Russell Kirk’s prescription of having no major alliances between conservatives and libertarians is wise. Conservatives may stand with libertarians against tyranny and for sensible free market policies, but in the end, I think even accepting the term libertarian is unwise. Should you be a libertarian? The answer, as with every term, depends on how you [...]
The fusionism of the past has been outmoded not due to some notion of progressive change but because the libertarian perspective it promotes is fundamentally flawed. Acknowledging the failure of fusionism is the first step to ensuring that conservatism may long endure. I recently had a rather extended debate with a libertarian-minded friend who expressed [...]
It strikes me that all those who talk incessantly of “my rights” are acting pridefully, in the sense that they are making themselves the centre of their own microcosmos at the expense of their neighbours. If we want freedom, however, we must be prepared to pay the price for it. One way of gauging the [...]
The term “libertarianism” is distasteful to people who think seriously about politics. Both Dr. F.A. Hayek and your servant have gone out of their way, from time to time, to declare that they refuse to be tagged with this label. Anyone much influenced by the thought of Edmund Burke and of Alexis de Tocqueville—as are [...]
Does God underwrite our freedom, or undermine it? There are thousands of self-styled “libertarians” who would argue the latter. They actively oppose the religious commitments of most social conservatives, many of them convinced that materialism is the best metaphysical home for what we might call “libertarian values”—individual rights, freedom and personal responsibility, reason, and moral [...]
We all know the arguments against the notion, but somewhat reluctantly I conclude that libertarians are indeed human. After all, our species contains the incontinent, the mentally disabled, the incurably giddy, and Mr. Walter Block. Mr. Block is an elderly academician inspired by Ayn Rand, Nathanial Branden and Murray Rothbard. Libertarians find him pleasant and [...]
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 [...]
Janet Himmelman swept back her hair, turned away from the computer screen and set her spectacles on her desk; this was the part of her job that she hated the most. She looked the nervous young man in his eyes and spoke as kindly as she could. “I’m sorry, Charles, but you simply do not [...]
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, [...]
Modern political conservatism takes its origin in Edmund Burke’s insistence upon the rights of society and its historically formed groups such as family, neighborhood, guild and church against the “arbitrary power” of a political government. By common assent modern conservatism, as political philosophy, springs from Edmund Burke: chiefly from his Reflections on the Revolution in [...]
So this astute and classy article by James Patterson explains why so many conservatives wrongly took the side of the Board of Visitors against University of Virginia President Teresa Sullivan on the matter of her removal and reinstatement. Someone might say, though, that the conservatives who support the Board aren’t really conservatives. They’re more properly called [...]