Imagine a man travelling through the night, without a guide, thinking continually of the direction he wishes to follow. That is the image of a man in search of order, says Simone Weil: “Such a traveler’s way is lit by a great hope.” Above even food and shelter, she continues, we must have order. The [...]
American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia, ISI Books, 2006. Left-wing intellectuals have an irritating habit of trying to define conservatism as a mental illness: as the fruit of an “authoritarian personality” in Theodor Adorno’s famous formulation, or as the unfortunate consequence of neuroses rooted in “fear and aggression, dogmatism and the intolerance of ambiguity,” as a group of [...]
The wittiest of our public men, Eugene McCarthy, remarked a few months ago that nowadays he uses the word “liberal” as an adjective merely. That is a measure of the triumph of the conservative mentality in recent years—including the triumph of the conservative side of Mr. McCarthy’s own mind and character. Perhaps it would be [...]
The following essay is adapted from the book Back on the Road to Serfdom: The Resurgence of Statism, edited by Thomas E. Woods Jr. (ISI Books, 2011). We are perhaps apt to forget that during the Cold War, it was generally conceded that the Soviet Union had a higher rate of economic growth than the [...]
In the world of constant communication, few of us would say that we enjoy a free relationship to technology. But according to the language of political liberty, we do. Liberty frees us to use technology and accept its benefits, or to avoid it and suffer the consequences. Yet liberty and technology are more deeply implicated [...]