-examine the word “conservatism.” Over the past 44 months, a question about definition or label or something related to this has come up at least 44 times, if not more. […]
It was Thomas Jefferson and America’s founding generation that set culture on a new course when they declared that all human beings had the inalienable right to the “pursuit of happiness.” It has been said that that phrase in the Declaration of Independence has done more to shape the sensibilities of the modern age than [...]