This week, on Facebook, The Imaginative Conservative republicized the late Joseph Sobran’s article regarding the supposed errors of Abraham Lincoln. While one should never have too much faith in commentators on the internet, especially those who hide behind anonymity, one rather outraged and intelligent young man posted something to the effect of “I don’t know why The Imaginative [...]
Conservatives have struggled with the problem of adjusting their public posture so as to reflect changes in their situation. Following electoral triumph and the dramatic shift in the temper of their countrymen which produced so many encouraging results at the polls, they have been obliged to represent themselves, through the spoken or the written word, [...]
There is an open space in the human heart–a void that seeks fulfillment and a hunger that longs for satisfaction. For the progressive this longing looks to the future. A brave new world is envisioned, an ideology is espoused and an action plan that brooks no dissent is put into place. For the conservative that [...]
Dorian Gray and Raymond Fosca are famous fictional characters renowned for miraculously being granted their wish to live forever without aging. But, whereas the protagonist in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is a self-indulgent sensualist, Simone de Beauvoir’s novel All Men Are Mortal depicts Raymond Fosca as someone dedicated to bettering the lives of his countrymen. Raymond [...]
Edmund Burke. Volume II: 1784-1797 by F.P. Lock The two volumes of F.P. Lock’s biography of Edmund Burke span more than one thousand pages and, by the author’s own calculation, over twenty years of research. In structure, method, and argument, they constitute a work of extraordinary consistency and erudition, and one that, in its use of [...]
In English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply its name in deploring its absence. We cannot refer to "the tradition" or to "a tradition"; at most, we employ the adjective in saying that the poetry of So-and-so is "traditional" or even "too traditional." Seldom, perhaps, does the word appear except in [...]
The Dry Salvages. Photo by Hye Tyde. “I do not know much about gods.” So begins Eliot’s third of four quartets, “The Dry Salvages.” Many have argued that this is one of Eliot’s weakest poems and the least effective of the Four Quartets. I can’t write as a literary critic, but I can [...]
Photo by Felipe Vanancio Eric Voegelin (1901-85) is often portrayed as one of the severest critics of modernity–its belief in human reason’s ability to understand and convey the fundamental structures of reality and its dismissal of transcendent teleologies as private and suspect beliefs. For Voegelin, modernity was a “Gnostic revolt” against reality: the [...]
Pine by Albrecht Durer I wish to dedicate this essay to a writer of books whose greatness is at once utterly at home in America and quite without spatio-temporal boundaries, Marilynne Robinson, who produces in reality the images I only analyze, and thereby not only saves but augments the tradition I love–the aboriginal [...]
The use of criticism as T.S. Eliot sees that use in his Harvard lectures in 1932-1933 is to discover the degree of a proper accommodation of the poet as a person to his work, in a just judgment of both poet and poem. The judgment is not so limited as it had seemed in 1920 [...]
Richard Weaver Like Macbeth, Western man made an evil decision, which has become the efficient and final cause of other evil decisions. Have we forgotten our encounter with the witches on the heath? It occurred in the late fourteenth century, and what the witches said to the protagonist of this drama was that [...]
I. Burke’s Legal Erudition Edmund Burke (1729–1797), was born and grew up in Dublin, Ireland, and even before he graduated from Trinity College in 1749, his father, Richard Burke, registered him as a student of law in the Middle Temple in London. At age twenty-one, in 1750, Burke went to London to study law. At [...]
Historians come in all different shapes and sizes. The well-known ones, those mass-market storytellers we invite into our homes by way of television or bestseller, display enough variety to suit most tastes. There’s David McCullough, courtly and urbane as a Renaissance bishop; Ken Burns, bearded and earnest in the required PBS manner; Michael Beschloss, bronzed [...]
The case for conservatism rests on the reality of vibrant, interdependent social communities that precede and supersede government. The conservative movement makes its most humane case for limited government when it chooses to paint a picture of a healthy network of friends, families, and neighbors instead of shouting “tyranny” and “communist” at those who support [...]