The conservatism of Robert Frost was rooted in his tendency to view existence as inherently paradoxical. Frost carefully crafted and honed metaphor as a device to express such tensions in suggestive rather than didactic ways, which sometimes resulted in critical misinterpretations that deny the importance of the metaphysical in his verse. Robert Frost: The Poet [...]
Several centuries before Edmund Burke, Thomas More warned against theorizing about the perfect society and advised statesmen to do their best with the form of government their people have passed on to them. Though he himself favored one form of government over another, he admitted that we rarely have the power to create the government [...]
If in fact the prudential, immediate goal of conservatives is simply to defend what remains of our heritage and forestall a slide into anarchy, then what is it conservatives can do to sustain our Republic of Hustlers? At our 2009 annual meeting, the Scholars Council of the Library of Congress was exposed to some surreal [...]
Few contemporary books reflect Forrest McDonald’s prodigious research on “The American Presidency,” nor bring to bear such a breadth of historical insight. If you seek a deeply historical and substantively rich overview of the U.S. presidency, this book is without peer. The American Presidency: An Intellectual History by Forrest McDonald (528 pages, University Press of Kansas, [...]
Physicists talk of two of the fundamental forces of nature as the strong and the weak forces. I am going to borrow these terms in an entirely metaphorical way to name the two fundamental forces in which I live my life as a professor of literature. The strong force is technology, not to be understood [...]
I wonder about the presuppositions when voices are raised concerning the fragmentation of society and problems of disconnectedness.[1] At the heart of these concerns is a philosophical anthropology, i.e., one’s beliefs about what it means to be human. What is it exactly that is fragmented or disconnected? It is probably incumbent on me to disclose [...]
It has been said that every religious heresy proceeds from a misunderstanding of the nature of God. Something similar could be said about constitutional heresies. They proceed from a misunderstanding of the nature of the Union. From the time the conservative intellectual movement emerged in the United States in the early 1950s, for example, its [...]
For the framers of the U.S. Constitution no task seemed more important than to limit and tame power. The chief reason why they established a government of divided powers and checks and balances was their view of human nature, which was primarily Christian and classical. It seemed to them self-evident that human beings are morally [...]
“Macbeth” was Abraham Lincoln’s favorite play. Although he had a passing acquaintance with many of Shakespeare’s plays, he was more familiar with some than with others, and thought himself as intimate with a few as the scholars and actors who made it their profession to study them. A few years before my grandmother died, she [...]
The Conservative Movement’s Perpetual Civil War The conflict between advocates of the free market and traditionalist conservatives dates from the beginning of the modern conservative movement. Never have traditionalists and classical liberals comfortably shared the same space. The differences and ensuing conflicts between these two strands within modern American conservatism have been well documented. In [...]
It was with no small sense of vindication that Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan signed the proclamation of 31 May 1913, declaring the Seventeenth Amendment duly ratified and incorporated into the fundamental laws of the United States. More than twenty years earlier as a Nebraska congressman, “The Great Commoner” had joined the struggle to [...]
My goal in this essay is less to impart a specific teaching than to tell a story. This story, I first should point out, is not a myth made up for didactic purposes, as so many such stories tend to be. It is rather a true story, one rooted in things we know about history, [...]
Walter McDougall’s “Throes of Democracy” shows us a more human, recognizable, and uncomfortable past—a more complicated past than the defenders of American pretense will ever acknowledge. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1852 novel, The Blithedale Romance, has been overshadowed for many years by The Scarlett Letter and The House of the Seven Gables. Perhaps its unsparing analysis of [...]
Odysseus has lived through many transformations since Homer commemorated him in the Odyssey. None of them, however, has made Homer obsolete. Both the Iliad and the Odyssey have been translated many times. By common consent of those competent to judge such matters, Robert Fagles has done a superb job with the Odyssey.[i] Even before I [...]