Trevor Colbourn considers the Declaration of Independence the highest expression of Anglo-Saxon thought and liberty. Not only did it draw upon the Whig traditions of natural rights and common law, but it identified the king as a traitor to his own office. The Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the Intellectual Origins of the American [...]
Friedrich Nietzche’s “Ecce Homo” lays waste to centuries of an ethic of inhibition and restraint. Intellectually brutalized, bloodied, and tortured, the nineteenth-century philosopher presented himself in his final and last words to a world he wanted to overthrow. Behold the man. To be more accurate, behold the demon. In his mockingly titled autobiography and final [...]
According to Tocqueville, a new political science must account for both the immediate and the universal, the moment and the eternal. When we fail to understand the choice that God has given us with democracy—that is, a science to guide, attenuate, and hone democracy—the baser instincts will rise to the fore. Tocqueville breaks his own [...]
I was deeply saddened to learn of the death of the greatest of "pirate scholars," Donald S. Lutz. As it turns out, he had actually passed away back in January of this year, but I only found out about it a week or so ago. I’ve loved the man’s work for a long time, and [...]
Cara Rogers Stevens has done the history profession proud with her new book, and we owe her a huge thanks for revising our understanding of Thomas Jefferson in terms of his lifelong opposition to slavery. Thomas Jefferson and the Fight Against Slavery, by Cara Rogers Stevens (400 pages, (University Press of Kansas, 2024) As I’ve [...]
If conservatism is true, it is true for all times, all places, and all persons. It might take on a Christian character here, or a Jewish character there, or a Stoic character way over there, but it remains universally tied to certain humane principles, whatever its local manifestations. It is imagination, perhaps our highest faculty [...]
May we always defend like Socrates and Cicero and Thomas More. May we always preserve like the monks of Lindesfarne. May we always see the world through the eyes of Russell Kirk, Christopher Dawson, and T.S. Eliot. May we always cherish the humanity and the divinity of the Second Person of the Most Blessed Trinity. [...]
The Catholic Church canonized Saints Thomas More and John Fisher in 1935, only two years after the appearance of "The English Way," a work edited by one of the most important Christian humanists and publishers of the twentieth century, Maisie Ward, and which looks at the lives, ideas, and deaths of the great Roman Catholic [...]
What’s rarely remembered about Barry Goldwater is how deeply influenced he was by the founder of post-war conservatism, Russell Kirk. I will admit, it’s hard for me to believe that Barry Goldwater ran for the presidency sixty years ago. Sixty years ago! I was born three years later, but I grew up in a very [...]
Unlike our present politicians, George Washington and Russell Kirk cared about the common good, strove for it, and constantly reminded us what it means to be a citizen of a republic. Dear Imaginative Conservative reader, as we approach this journal's fourteenth birthday, I owe a humble apology (bless me, Father, for I have sinned!) to [...]
Evil, according to Christopher Dawson, is a progressive force, and it has grown mightily over the centuries since the Reformation first tore apart the West. The Reformation led to secularization, and secularization led to the creation of a machine-like society, dehumanizing all citizens of the world. The modern world is the world of the anti-Christ, [...]
State-sponsored murder was the primary fact of the twentieth century—not the rise of democracy or the liberation of peoples, as many have been taught, but the devastating horrors of the gulag, the holocaust, and the killing fields. It was in June 1996 that I picked up a book that, for all intents and purposes, changed my [...]
Our world is rife with idealism—and that’s a bad thing. Consider our social policy where we dream of a world of perfect equality, rejecting obvious differences of sex, talent, and culture. The result is suppression of free speech (no room for a loyal opposition), mutilated children (a small price to pay for egalitarian paradise), and [...]
In “The Conservative Mind,” Russell Kirk sought to identify, elucidate, and cultivate the best of the Western tradition as the West itself weathered, rather roughly at times, the storms of ideologies. Conserve the past, yes, but Kirk also wanted us to rally to the standards of the past to leave an inheritance for our children. [...]