Niccolo Machiavelli may help modern man to think more clearly about power and prudence, and to remember that the world is a dangerous place where all is not as it seems. An argument can be made that Niccolo Machiavelli’s sinister reputation is unjust. This is not to gloss over the very deep flaws in the [...]
It took Edmund Burke a very little time to decide that French Revolutionary philosophy posed a massive threat to civilization and social stability throughout Europe. By the end of his life, eight years after the storming of the Bastille, his fears of Jacobin contagion had led him to ask for a secret grave, removed from [...]
Henry Clay and Sam Rayburn fit well with Willmoore Kendall’s views of the democratic statesman. Both were skilled politicians who sought the good, avoided extremism, and consciously represented the people in Congress. For many centuries, scholars have written weighty tomes on statesmanship. In the twentieth century in particular, many students of the American political philosopher [...]
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s romantic conservatism is passionate, incisive, and high-minded. His notion of the “Idea” is persuasive in regard to how it exists in human society, and he lit the way to resolving the ever-present conservative tension between theory and practice. The life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, if tumultuous and at times disastrous, was a [...]
Russell Hittinger’s new book, "On the Dignity of Society," articulates Catholic principles regarding the social order. One of the great themes of the book was the continuity between man’s nature and society. On the Dignity of Society by F. Russell Hittinger Is the history of philosophy full of philosophers rejecting past philosophers? Broadly, this may be [...]
Harry Jaffa’s constitutional history of America’s late-eighteenth-century is not credible nor, in keeping with many of his own pronouncements, is it conservative. The writing of history, as we have learned from authors as diverse as Thucydides, Voltaire, Nietzsche, Butterfield, Collingwood, and Oakeshott can and has been done in strikingly different ways while serving radically different [...]
Instead of considering contemporary political issues, or politicians, Roger Scruton attempts to rebuild conservatism by looking seriously at its past. Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition, by Roger Scruton (176 pages, All Points Books, 2018) In his Conservatism, An Introduction to the Great Tradition (2017), long-time Anglo-American conservative champion and author Sir Roger Scruton says [...]
Russell Kirk would agree that what is happening these days is civil liberty (gone astray) prioritized over public morality. Kirk urged the rising generation to take up the defense of the moral order and the social order, the order of the soul, and the permanent things. It’s a faith worth fighting for. In the opening [...]
There could be no Henry David Thoreau without a Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson glorified the individual independence of the new American; Thoreau evolved that into a nation-less, anarchic, natural man of subjective conscience. In 1838, Harvard College exiled a young James Russell Lowell to the tutelage of a minister in Concord, Massachusetts, a suspension for [...]
Orestes Brownson so esteemed New England people, customs, and institutions that they dominated his writings and fit at the heart of his political ideas. The danger of majoritarian tyranny hangs over republics. The dilemma of constituting a virtuous republic while also restricting interests, sects, and factions’ use of unchecked political power possessed eighteenth century American [...]
In America today, we are living in a toxic political climate that is the product of a very dangerous combination: Our rulers lack the learning necessary to ask the kinds of deep and fundamental questions that leaders and lawgivers ought to make a habit of pondering, while our people rebelliously scrutinize all orthodoxies and impose [...]
James Harrington insists on the possibility of an empire of laws. The claim that institutional arrangements can force self-interested behavior to serve the common interest underlies the system of separated powers and checks and balances central to the American constitutional order. But is he right? Can this theory of “dividing-and-choosing” give us confidence? “Two [girls] [...]
It is fitting that one of the most profound thinkers of the 20th century should also have been one of its most obscure. Nicolás Gómez Dávila's critique of democracy may go some way in explaining why he remains a relatively unknown figure in the English-speaking world, for we in the modern West are all children [...]
Franklin Pierce’s suspicions reflected a tension within the antebellum Democratic Party in relation to slavery—how can we reconcile an advocacy of democratic decision-making with the existence of transcendent moral values, the Constitution with the Bible? On the stump in New Boston, New Hampshire in early January 1852, Franklin Pierce gave a long oration during which [...]