Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join James Seaton as he discusses the importance of Irving Babbitt’s imaginative conservatism. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher It is tempting to think of Irving Babbitt as a voice crying in the wilderness, a lonely prophet attempting the impossible task of reversing the [...]
Pixar certainly has a winning formula. The movie studio seems to have found that little spot behind the collective ear that we like to have scratched. Its first 2015 release, Inside Out, follows the same inimitable story-telling recipe it served up to great applause with films such as Up, WALL-E, and Ratatouille. Pixar films are captivating—artfully done—without losing [...]
John Adams wondered why men cannot live together “naturally” at peace, with the justice of their relations emerging immediately from the operation of reason in each individual. As elaborated thus far, natural law teaches that legitimate government is circumscribed by liberty in a dual sense: It derives from the consent of equally free individuals, and [...]
Leo Strauss (1899-1973) was a native of Germany. "I was," he reported near the end of his life, "brought up in a conservative, even orthodox Jewish home somewhere in a rural district of Germany."[1] Strauss received his doctorate from Hamburg University in 1921. In 1938, he emigrated to the United States and commenced teaching political [...]
Rousseau and Romanticism by Irving Babbitt (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1991) This reprint of the best-known work by Irving Babbitt (1865–1933) is a sturdy addition to Transaction’s Library of Conservative Thought. When it was initially published in 1919, it was recognized by discerning readers as the landmark it has since become. The New York Evening Post [...]
No intellectual task could be more urgent today than refuting the pseudo-scientific distinction between ”facts” and “values” and restoring to the humanities and social sciences a sense of transcendent moral purpose.[1] In this effort we would be well-advised to reconsider the work of a great American whose ideas have yet to be fully comprehended and [...]
Motivational speakers, from what little exposure I have been forced to have with them, seem fond of telling people that they should “do the impossible.” This may well be simply part of the meaningless verbiage intended to get employees to pay attention to the context of the facts they face. To “think outside the box” [...]
For the framers of the U.S. Constitution no task seemed more important than to limit and tame power. The chief reason why they established a government of divided powers and checks and balances was their view of human nature, which was primarily Christian and classical. It seemed to them self-evident that human beings are morally [...]
Russell Kirk Defending tradition is a difficult task in an age that is predisposed to innovation and change. Yet that has been the challenge to conservatives in the modern age. Modernity inverts the conservative prejudice for prescriptive wisdom; it favors change and innovation as the instruments of progress; it places faith in what [...]
As those serious about influencing the nation on both sides of the aisle understand, winning in politics first requires winning the culture. Doing so necessitates both a keen eye for recognizing cultural trends and the creative foresight to envision how best to guide a culture back to true principles by which a people can safely [...]
At the risk of seeming too parochial, I want to outline the dimensions of a problem that has been of special concern for me and other conservative students of the American political tradition, broadly defined. This concern is not as narrow as it may at first seem. Nor, by any standard, is it insignificant; it [...]
Dr. Himmelman dumped her files onto the common-room table, made a cup of Earl Gray and sat down heavily. It didn’t take a world-famous clinician to see that she was having a bad day. “Looks like you’re having a bad day,” observed Barbara D’Angelo, a world-famous clinician. “Is it Charles again?” Janet shook her head [...]
So everyone’s talking about the article by the intellectual Russell Jacoby on the alleged fact that there are no conservative intellectuals anymore. The article isn’t much good, in fact. One problem is that it doesn’t really explain what an intellectual is. The first outstanding criticism of modern intellectuals came from the lefty philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. [...]
An excerpt from Democracy in America. I had remarked during my stay in the United States that a democratic state of society, similar to that of the Americans, might offer singular facilities for the establishment of despotism; and I perceived, upon my return to Europe, how much use had already been made, by most of [...]