Above all, Forrest McDonald survived and thrived because he was not by temperament a party-line ideologue and was unfazed by the imprecations of those who were. Unlike too many of his fellow historians who let their present-day policy agendas control their interpretation of the past, McDonald refused to distort his subjects in this way. Recovering [...]
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 [...]
A History of Political Ideas from Antiquity to the Middle Ages by Philippe Nemo As the first part of a two volume survey of political thought, Philippe Nemo approaches the field of study in a manner different from many American texts. Appealing to readers with “little prior knowledge” of political thought, the author provides a lucid, [...]
(This is the first essay in a series The Imaginative Conservative will be publishing in honor of the sixtieth anniversary of Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind.) A vital date for those of us who read Winston Elliott’s The Imaginative Conservative is May 11, 2013, the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind. It’s [...]
I’ve gotten several emails about this article by Joanne Lipman in the Wall Street Journal. The bottom line is that the teachers who get the best results are all about really tough love. The best way to motivate students is to challenge them with realistic (and therefore tough) assessments of their shortcomings. It’s a good idea to shout [...]
Chapter Three in The Young Man’s Guide to Building a House The words love and economy rarely find their ways into the same sentence. Economics has been called the dismal science but people write songs about love. You don’t write songs about economics unless you’re writing a parody. When most people hear the word economy they think about money. That is dismal. [...]
Christianity and the classical heritage taught men and women to strive for a better life but to have modest hopes. The reason why we cannot look forward to a vastly improved worldly existence is that human beings—we ourselves in particular—are flawed creatures. We have to learn to deal with the consequences. We must not forget [...]
Senator Ted Cruz’s 2013 filibuster did not do much to change the dynamic of politics in Washington or to stop the Affordable Care Act from becoming the last brick in the wall of social democracy separating Americans from their traditions of self-reliance and local community control. But, to someone interested in the constitutional basis of such [...]
America is the land of progress, speculative, contingent, pragmatic, experimental, traditionless. An American conservatism, accordingly, is oxymoronic, blundering, graceless, and embarrassing in a society devoted to change and forgetful of the past. “The storybook truth about American history,” began Louis Hartz in The Liberal Tradition in America, is that the country “was settled by men who [...]
“Lincoln himself, of course, was no enthusiast generally for millenialist imagery: for instance, his reply to the clergyman who told him that ‘God is on our side.” Lincoln said he knew nothing of the sort: he only hoped that we were on His. As Fisher Ames said at the beginning of the nineteenth century, ‘This [...]
Here is a book that will send a reviewer—and all decent-minded readers—groping for superlatives. Indeed, I find it difficult to refrain from cluttering my review with mere rhapsodies, which might be warranted, but which do not throw much light on things. Anthony Esolen mounts a crushing and delightful riposte to the whole array of theories [...]
To what extent are the differences between man and woman rooted in the soul, rather than just the body? If the soul is the “form” of the body, one might assume that masculinity and femininity are characteristics of the soul before they are of the body. Yet the tradition of patristic and medieval commentary on [...]
In the last fortnight the Australian people elected a new government under the leadership of Tony Abbott, a pro-family Catholic and constitutional monarchist. He has a wife called Margaret and daughters Louise, Bridget and Frances. Abbott was educated at St. Ignatius College, Riverview, the University of Sydney and Oxford University. Riverview is the most prestigious Catholic [...]
In late 2013, the Future Powers met quietly in Astana. Their decision tells us much about 21st Century geopolitics, the balance of power, and the role of decadence in the decline of nations and empires. The Chinese, Central Asians, Russians and Iranians are rebuilding the fabled Silk Road without the silk. In the short-run it [...]