The university is not a center for the display of adolescent tempers, nor yet a fulcrum for turning society upside down. It is simply this: a place for the cultivation of right reason and moral imagination. Already the reaction is upon us. Political leaders, college presidents, and syndicated columnists join in condemnation of violence on [...]
A reformed history must be imaginative and humane; like poetry, like the great novel, it must be personal rather than abstract, ethical rather than ideological. Like the poet, the historian must understand that devotion to truth is not identical with the cult of facts. The middle decades of our twentieth century have been marked intellectually [...]
Edmund Burke’s principle of order is an anticipatory refutation of utilitarianism, positivism, and pragmatism, an affirmation of that reverential view of society which may be traced through Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, the Roman jurisconsults, the Schoolmen, Richard Hooker, and lesser thinkers. It is this; but it is more. What Matthew Arnold called “an epoch of concentration” [...]
Edmund Burke transcends party struggles and the questions of his hour; and, though suspicious from first to last of abstract doctrine and theoretic dogma, he will endure not for what he did, but for what he perceived. Burke and the Nature of Politics: The Age of the French Revolution by Carl B. Cone (527 pages, University [...]
George Gissing found himself more intensely conservative than the Tory politicians of his time, a lover of old ways and old towns, a champion of the countryside, a man who distrusted innovation and spoke for the permanent things. The Collected Letters of George Gissing, Volume Three, 1886-1888, edited by Paul Mattheisen, Arthur C. Young, and Pierre [...]
The peculiar conditions of our time and our society demand now, more than ever before, a reinvigoration of truly liberal learning. This hour is favorable to the restoration or establishment of a college with principle… A few years ago, a graduate of New York University brought suit against that institution. He had been induced to enter [...]
Abraham Lincoln was a conservative statesman on the intellectual model of Cicero. In his dignity there was no hubris; much, he knew, must be left to Providence. The Roman Republic was at the back of the minds of the framers of the American Constitution; it was their hope that the chief magistrate of these United [...]
Practical politics, Edmund Burke knew, is the art of the possible. We cannot alter singlehandedly the climate of opinion, or the institutions of our day, by a haughty adherence to inflexible and abstract doctrines. The Political Reason of Edmund Burke, by Francis Canavan (S.J. Duke University Press, 1960) Edmund Burke and Ireland, by Thomas H.D. [...]
American businessmen are inhumane. I do not mean that they are inhuman; they are all too human. I do not mean that they are insufficiently humanitarian. I mean that American businessmen, like most other Americans, are deficient in the disciplines that nurture the spirit. They are largely ignorant of the humanities, which, in a word, [...]
The patrimony of a civilization can be lost at the very moment of that civilization’s material triumph. In any culture worthy of the name, men must be something better than the flies of a summer; generation must link with generation. Some men among us are doing whatever is in their power to preserve and reinvigorate [...]
Let us now see how far the American constitution, both written and unwritten, accords with these principles; and how strongly prepared the American constitutional order may be to withstand powerful challenges in the dawning years. […]
“We are at the beginning of great troubles.” Once upon a time, it was the assumption of most of the people in the world that the fundamental constitutions of their society would endure to the end of time; or at least for a very great while; or certainly for the lifetime of those who had [...]
Was the American War of Independence a revolution? It was certainly not the sort of political and social overturn that “revolution” has come to signify. Was the American War of Independence a revolution? In the view of Edmund Burke and of the Whigs generally, it was not the sort of political and social overturn that [...]
Is there such a thing as a Christian polity? T.S. Eliot raised the right questions about such matters, on the eve of the Second World War, and offered some answers; but, as Eliot put it at another time, there are no lost causes because there are no gained causes.[1] Every generation fights the same battles [...]