I'd say a conservative is a person who prefers the devil he knows to the devil he doesn't. He knows there are always ills and devils in the world, and he would rather get along with present imperfections than dash into some ruinous and impossible scheme of perfectibility. Editor's Note: This interview, conducted in the [...]
Cant and equivocation dismissed, it seems to me that there are three great bodies of principle and conviction that tie together what is called modern civilization. The first of these is the Christian faith: the theological and moral doctrines which inform us, either side of the Atlantic, of the nature of God and man, the [...]
It is the best of times, it is the worst of times. It has the best of times for HSBC, the giant British bank caught using American personnel and facilities to launder money for Mexican drug cartels and various rogue states. How so? HSBC’s stock value has continued to rise since the U.S. government announced a [...]
Richard Weaver In his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams (1907), Adams tells us that he was born into one world in the nineteenth century and lived on into another. Born in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1838, he lived to see the emergent twentieth century—a world in which a secular Dynamo replaced Venus and the [...]
Virtue and the Promise of Conservatism: the Legacy of Burke and Tocqueville, by Bruce Frohnen. Conservatism lives. It continues to exercise its power over bright young minds. It also shows us a way of life, how to live. For these assertions there could be no better evidence than Bruce Frohnen’s Virtue and the Promise of Conservatism. Conceived [...]
In my last post about teaching in an age of ideology, I proposed that one needs to illuminate to students about how to live according to the true, the beautiful, and the good. Now what exactly constitutes these goods has elicited an array of different responses from some of the most prominent thinkers as teachers in this [...]
Humanism and Religion: A Call for the Renewal of Western Culture, by Jens Zimmermann, Oxford University Press, 2012. As a number of books from important thinkers (Etienne Gilson, Jeffrey Burton Russell) have sought to educate open-minded readers to a most enlightened Middle Ages, Zimmermann seeks, in part, to challenge some misinterpretations and terrible damage done to [...]
The concept of federalism has been one of the principal casualties of modern American history. One has to look far and wide to find American historians and political scientists who do not believe, with the smugness and tenacity of dogma, that our federal institutions are lumbering relics of a past we outgrew over a century [...]
Russell Kirk To condense into a short essay the reason I’m a conservative is no mean feat. From my perspective, in order to represent my reasoning, I need to address not only what it is about conservatism that first captured my attention, but also how I believe that the principles of conservatism best [...]
Liberalism “is now fading out of the world,” Russell Kirk proclaimed in 1955 in the liberal Catholic periodical Commonweal. “And I believe that the ephemeral character of the liberal movement is in consequence of the fact that liberalism’s mythical roots always were feeble, and now are nearly dead.” For Kirk, and many Christian Humanists of [...]
What are the ends of education? We mean, of course, the ends for us, for us democratic Americans. So we begin with the best book ever written on democracy and the best book ever written on America—Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. America, Tocqueville noticed, is an overwhelmingly middle-class country. To be middle class, of [...]
What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us.—Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue MacIntyre’s brilliant critique of modernity and its many failings was published almost thirty years ago. Its many [...]
When it comes to the opinion of the people who matter, the Shakers are hip. They had all the correct views: They practiced sustainable agriculture and gender equality, and they even reduced their carbon footprint to almost zero. (There are said to be only three Shakers left in North America—that’s what celibacy will do for [...]
Socrates, who lived from 470 to 399 B.C., is separated from us by nearly two and one half millennia. This means that he had not in common with our progressive age the automobile, the aeroplane, the television, the computer, the telephone (whether cellular or regular), video games, virtual reality, etc. Can we, then, “relate” to [...]