Literature in Revolution. Edited by George Abbott White and Charles Newman. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston-Triquarterly Book, 1972). Time was when the study of humane letters stood central in formal education. Public men were brought up in a literary discipline, and “rhetoric” meant more than an orator’s style. The domination of the political order [...]
Hard Green: Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists; A Conservative Manifesto, by Peter Huber The Greening of Conservative America, by John R.E. Bliese. These two books set out to correct the general public perception that conservatism and environmentalism are at odds. Peter Huber’s book goes even further. His manifesto argues that modern liberal environmentalism is fraudulent. [...]
Today, Allan Bloom’s unlikely 1987 bestseller The Closing of the American Mind is in some ways truer and more moving than ever. I have just taught the book in a class (one that began by reading Tocqueville) filled mostly with very smart yet still overachieving Evangelical students. They eagerly embraced the book as evidence of [...]
In Natural Right and History, Leo Strauss writes that “Prescription cannot be the sole authority for a constitution, and, therefore, recourse to rights anterior to the constitution, i.e., to natural rights, cannot be superfluous unless prescription itself is a sufficient guarantee of goodness.”[1] Such a characterization results in the accusation that those who hold to prescription [...]
America the Virtuous: The Crisis of Democracy and the Quest for Empire by Claes G. Ryn Many Enlightenment ideologues hoped to see fulfilled in America all the dreams of the Age of Reason: an empire of unfettered minds, natural rights, unbounded human benevolence and progress, the first fruits of a world reborn. Impatient utopians soon despaired, however. [...]
Irving Babbitt To define Irving Babbitt’s central view of life, from which radiate all his other views—of letters, of education, of society—I commence by quoting not his own words, but those of a different writer—one whom he would not have approved. For in reading Bertrand Russell’s recent autobiographical volume Portraits from Memory, I [...]
It is a commonplace that the defining characteristic of that characteristically modern literary form, the novel, is a concern for the revelation of the inner life of the ordinary man. Hence, the frequent use at first of the device of diaries or letters (e.g. in Richardson’s Clarissa and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe) culminating in the stream [...]
Russell Kirk’s home A friend of mine recently told me about a banner she saw hanging inside the entrance of an American public elementary school. “You’re all number one,” the banner read. I must admit that my reaction to this was rather strong, if not downright irate. Two immediate problems sprang to mind. [...]
A quarter of a century ago Modern Age asked me to assess the state of American intellectual conservatism for its 25th anniversary issue.[1] I had been a student of the subject for twenty years. In 1971, five years before George Nash published The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, I and a co-author brought out a [...]
Albert Jay Nock, with some trepidation, popularized Ralph Adams Cram’s theory that the immense majority of homo sapiens is not human, but are merely the raw material out of which the occasional human is produced. Tocqueville believed, “that in a few minds and far between, an ardent, inexhaustible love of truth springs up, self-supported, and [...]
Robert Nisbet Unlike Max Weber or Emile Durkheim, Robert A. Nisbet has not produced a remarkably original theory that has shaken the sociological world or revolutionized its concepts and methods of analysis. What Nisbet has done over the period of a long career in American sociology is to act as a consistent, and [...]
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 [...]
Irving Babbitt Democracy and Leadership, first published in 1924, still is in print at the end of a whole generation. This new printing indicates how little ephemerae found their way into the body of Babbitt’s writings, and how he foresaw, far more clearly than his opponent John Dewey, the great issues of the [...]
Historical Consciousness: The Remembered Past by John Lukacs, Transaction Publishers (Library of Conservative Thought), 1994. Applying a philosophical intellect to the study of history, Dr. Lukacs believes that historical studies may become the principal literary form and way to wisdom in the dawning age. This does not mean that he endeavors to present a “philosophy [...]