He sat in a wheeled chair, waiting for dark, And shivered in his ghastly suit of grey, Legless, sewn short at elbow. Through the park Voices of boys rang saddening like a hymn, Voices of play and pleasure after day, Till gathering sleep had mothered them from him. […]
Samuel Johnson believed that just as pedants can abuse the objective meaning of words, distorting them for their own purposes, so can scoundrels abuse the healthy love of home and homeland, parroting patriotic words for self-serving reasons… Can it really be true, as Mark Malvasi has claimed in two separate essays on these pages, that [...]
Francesco Petrarch and Laura de Sade likely never met or spoke, but Petrarch wrote hundreds of sonnets about her and to her. When we think of love sonnets, most of us think of the sappy ooze of lyricists or the sometimes flavorless mush in cheap greeting cards. When they were first written in the fourteenth [...]
Listen to musicologist/pianist Robert Levin play Mozart's own piano and explain why it is important to know how Mozart's music sounded to the composer on the very instrument for which he composed... Books on the topic of this essay may be found in The Imaginative Conservative Bookstore. We hope you will join us in The Imaginative Conservative community. The [...]
Habits, mores, manners, and customs should prove more important in a republic than the law… “With Cicero fell the republic.”—Russell Kirk As one of my grand Hillsdale colleagues, Dr. Stephen Smith, once said to me, there has never been a serious reform or renaissance in Western Civilization since the fall of the Roman Republic without [...]
In The Federalist, Publius writes of “new” and “improved” “principles” of the “science of politics,” and he urges his countrymen to abandon the classical teachings concerning the possibilities of republican government over an extensive territory… Conservatives—American and otherwise—have always held The Federalist in extremely high regard. Virtually all would agree with Clinton Rossiter that it stands with the Declaration [...]
John Adams never had an optimistic view of human nature, and his experience in the Congress and abroad only deepened his suspicion that his fellow Americans might not have the character to sustain a republican government. In the Spring of 2016, Library of America released John Adams: Writings from the New Nation 1784-1826, the third and [...]
Had the Nationalists carried the day in 1776 and turned the Continental Congress into a national government, implied powers would have been the normal constitutional practice from the moment of independence. The American Revolution, State Sovereignty, and the American Constitutional Settlement, 1765-1800 by N. Coleman (294 pages, Lexington Books, 2016) The Articles of Confederation that Congress [...]
There is a secret to the art of education, but it is an obvious secret. Despite the whirlings of the world, education is straightforward: It engages the good, the true, and the beautiful in the context of basic and natural human interactions and for the sake of human happiness. As an action exercised by one [...]
Is a long-standing commemorative cross on public land socially divisive and a governmental endorsement of religion? Or, to the contrary, is a constitutional challenge to that cross an act of gratuitous social divisiveness? Recently, in American Humanist Association v. Maryland, the federal Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a ruling of the federal district court of [...]
By affirming our human limitations, conservatism actually opens our minds to learning and discovering… Conservatives have always been portrayed as backward and unenlightened simpletons. This is true especially today because intellectual conservatives are being sidelined by identitarian and populist conservatism. This is not to excuse the Left. On the contrary, the Left’s insistence on presenting conservatives [...]
At his death, Robert E. Lee was not fully a citizen despite the efforts he made in his last years to regain his citizenship. This final aggression against the name of a great man continued to trouble many Americans, both in the North and the South. At the time of his death, was Robert E. [...]
Historical context, for members of the Straussian school, is “historicism,” a form of moral relativism that believes that there are no fixed truths, only ideas appropriate for their historical moment… Patriotism Is Not Enough: Harry Jaffa, Walter Berns, and the Arguments That Redefined American Conservatism by Steven Hayward (263 pages, Encounter Books, 2016) Dr. Steven Hayward [...]
Conservatives should be troubled by Thomas West's claim that America has always been liberal and that the only historical discourse available today is that same liberalism. Vindicating the Founders: Race, Sex, Class, and Justice in the Origins of America, by Thomas G. West (211 pages, Rowman and Littlefield, 1997) Thomas West has written a courageous [...]