The Imaginative Conservative Archives ~ Page 34 of 44 ~ The Imaginative Conservative

A Meditation on Malick’s Tree of Life & Voegelin’s Philosophy of Consciousness

By Christopher Morrissey|2014-04-13T10:45:55-05:00May 28th, 2013|Categories: Eric Voegelin, Film|Tags: Terrence Malick, The Tree of Life|

Terrence Malick’s film, The Tree of Life (2011), is a significant cultural achievement, not only cinematically but also philosophically. Back in 1969, the philosophically inclined Malick produced a bilingual edition of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s The Essence of Reasons, supplying the English translation. With The Tree of Life, the meditative practices visible in his previous films–Badlands (1973), Days of [...]

Will the Future Be Superficial?

By Irving Babbitt|2018-08-31T14:28:03-05:00May 25th, 2013|Categories: Conservatism, Irving Babbitt, Quotation|

Irving Babbitt According to Mr. Lloyd George, the future will be even more exclusively taken up than is the present with the economic problem, especially with the relations between capital and labor. In that case, one is tempted to reply, the future will be very superficial. When studied with any degree of thoroughness, [...]

Meddling with What We Do Not Understand

By Edmund Burke|2019-06-04T16:02:16-05:00May 24th, 2013|Categories: Conservatism, Edmund Burke, Permanent Things, Quotation|

What has been said of the Roman empire, is at least as true of the British constitution—“Octingentorum annorum fortuna, disciplinaque, compages haec coaluit; quae convelli sine convellentium exitio non potest. ”1 This British constitution has not been struck out at an heat by a set of presumptuous men, like the assembly of pettifoggers run mad [...]

We Won: Burke and De Tocqueville

By Bradley J. Birzer|2014-01-18T15:59:53-06:00May 24th, 2013|Categories: Alexis de Tocqueville, Bradley J. Birzer, Conservatism, Edmund Burke, Peter Stanlis, Russell Kirk|

Figureheads Coming and Going For any of us interested in the history of post-war American conservatism (and, I assume you must be, or you wouldn’t be reading The Imaginative Conservative), we owe an immense debt to several historical figures and personalities—most immediately to Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville, but also to Cicero, St. Augustine [...]

Religion & Culture: Christopher Dawson as Superlative Guide

By Robert M. Woods|2016-08-03T10:37:11-05:00May 10th, 2013|Categories: Christendom, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, Culture, Featured, Religion, Robert M. Woods|

There is a popular series of books entitled, “Eat This, Not That.” The premise of the series is that of all the foods out there, some are healthier for you than others or some are not as unhealthy as others. We can classify this essay as a “Read This, Not That.” With the growing number [...]

English Letters in the Age of Boredom

By Russell Kirk|2019-10-30T13:35:41-05:00April 27th, 2013|Categories: Books, Literature, Moral Imagination, RAK, Russell Kirk, T.S. Eliot|Tags: Eliot and His Age|

Some day I shall write a book with the title The Age of Eliot (ed., published as Eliot and His Age). The span of Mr. T. S. Eliot’s life, extending from the ascendancy of President Cleveland and Lord Salisbury to our present troubled hour, has been characterized by as much material change as any age in the whole [...]

Eric Voegelin’s Philosophy & the Drama of Mankind

By Gerhart Niemeyer|2016-06-14T09:09:05-05:00April 16th, 2013|Categories: Christianity, Eric Voegelin, Gerhart Niemeyer, Philosophy|Tags: 1IR|

Eric Voegelin Nearly two decades ago there appeared the first three volumes of Eric Voegelin’s exemplary quest for a theoretically intelligible order of history (Vol. I, Israel and Revelation; Vol. II, The World of the Polis; Vol. III, Plato and Aristotle). The plan projected three more volumes: Empire and Christianity, The Protestant Centuries, and The Crisis [...]

The Conservative Mission and Progressive Ideology

By George W. Carey|2019-04-25T12:41:55-05:00April 13th, 2013|Categories: Edmund Burke, George W. Carey, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Progressivism, Thomas Jefferson|Tags: 1MA|

At the risk of seeming too parochial, I want to outline the dimensions of a problem that has been of special concern for me and other conservative students of the American political tradition, broadly defined. This concern is not as narrow as it may at first seem. Nor, by any standard, is it insignificant; it [...]

Eric Voegelin on the Death of Plato

By James V. Schall|2020-08-12T16:26:09-05:00March 31st, 2013|Categories: Books, Christianity, Classics, Eric Voegelin, Fr. James Schall, Plato, Socrates|

Eric Voegelin was charmed by the death of Plato. Philosophy, Voegelin thought, had fled to the Academy—Plato’s Academy not ours—wherein poetry and the pleasure of music are received back no longer tainted by the polis using them for its own purposes. “But there is another sort of old age too: the tranquil and serene evening [...]

The Movement of World Revolution: Christopher Dawson

By Bradley J. Birzer|2018-02-13T09:45:12-06:00March 18th, 2013|Categories: Books, Bradley J. Birzer, Christendom, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, Featured|

The Movement of World Revolution by Christopher Dawson (The Catholic University of America Press) Having witnessed the loss of an idyllic Edwardian world to the deadening trenches of the first world war, the rise of communism and the gulag state in Slavic Europe and China, and the advent of national socialism and the holocaust camps in [...]

Sanctifying the World: Christopher Dawson

By Bradley J. Birzer|2023-05-12T10:48:36-05:00March 18th, 2013|Categories: Books, Bradley J. Birzer, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, Featured, TIC Featured Book|

Sanctifying the World: The Augustinian Life and Mind of Christopher Dawson, by Bradley J. Birzer Featured Book: Since religion is the heart of culture, Dawson wrote, then “religion is the key to history;” therefore “[w]e cannot understand the inner form of a society unless we understand its religion.” To understand Europe and the West, then, [...]

Robert Nisbet & The Quest for Community

By Jeffrey O. Nelson|2015-04-28T08:40:30-05:00March 9th, 2013|Categories: Books, Community, Conservatism, Robert Nisbet, TIC Featured Book|Tags: Jeffrey O. Nelson|

Featured Book: The Quest For Community, by Robert Nisbet, ranks high among the foundational works of post-war American conservatism. In it, Nisbet argued that the emergence of the “centralized territorial State” in the wake of the Middle Ages decisively impacted Western social organization. Nisbet was particularly sensitive to the rise of the “national community,” the total political [...]

Oak & Stone and the Permanent Things

By Ian Crowe|2015-02-11T10:38:19-06:00March 4th, 2013|Categories: Edmund Burke, Ian Crowe, Permanent Things, T.S. Eliot|

Edmund Burke For the present is the point at which time touches eternity.-C.S. Lewis[1] It was in 1939, in The Idea of a Christian Society, that T.S. Eliot defended what he called “the permanent things” against a world that appeared drunk on the politics of revolution and “change.” Eliot’s purpose was not a [...]

The Restoration of Tradition

By Stanley Parry|2019-06-27T11:40:10-05:00March 1st, 2013|Categories: Eric Voegelin, History, Tradition|Tags: 1MA|

A guide to the paths that remain open when “tradition falls out of existence.” The position this paper will attempt to illustrate, if not demonstrate, is that once lost or weakened the tradition of a society can be restored only by a creative and even radical reconstruction of the tradition itself. The problem to which [...]