Ted McAllister

Russell Kirk on the Variety and Mystery of Human Existence

Too often the public conversation about universal truths divides along rather sterile ideological lines. Russell Kirk's great warning is that this is not really a battle of ideas, understood abstractly, but a battle of sentiments or affections...

Reclaiming Our Constitutional Heritage

The so-called American Revolution was a rebellion to preserve and reinstitute long-established liberties and to develop a system of governance that put those liberties on a more secure foundation. We might even think of the “Revolution” as a rebellion that prevented or postponed a revolution...

“The Conservative Mind”: An Act of Recovery?

Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Ted McAllister as he examines Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind. Dr. Kirk reminds us that not only ought we to be fighting over ideas but we ought to be shaping hearts. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher

How Equality Destroyed the Carnegie Family

Oh, how Andrew Carnegie adored creative destruction! How much he hated the past! His 1886 book, Triumphant Democracy, a breathless paean to “the Republic,” feels like a prayer, spoken as much in numbers as in words....

Understanding the Bohemian Conservative

Half-knowledge is more victorious than whole knowledge: it understands things as being more simple than they are and this renders its opinions more easily intelligible and more convincing. –Nietzsche Several years ago, I...

Can a Southerner Ever Escape the South?

In October of 1997, I attended the Southern Historical Association’s convention in Atlanta because I wanted to hear Paul Conkin’s presidential address, “Hot, Humid, and Sad.” What I heard was largely a history of the South in...

Global Citizenship: When Words Turn into Semantic Quicksand

We are told to be careful with our words, to be aware of how our words might make other people feel, or of how we might be misunderstood. However important is this advice...

Conservatism: Past & Future?

The historiography of American conser­vatism (often rendered the “conservative movement”) remains immature. For decades, the academic historical establishment largely ignored American conservatives or dealt with them as a sort of fringe...

Of Ideas and Politics

Perhaps contemporary conservatives misunderstand their own movement because conservative philosophy distorts conservative history. Ideas, not material conditions, drive history, conservatives aver. Richard Weaver's Ideas Have Consequences (an editor's title much disliked by Weaver) established a powerful...

The Romance of Conservatism

In one of the great works of imagination, Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton declared that faith is romantic, that materialism is not only dull but produces a boredom that leads to madness. Humans are born romantics and they...

The Conservative Mind-An Act of Recovery?

Since the nation’s founding a salutary tension has informed American political thought—a tension between the abstract, universal truths expressed in the first part of the Declaration of Independence and the particular, experience-based prudence of...