Libertarian futurists such as Tyler Cowen and Brink Lindsey sometimes write as if the point of all our remarkable techno-progress—the victory of capitalism in the form of the creative power of “human capital”—is some combination of the emancipatory hippie spirit of the 1960s with the liberty in the service of individual productivity of Reagan’s 1980s. [...]
Ross Douthat has written on the revival of Marxism as a seductive theory in the wake of burgeoning economic inequality and the withering away of the middle class. He might have said that the futurist most attuned to both those trends is the savvy libertarian economist Tyler Cowen in his Average Is Over. Cowen says, [...]
Conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat explores the next stage of creeping—and sometimes creepy—American libertarianism. We Americans are still becoming less Puritanical, if by Puritanical we mean a combination of religious conservatism and liberal communitarianism, a combination that leads us to be concerned with the moral well-being of our fellow citizens and fellow creatures. Now we [...]
Bertrand de Jouvenel The more one considers the matter, the clearer it becomes that redistribution is in effect far less a redistribution of free income from the richer to the poorer, as we imagined, than a redistribution of power from the individual to the State. In the disaster for humanity that was the [...]
Have you the makings of a Great Libertarian? Might you become a Titan of Liberty like Ayn Rand, a Hercules of Revolutionary Thought like Murray Rothbard or a Paragon of Pure Reason like Walter Block? Or are you doomed to be merely a well-meaning but hopelessly inconsistent conservative muddler like Russell Kirk, Ronald Reagan, Edmund [...]
David Mamet is the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, film and television director, and author of many books of essays, most recently, in 2011, of the crackling libertarian manifesto, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture. The target of Mamet’s book is an updated version of Rousseau’s noble savage: a 21st-century peace-loving tribesman whose Eden it [...]
Plenty of liberals—and not just liberal professors—think there is a conservative conspiracy to use online education and MOOCs, to destroy genuinely higher education in this country. I see no organized conspiracy, and much of the liberal paranoia amounts to whining about the results of legitimate political defeats. Nonetheless, there is something to the thought that hostility [...]
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 [...]
Downton Abbey cast So what will you be doing Sunday night? My advice: Watch more TV! Now you innovative and disruptive TIC readers might think you don’t have the time. But that’s only because you’ve forgotten about “multitasking.” Professors, for example, can be watching while grading papers and filling out assessment rubrics. Some [...]
The other day, I had the occasion to look over some of my past essays at The Imaginative Conservative. Much to my surprise, I’m quickly approaching my 250th essay. I might actually have reached and passed this number. Because I’ve failed to label my essays correctly, I am probably over 250 essays. Officially, though, Google [...]
Not Chesterbelloc, but Bur-Kirk. [Dedicated to the genius and patience of Winston Elliott] In the fall of 1950, Russell Kirk turned the ripe old age of 32. He had been publishing articles and reviews (and soon his M.A. thesis on John Randolph of Roanoke through the University of Chicago) since 1936. Even during [...]
Winston, again, thanks much for initiating and continuing this conversation. I very much appreciate the quotes from Kirk’s talk, “The Chirping Sectarians,” and I’m assuming you’re in agreement with the arguments presented. More on this in a bit. Barbara, I’m very glad, but not at all surprised, that we are almost entirely in agreement on [...]
Dr. Kirk uses strong words to oppose a conservative alliance with libertarians. In light of the recent discussion of this issue on this online journal I think it may prove fruitful to let Dr. Kirk join the conversation by way of excerpts from his essay “Chirping Sectaries.” The entire essay is well worth reading. Is [...]