Conservatism Revisited: The Revolt Against Ideology, by Peter Viereck. With a major new study of Peter Viereck and Conservatism by Claes G. Ryn Developments in recent American politics have raised questions about the intellectual roots and philosophical depth of conservatism. The direction of American foreign policy, for example, has inspired debates about the meaning of American [...]
Of the voluminous corpus of Russell Kirk’s writings, no small amount concerns the subject of education. Kirk counted in his memoirs that over a span of five decades he had authored “some hundreds of essays, articles, and newspaper columns,” as well as three books devoted to the subject. In particular, his fortnightly page in the [...]
Hard Green: Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists; A Conservative Manifesto, by Peter Huber The Greening of Conservative America, by John R.E. Bliese. These two books set out to correct the general public perception that conservatism and environmentalism are at odds. Peter Huber’s book goes even further. His manifesto argues that modern liberal environmentalism is fraudulent. [...]
James E. Person, Jr. interviews Peter J. Stanlis Peter Stanlis’s groundbreaking work, Edmund Burke and the Natural Law (1958), forever changed the way scholars view Burke’s work. Mr. Stanlis (1919-2011) placed Burke firmly in the tradition of Western natural law reasoning. Mr. Stanlis has also published a number of essays and articles on Frost, including Robert Frost: [...]
Sanctifying the World: The Augustinian Life and Mind of Christopher Dawson, Bradley J. Birzer Towering above the early twentieth century Catholic literary revival stands Christopher Dawson, the English historian and man of letters who identified culture as the animating principle of history. Since religion is the heart of culture, Dawson wrote, then “religion is the [...]
The Essential Calhoun: Selections from Writings, Speeches, and Letters. Edited with an Introduction by Clyde Wilson. Foreword by Russell Kirk. The contemporary academic interpretation of John Caldwell Calhoun is like the contemporary academic response to anything and anyone thoroughly and unmistakably Southern: a politically correct caricature, both as to motives and with regard to the meaning of [...]
Irving Babbitt To define Irving Babbitt’s central view of life, from which radiate all his other views—of letters, of education, of society—I commence by quoting not his own words, but those of a different writer—one whom he would not have approved. For in reading Bertrand Russell’s recent autobiographical volume Portraits from Memory, I [...]
At the End of an Age by John Lukacs. In his book, At the End of an Age, historian John Lukacs argues that the Modern Era, which began about five hundred years ago, is rapidly coming to its terminus, or might indeed already have given way to a new era, the outlines of which do not [...]
Christopher Dawson A Historian and His Word: a Life of Christopher Dawson, 1889–1970 by Christina Scott. The Dynamic Character of Christian Culture: Essays on Dawsonian Themes edited by Peter J. Cataldo. “Years ago when I was an undergraduate your Ballad of the White Horse first brought the breath of life to this period for me when I [...]
One might think that I’m being sarcastic but I’m only trying to illustrate my contention that the term conservatism has become so free-floating that it means whatever journalists and politicians want it to mean. “Conservative,” as it is now being used to describe Republican ward-heelers and neo-Wilsonian social democrats, is an arbitrary designation. Equally [...]
Conservatism is poorly understood in the United States. It is not right-wing liberalism or nationalism; nor is it political Protestantism. It has nothing to do with a neurotic longing for an ideal past, and reactionaries who insist there is nothing left to conserve show that they don’t know the meaning of the word. Conservatism has [...]
Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child by Anthony Esolen. “A good book is a dangerous thing….It carries within it the possibility…of cracking open the shell of routine that prevents us from seeing the world.” Anthony Esolen not only wrote these words, he wrote just such a book. As a college professor, I read [...]
USA Today: The Stunning Incoherence of American Civilization by Reid Buckley, P. E. N. Press (North Carolina), 2002. How does one review a book that begins with a chapter entitled, “This Blessed Land,” in which the author declares, “I am obliged to make a public declaration that I cannot love my country,” and which ends with [...]
The following essay appears in the final chapter of Russell Kirk’s textbook Economics: Work and Prosperity (Pensacola, Fla.: A Beka Book Publications, 1989), pp. 365–368. Some people would like to separate economists from politics, but they are unable to do so. Another name for economics is political economy. As we mentioned in earlier chapters, a [...]