The university is not a center for the display of adolescent tempers, nor yet a fulcrum for turning society upside down. It is simply this: a place for the cultivation of right reason and moral imagination. Already the reaction is upon us. Political leaders, college presidents, and syndicated columnists join in condemnation of violence on [...]
A reformed history must be imaginative and humane; like poetry, like the great novel, it must be personal rather than abstract, ethical rather than ideological. Like the poet, the historian must understand that devotion to truth is not identical with the cult of facts. The middle decades of our twentieth century have been marked intellectually [...]
The future is bright for conservatives. If conservatism is understood as somehow a post-modern phenomenon, we will no longer labor under the tiresome accusation that we are on the wrong side of history and therefore irrelevant… In the late 1970s, if you had asked someone what a conservative was, the answer would have been easy. [...]
The beautiful sadness of the classical movement in architecture can be a message, urging all people of the third millennium to retrieve what was lost at the end of the second: the human need for transcendent meaning beyond history… What is the meaning of what we now generally refer to as the “New Classicism” or [...]
The speculations of classic and scholastic metaphysics are edifices of reason erected on the experiential basis of existence in truth. We cannot withdraw into these edifices and let the world go by, for in that case we would be remiss in our duty of “debate”… In our capacity as political scientists, historians, or philosophers we [...]
What do conservatives want? Limited government, they answer; free enterprise; strict construction of the Constitution; fiscal responsibility; traditional values and respect for the sanctity of human life. No doubt, but I wonder: how much are these traditional catchphrases and abstractions persuading people anymore? How much are they inspiring the rising generation?… (essay by George Nash) [...]
The most important of the virtues for conservatives is fortitude—the courage to take stands that are not popular, the courage to ignore the opinion polls… In moments of despair, when I think America is indeed slouching towards an unfashionable address, when I contemplate the apparent indifference of the public to corruption and perjury in high [...]
Director Whit Stillman understands that America is dominated by a culture that was imported from Europe and is expressed in European tongues and nourished and maintained by contact with Europe… “Amerika, du hast es besser!” Goethe exclaimed. For him America was a land free from the ancient traditions that are Europe’s heritage and curse. For [...]
Surely, there will be composers who will once again build upon the past and upon each other’s work, creating beautiful new melodies and nobly redefined forms. Eventually, a genius will appear who, like Mozart, will owe almost everything to those who went before him. In each nation of importance for Western music during the first [...]
Is there such a thing as a Christian polity? T.S. Eliot raised the right questions about such matters, on the eve of the Second World War, and offered some answers; but, as Eliot put it at another time, there are no lost causes because there are no gained causes.[1] Every generation fights the same battles [...]
The Conservative Constitution by Russell Kirk A nation’s constitution can be created overnight, claimed Clinton Rossiter incautiously at a symposium over thirty years ago. Witness, he continued, the guiding instruments composed by several European countries shortly after each of the two world wars. Present at that same symposium, Russell Kirk answered Rossiter’s statement with a [...]
Toward the end of her life, Flannery O’Connor was often asked to speak about being a Southerner, as though this were a peculiar condition in need of explanation. In “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South,” a composite essay published from two of her last public talks, she sums up what she thinks of her [...]
Ronald Reagan’s personal qualities do not fully explain his appeal to American conservatives. Reagan gained their favor not so much because of his personality and communication skills but because conservatives liked and believed what he said. His message was more important than the messenger. Perhaps the most important fact to assimilate about modern American conservatism [...]
The communitarian movement has arisen as an effort to address the evident and growing deficiencies of modern liberalism, which seems unable to think beyond the sovereign autonomy of rights-bearing individuals. But communitarianism has considerable deficiencies of its own. In particular, there is its propensity to use the language of “community” as a form of mood [...]