Parents and Relatives, Fellow Tutors and Mr. President, Board Members and, above all, Santa Fe Seniors and Graduate Institute students! Some of you will remember that radio-telephone distress signal of old: “Mayday, Mayday.” It had, alas, nothing to do with the “merry month of May.” Our seniors, who have all learned a lot of French, [...]
If there’s one thing we’ve learned from the recent EU referendum in the United Kingdom it is that modern politics have nothing whatever to do with lofty principles, such as truth, integrity or freedom, and everything to do with fear-mongering of the most pernicious kind. One hardly knows where to begin when offering examples of [...]
On the morning of June 24, the world awoke to a changed Europe. With the so-called Brexit referendum, the UK voted to leave the European Union, and as such, the EU lost one of its most important member nations. Almost immediately, there were calls from France, Italy, and the Netherlands to hold similar referenda, jeopardizing [...]
The Free Enterprise System is dynamic. It is disruptive, yet also full of opportunities in its competitive nature. It requires hard work and virtue in order for it to be possible. If capitalism is to rise above cronyism, a proper understanding must not only be cultivated but also promoted. Dr. David Azerrad offers us such an [...]
Socrates in the Underworld: On Plato’s Gorgia, by Nalin Ranasinghe (192 pages, St. Augustine Press, 2009) Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Peter Augustine Lawler as he reflects on how Socrates models both rightly-ordered eros and logos, in contrast to the Stoics and Sophists. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher [...]
Understanding Progressivism and the Progressive Era is one of the most important tasks for intellectual defenders of ordered liberty. In just under two generations, Progressivism captured the minds of the American intellectual class, which then transformed traditional governance institutions into the modern bureaucratic-administrative state. As Thomas C. Leonard shows in his new book, Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, [...]
That sail which leans on light, tired of islands, a schooner beating up the Caribbean for home, could be Odysseus, home-bound on the Aegean; that father and husband’s longing, under gnarled sour grapes, is like the adulterer hearing Nausicaa’s name in every gull’s outcry. This brings nobody peace. The ancient war between obsession and [...]
When Max Weber suggested in 1917 that the world had been disenchanted, he meant that modernity was best understood by the expansion of “technical means” that controlled “all things through calculation.”[1] The real power of these technical means lay not in the techniques and technologies themselves but in the disposition of those who used them, in [...]
The Religion of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate. This right is in its nature an unalienable right. It is unalienable, because the opinions of men, depending only on the evidence contemplated by [...]
Readers of The Imaginative Conservative will have a great and healthy respect for the Great Books of civilization, those seminal tomes which have helped define who we are, why we are and where we are. Our culture would be impoverished without them. Indeed, it would be rendered penurious in their absence. It is no surprise, [...]
Man, it is often said, cannot jump over his own shadow. The poet—and by “poet” I mean a writer of imaginative works in verse or prose—leaps over the universe… Sicut erat in principio et nunc et semper et in saecula saeculorum. I We not only read a novel, we enter into its created world. We [...]
On the heels of the Orlando massacre and with the Fourth of July recess in the near future, House Democrats sought to “seize the moment” to bring about strict gun control. Thus, on Wednesday, July 22, 2016, they orchestrated and executed a twenty-five-hour sit-in on their chamber’s floor. In light of these events, the temptation is to [...]
Hungary has once more become a key country, as we have stopped the flow of migrants. We want to protect our national sovereignty and security, and so we constitute an obstacle to the George Soros-inspired American plan to promote the movement of a million Muslims into Europe each year. The following is an interview that [...]
Over the past few days I’ve been reading through Alfred A. Knopf 1915-2015: A Century of Publishing, a volume celebrating the legacy of one of the world’s most influential publishers. Knopf, now a division of Random House, has published twenty-five Nobel Prize winners and numerous Pullitzer Prize and National Book Award winners. What struck me, [...]