Power has shifted from Congress to the presidency; the modern, “heroic” presidency represents the greatest threat to the Republic. The Cult of the Presidency: America’s Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power, by Gene Healy (Cato Institute, 2008, 262 pages) “Taken by and large,” Edward Corwin wrote, “the history of the presidency is a history of aggrandizement, [...]
On Empire, Liberty, and Reform: Speeches and Letters of Edmund Burke, ed. David Bromwich (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). Empire and Community: Edmund Burke’s Writings and Speeches on International Relations, ed. David P. Fidler and Jennifer M. Welsh (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999). Edmund Burke was one of those rare figures who combined profound [...]
Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, uniquely, have been lionized as merely “lending their names” to the founding. But at least one of these two greatest Americans of the eighteenth century was indeed a lawmaker and not merely a symbol in the Constitutional Convention. The title of this essay gives away its complete content, without suggesting [...]
The Framers’ temperament was indebted far more to the inherited culture of the “old constitutional morality” than to Enlightenment fads for remaking the world. While many did indeed believe that their success or failure would affect other nations and future generations, their enthusiasm was constrained by the enduring classical and Christian tradition. On December 4, [...]
T.S. Eliot T. S. Eliot indisputably was, and remains, in the first rank of poets of any era and any culture.[1] Eliot is almost as well known among literate persons as a critic and literary theorist. His journal, The Criterion, despite its short lifespan, remains the standard of high modernism. Continuing interest in [...]
A Better Guide Than Reason: Studies in the American Revolution. (La Salle, IL: Sherwood Sugden & Company Publishers, 1979). Cited in the text as Guide. Remembering Who We Are: Observations of a Southern Conservative. (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1985). Cited in the text as Remembering. A Worthy Company: The Dramatic Story of [...]
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 [...]
By and large, the American Revolution was not an innovating upheaval, but a conservative restoration of colonial prerogatives. Accustomed from their beginnings to self-government, the colonials felt that by inheritance they possessed the rights of Englishmen and by prescription certain rights peculiar to themselves. When a designing king and a distant parliament presumed to extend [...]
Bruce Frohnen In his essay in the 2006 issue of The Political Science Reviewer our good friend Bruce Frohnen addresses fundamental questions regarding the conservative roots of America’s political culture. I publish this partially in response to Brad Birzer’s “Under Montana Skies” essay today. In this essay Brad defends alliances between conservatives and [...]