Christopher Columbus offers us the example of those virtues that the old Romans called fortitude and constancy; and the example of those virtues that the early Christians called faith and hope. Half a millennium ago, a Genoese navigator with three caravels and Spanish crews groped his way among the islands of the Caribbean. Thus commenced [...]
What important works of fiction worked a healthy reaction against the French Revolution in Britain and America, a reaction little diminished today? The bicentenary of the French Revolution occurs in this year of 1989*; and still the world is tormented by ghastly political upheavals and acts of terror that are inspired by what was said [...]
The American and French Revolutions provide a contrast between principle and ideology; between prudence and fanaticism; between prescriptive rights and extravagant ambitions; between historical wisdom and utopianism; between free government and democratic despotism. A little book forgotten for a century and a half, Friedrich Gentz’s Origin and Principles of the American Revolution, compared with the Origin and [...]
Order is the first need of all. One finds happiness in restoring and improving the order of the soul and the order of the republic—not in acts of devastation that make a desert of spirit and of society. Imagine a man travelling through the night, without a guide, thinking continually of the direction he wishes [...]
Nathaniel Hawthorne held this resolute conviction: that moral reformation is the only real reformation; that sin will always corrupt the projects of enthusiasts who leave it out of account; that progress is a delusion, except for the infinitely slow progress of conscience. Conservatism in America, though so often defeated at the polls, always has held [...]
Abraham Lincoln never was a doctrinaire; he rose from very low estate to very high estate, and he knew the savagery which lies so close beneath the skin of man, and he knew that most men are good only out of obedience to routine and convention. Whatever the result of the convulsion whose first shocks [...]
Don’t mistake me for a spoil-sport: on the contrary, I should like to revive all the good old customs genuinely associated with the joyous season of Christmas. In city after city, I have seen Christmas parades on Thanksgiving Day! One might think that we were celebrating the birth of Mammon, rather than that of Jesus, [...]
Forgetting that there exists such a state as salutary dread, modern man has become spiritually foolhardy. The God-fearing man is rare. A Michigan farmer, some years ago, climbed to the roof of his silo, and there he painted, in great red letters that the Deity could see, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning [...]
Wilhelm Roepke was the principal champion of a humane economy: that is, an economic system suited to human nature and to a humane scale in society, as opposed to systems bent upon mass production regardless of counterproductive personal and social consequences. Today I offer you some observations concerning Wilhelm Roepke, a principal social thinker of [...]
Are there men and women in America today possessed of virtue sufficient to withstand and repel the forces of disorder? Or have we, as a people, grown too fond of creature-comforts and a fancied security to venture our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor in any cause at all? “The superior man thinks always [...]
When liberal education is forgotten, we grope our way into that antagonist world—if you will, from space to anti-space, into Milton’s “hollow dark.” Our term “liberal education” is far older than the use of the word “liberal” as a term of politics. What we now call “liberal studies” go back to classical times; while political [...]
Everything worth conserving is menaced in our generation. Mere unthinking negative opposition to the current of events, clutching in despair at what we still retain, will not suffice in this age. A conservatism of instinct must be reinforced by a conservatism of thought and imagination. A friend of mine, whom we shall call Miss Worth, fell [...]
Being neither a religion nor an ideology, the body of opinion termed conservatism possesses no Holy Writ and no Das Kapital to provide dogmata. So far as it is possible to determine what conservatives believe, the first principles of the conservative persuasion are derived from what leading conservative writers and public men have professed during [...]
The adversaries of Modernity were raising their voices some forty years ago in Switzerland, France, Australia, and other countries; the journal Modern Age was intended to become, in considerable part, an American protest against the illusions of Modernity; and so it has remained… It was not without irony, thirty years ago, that I clapped the name [...]