Richard Weaver claimed his homeland was the “last nonmaterialistic civilization in the western world.” Modernity to him meant at bottom institutionalizing most of the Seven Deadly Sins… Though his worth and stature were early established among them, while yet living Richard M. Weaver was something of a puzzle for his friends within the American “conservative [...]
Despite their differing political views, the conservative Edmund Burke and the radical Daniel O’Connell played major roles in combatting the suppression of Catholics in eighteenth-century Ireland… In the past couple of decades, the Catholic Church has fallen upon bad times in an Ireland whose overwhelmingly Catholic population had been among the most observant in the [...]
Liberalism is the refuge favored by intellectual cowardice, because the essence of the liberal’s position is that he has no position. There is a saying by William Butler Yeats that a man begins to understand the world by studying the cobwebs in his own corner. My experience has brought home to me the wisdom in [...]
In The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot gives us a terrifying gaze at the spiritual reality of the world. All men are cracked, thirsty and longing for death… “The awful daring of a moment’s surrender / which an age of prudence can never retract / by this, and this only, we have existed / which is not [...]
We need to develop a fully American variant of conservatism; to advance our understanding of the conservative nature of the political traditions we have inherited; and to do so with a dignity that will permit us to stand before God, the American public, and our conservative forebears. In the next century, because of both need [...]
Edmund Burke’s greatest service to liberty was to remind the world that freedom is anchored in a transcendent moral order and that for liberty to flourish, social and personal order and morality must exist, and radical innovations must be shunned… Edmund Burke (1729-1797) is rightly renowned as the father of conservatism. In this bicentennial year of [...]
At this time, as perhaps never before, we Americans are as a people well on our way to being forced into belated recognition of the truth behind Mr. Jefferson’s alarm at the Compromise of 1820, our first attempt in employing the engines of national power to regulate and reform our domestic economic and social relations [...]
Controversy surrounds the story of John Sullivan’s life. Yet he is among the representative Americans of his time—generous to a fault, jealous of his personal honor, optimistic, gregarious, ambitious, and “larger than life.” John Sullivan (1740-1795), lawyer, entrepreneur, soldier, and political leader of New Hampshire during and after the American Revolution. Both a commercial and [...]
Irving Babbitt believed that man defined himself not by his rights, but by his duties, and particularly how willing he was to restrain his darker impulses and sacrifice himself for another… Famously, when Paul Elmer More and Irving Babbitt were debating one another while on a walk, the former, exasperated, asked: “Good God, man. Are [...]
The dismantling of the idea of the West unwittingly wrought massive damage upon the very ways in which Western citizens viewed themselves, disconnecting them not only from other cultures and peoples but also from one another. The dismantling of the idea of the West began when medieval philosophers began re-introducing the Sophist notions reduced to [...]
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” [...]
Though Christopher Dawson remained unsure why the Natural Law developed, he did not hesitate to celebrate it. He remained firmly convinced that the development of Natural Law did not randomly emerge from individual genius, but rather believed that individual genius arose out of the various traditions and norms of each people. As a historian and [...]
Poetry is able to grant the reader the ability to perceive that reality, in spite of its often chaotic and random appearance, has some underlying unity by which it is bound together. This insight, in turn, provides the terms by which one may make peace with the world... A 2012 survey found that only 6.7% [...]
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 [...]