Thanks so much to Carl for his able account—complete with astutely copious quoting—of Yuval Levin’s essay in Modern Age.* Modern Age, of course, was founded by Russell Kirk and has remained infused with “traditionalist” conservatism, which is often contrasted (as it is by our James Ceaser) with libertarianism and “natural rights” conservatism. Yuval ably displays his [...]
M.E. Bradford Ideas about property, language, and memory established the contours and parameters of M.E. Bradford’s Southern inheritance. In Bradford’s thought, property, language, and memory were linked in defense of what his mentor, Donald Davidson, characterized as “the great vital continuum of human experience to which we apply the inadequate term ‘tradition’….”[1] The [...]
Allen Tate Who Owns America? followed I’ll Take My Stand–which had appeared six years earlier–as a more diverse sequel and defense of decentralization. More importantly, Who Owns America? was explicitly a plea for a recovery of what had been lost: a humane social order. If the Agrarian and Distributist insights contained in Who [...]
Today’s political debates often set up a simple tension: the individual versus government. Certainly individual liberty and limited government are fundamental principles of a free society, but such a polarized perspective overlooks the ways we actually live our lives—in families, as part of neighborhoods, in church communities, in civic groups, and so on. In this [...]
In re-reading T.S. Eliot’s Ash Wednesday on Ash Wednesday, a friend asks what many have wondered: “Excuse me, but what on earth does ‘Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree’ mean?” Is it such a mystery? With a little bit of detective work we can see through the illusion, connect the allusion, pick up [...]
Russell Kirk In the early 1950s, intellectuals on both the Right and the Left who were at odds about almost everything, agreed on one thing: Conservatism as a defined philosophy and movement scarcely existed in America. Respected intellectuals on the Left such as Lionel Trilling argued that modern “liberalism is not only the [...]
I have been encouraged by Mr. Joseph Pearce’s two excellent essays, “How Many Loves? Arguing with C.S. Lewis” and “The Vulgar Mob: Arguing with G.K. Chesterton,” to offer up a little challenge to one thinker who has indelibly influenced my own conservatism. I have tremendous admiration for Roger Scruton’s courage in abandoning his academic career [...]
Edmund Burke “The only liberty that is valuable is a liberty connected with order; that not only exists along with order and virtue, but which cannot exist at all without them. It inheres in good and steady government, as in its substance and vital principle.” – Edmund Burke […]
Modernism is an ancient phenomenon. If prostitution is the world’s oldest profession, then modernism is the world’s oldest heresy. Modernism’s essential features were already understood long before the era of modernity. Plato reveals them in his dialogue The Euthyphro. The character of Euthyphro is a prototype of modern man. In the dialogue Euthyphro is prosecuting [...]
Never has the stock market soared higher nor the supply of affordable books been cheaper. Lucky or cursed, let us examine the latter—about which T.S. Eliot asks a great question but falls short in his reply. I confess, I adore them. I thrill to their touch; my heart is aroused by their scent. If old [...]
T.S. Eliot and his second wife, Valerie The struggles of T.S. Eliot’s personal life continue to fascinate both his critics and admirers. Eliot was frustrated and wounded in love, and the women in his life thus assume mythical proportions, as if his life and literature have become a unified drama. Eliot married Vivienne Haigh-Wood [...]
The twentieth century witnessed the shattering of the traditional social and moral order among nations as the infection of the ideologues and their murderous ideological regimes spread throughout the civilized world. It began in earnest with the assassination of a central European archduke and the consequent destruction of the Old World in 1914. But in truth, the [...]
The term “libertarianism” is distasteful to people who think seriously about politics. Both Dr. F.A. Hayek and your servant have gone out of their way, from time to time, to declare that they refuse to be tagged with this label. Anyone much influenced by the thought of Edmund Burke and of Alexis de Tocqueville—as are [...]
I have called M.E. Bradford the Agrarian Aquinas. He did not write a Summa, but his work, as a whole, enriched and carried into new territory the message of I’ll Take My Stand on a broad front of literature, history, and political thought. He came at a crucial time when Richard Weaver had passed his [...]