All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly The authors of this latest attempt to give life “meaning” and to “uncover the wonder” of the world—concealed, as it has been, by modern technological culture—begin their argument with an episode. In 2007, a young [...]
George Orwell’s delightful, brief narrative acts as a fable: its animal characters allow us to see afresh well-worn and conventional truths. The fable warns us of what we already know, but must learn again and again if we are not to be fooled into historical optimism. By the time George Orwell’s Animal Farm appeared in August [...]
Russell Kirk: A Critical Biography of a Conservative Mind, by James E. Person, Jr., Madison Books, Lanham, MA, 1999 In the book before us, James E. Person, Jr. has sought “to craft a critical primer” on the thought of Russell Kirk—a man whose 50 years of professional life yielded 32 books, 800 essays and reviews, [...]
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 [...]
In the twentieth century, no novelist exerted a stronger influence upon political opinion, in Britain and America, than did George Orwell. Also Orwell was the most telling writer about poverty. In a strange and desperate way, Orwell was a lover of the permanent things. Yet because he could discern no source of abiding justice and [...]
While some books deserve their obscurity, others are unjustly forgotten; Russell Kirk’s early text, The American Cause, should be remembered. Not as developed and mature as his later work, still this little book reminds us of human nature and its limitations, thereby warning us against ideology and its violent tendencies. For Kirk, prudent acceptance of limitation—what he [...]
Astute thinkers from Hegel onward have claimed that we live at the end of the modern world. That does not mean the modern world is about to disappear: the world, in truth, is more modern than ever. So we must contest Hegel’s assertion that the modern world is the end, the fulfillment, of history. The [...]
Shakespeare “It was William of Occam,” writes Richard Weaver in his seminal work, Ideas Have Consequences, “who propounded the fateful idea of nominalism, which denies that universals have a real existence.” Weaver compares this development in the intellectual history of Western man to Macbeth’s ominous meeting with the Weird Sisters: “Have we forgotten our [...]
The traditional ideal of the professor—a vaguely eccentric, impractical seeker of truth always teetering, like the Greek philosopher Thales, on the brink of some well or other—has all but disappeared. Though obviously a caricature, this stereotype at least captured the essence of what a professor should be: someone whose life is passionately consumed with the [...]
Review of The Thanatos Syndrome, by Walker Percy. In spite of his six widely read novels, his two works of nonfiction (with their original contributions to the study of language and the human psyche), and his two national literary awards, Walker Percy remains a figure on the fringes of the American literary establishment. When he [...]
The theme of this “historical meditation” is the crisis and decline of civilization in the West during the twentieth century. That perspective is the product both of an individual temperament and also of a historical consciousness. One hundred, or even fifty, years hence neither the temperament nor the perspective may matter very much. But I [...]
The Prophetic Poet and the Spirit of the Age by Marion Montgomery (in three volumes): Why Flannery O’Connor Stayed Home (1981), Why Poe Drank Liquor (1983), Why Hawthorne Was Melancholy (1984) Marion Montgomery’s trilogy is an ambitious, indeed audacious, assessment of the social, political, literary, religions, and philosophical temper of the Western world since the [...]
The theme of this “historical meditation” is the crisis and decline of civilization in the West during the twentieth century. That perspective is the product both of an individual temperament and also of a historical consciousness. One hundred, or even fifty, years hence neither the temperament nor the perspective may matter very much. But I [...]
In 1941 the Prairie Farmer, America’s oldest farm periodical, celebrated its one hundredth anniversary. The centennial cover features a drawing of the iconic twentieth-century “new” farmer: tall, young, and slender. Bulky overalls have given way to tailored city clothes; the straw hat to a fedora. In the artist’s words, he is “a strong, virile, keen, [...]