There are several areas in which distributists and free-market economists can find common ground, and even common ends. Both share a desire for more widespread ownership of the means of production, and a desire for a less powerful centralized state. With this essay, I am venturing into unfamiliar territory. My previous essays featured in this journal have [...]
What Matthew Arnold called “an epoch of concentration” seems to be impending over the English-speaking world. The revolutionary impulses and the social enthusiasms which have dominated this era since their great explosion in Russia are now confronted with a countervailing physical and intellectual force. Communism, Fascism, and their kindred expansive ideologies all in their fashion [...]
Arguably the first twentieth-century dystopian, Robert Hugh Benson authored “Lord of the World,” a prophetic vision of a ravaged world run by an unholy alliance of Free Masons and Communists. The first great dystopian writers of the twentieth century came from upstanding British families. Arguably the first twentieth-century dystopian, Robert Hugh Benson was the third [...]
Preface For almost as long as I have had the privilege of reading, I have read dystopian literature. I started with Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles, but I soon rather quickly devoured Brave New World, Animal Farm, and Nineteen Eighty-Four as well as many of the works of Robert Heinlein, Ursula Le Guin, Arthur [...]
It is a mistake, I think, to look at Whit Stillman as an apologist for what one of his characters in Metropolitan wanted to call the Urban Haute Bourgeoisie, or UHB. Apart from anything else, it is far from clear whether any such thing actually exists in nature in the form proposed by the term’s [...]
George Orwell’s delightful, brief narrative acts as a fable: its animal characters allow us to see afresh well-worn and conventional truths. The fable warns us of what we already know, but must learn again and again if we are not to be fooled into historical optimism. By the time George Orwell’s Animal Farm appeared in August [...]
There’s a point to this, but wait for it. Meanwhile, it’s all true and includes a morbidly obese ninja. Newspapers were agog over a Welsh matron staggering home across the village green after a long night in the pub, when she was bitten by a ten-foot python. She thought she’d been stung by nettles until [...]
One of the most delightful things about foreigners and their problems is that it lets us indulge in ignorance, condescension and cheap politics all at once. Besides being good old-fashioned fun, these are the three major principles on which the West now reclines. Take the Turkish riots. To spoil the plot, kids, this mirrors the [...]
Gaston County and the county seat of Gastonia, located in the southwestern part of North Carolina, bear his name, a fitting tribute to the easterner who came to support the rights of his western brethren. In his day, his legal acumen was hailed by none other than the great Luther Martin of Maryland, perhaps the [...]
The current issue of HUMANUM, the freely available online journal of the Pope John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family in Washington, DC (from the Institute’s Center for Pastoral and Cultural Research) is devoted to the crisis of fatherhood in our culture. It contains articles and book reviews devoted to the literature [...]
The rise of techno-capitalism has signaled the triumph of the “bourgeois family” and the demise of the “traditional” family. Christian theologian Stanley Hauerwas said that economist Adam Smith was well aware that the “weakening of familial ties would increase the necessity of sympathy between strangers and result in cooperative forms of behavior that had not [...]
In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government by Charles Murray Throughout his long and highly productive career, Charles Murray has done the seemingly impossible. He has melded his strong libertarianism with respect for, and insights from, the work of Robert Nisbet and Russell Kirk. He has trained as a social scientist, worked for the Peace Corps, [...]
Over on the First Things blog, Robert George has blessed us, yet again, with the conventional and convenient wisdom of (Catholic) neoconservatism. The post, titled “No Mere Marriage of Convenience: The Unity of Economic and Social Conservatism,” is a sustained argument for just how convenient this marriage of utility and principle really is, and why [...]
A phenomenally well-travelled lady doctor in Upstate New York once told me, disparagingly, that millions of American families at Florida’s Epcot Center spend more money to visit there, and to frequent its ersatz Spanish bodega, than it would have cost them to go to Spain and enjoy the real thing. She may be right. Those [...]