A smart word, an attentive ear, and the quick gift of a book can change a person… I have had the wonderful fortune of writing a weekly essay for The Imaginative Conservative since its founding in the summer of 2010. A lot of words and a lot of ideas. Most of them, I hope, were [...]
What do conservatives want? Limited government, they answer; free enterprise; strict construction of the Constitution; fiscal responsibility; traditional values and respect for the sanctity of human life. No doubt, but I wonder: how much are these traditional catchphrases and abstractions persuading people anymore? How much are they inspiring the rising generation?… (essay by George Nash) [...]
If we are to know and rebuild a conservative civil social order in this country, then we need to “rake from the ashes” of recent American history the books that influenced a generation of conservative scholars and public figures, books whose message resonated with much of the American populace and resulted in astonishing political triumphs. [...]
Because we Americans have become so infatuated with the power and person of the presidency, we have forgotten our republican duty to promote our sovereignty in legislative bodies… If you were interested in finding the single harshest and yet reasoned critic of the twentieth-century nation-state, you would not, strangely enough, turn to a libertarian. You [...]
No informed person will deny that conservatism has been having a rough time for several decades. But to pass from the presence of conflict to a conclusion that control and discipline and order have no place in the world is to reverse the process by which political judgments should be arrived at… The Conservative Illusion, [...]
Given the nature of our politically-driven, morality-obsessed middle class society, and its passion for direct action, it follows that the more persons there are who are dedicated to solving problems, the more problems there have to be… The Unheavenly City by Edward C. Banfield (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1970) Once in a great while there [...]
Edmund Burke believed that a constitution rooted in the fundamental beliefs and practices of the people was essential for preserving a nation and guiding its leaders… Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Robert Heineman as he argues that pluralism is destroying America’s political institutions as they were understood [...]
The kind of freedom people speak of today is more likely than not something more than emancipation from political tyranny. It is freedom from social custom, from tradition, from the created order, freedom from God. And for this troubling illusion, we may in part thank James Joyce… The plight of the artist in the modern [...]
In its short, sharp life, “The Burke Newsletter” offered a model for all of us hoping to change the world through ideas, not ideology, through persuasion, not violence… Edmund Burke In “The Conservative Conspiracy of the 1950s” I had the privilege of writing about the alliance formed among Russell Kirk, Peter Stanlis, and other [...]
Whether or not President Trump is successful with a principled nationalistic agenda or with a more pragmatic one, more traditionally-oriented conservative intellectuals must do some serious thinking, either acceding to nationalism or pragmatism or finding a new story… Donald Trump is nothing if he is not forthright. In his Inaugural Address, the President could not [...]
That most overrated academic fop of the twentieth century, Peter Gay, spent a considerable amount of time and vitriol in the 1950s taking swipes at Russell Kirk, believing the duke of Mecosta a superficial romantic stuck in the past, fighting for the most worthless and transient of causes. In 1961, he finally wrote something of [...]
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. [...]
T.S. Eliot faced metaphysical crises of which even the most talented of the avant-garde were completely oblivious… Eliot and His Age: T.S. Eliot’s Moral Imagination in the Twentieth Century, by Russell Kik (Random House, 1972) Only late in Eliot’s life did Russell Kirk enjoy the personal intimacy which adds a special appeal to this biography, [...]
Whereas Adam Smith had warned that government must intervene in the economy from time to time, Edmund Burke believed any interference in the economy on the part of government to be a violation of the natural law… […]