Robert Nisbet Unlike Max Weber or Emile Durkheim, Robert A. Nisbet has not produced a remarkably original theory that has shaken the sociological world or revolutionized its concepts and methods of analysis. What Nisbet has done over the period of a long career in American sociology is to act as a consistent, and [...]
Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, by Hugh Blair. Edited with a Critical Introduction by Harold F. Harding. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965. Two Vols., 496 and 566 pp. One of the most successful of all nineteenth-century textbooks was Hugh Blair’s weighty Rhetoric. Between 1783 (the date of their first publication) and 1911 (the [...]
Leviathan is a Hebrew word signifying “that which gathers itself in folds.” In the Old Testament, Leviathan is the great sea-beast: “Canst thou draw out leviathan with a hook?” In the 17th century, Thomas Hobbes—whom T.S. Eliot calls “that presumptuous little upstart”—made Leviathan the symbol of the state, or rather of mass-society, composed of innumerable [...]
Russell Kirk Once upon a time I was seated in an automobile passing rapidly along the broad highway that runs between Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo. My companion in the back seat was the very young person who today is among this school’s graduates: Miss Cecilia Abigail Kirk. For some miles, that highway [...]
Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South by Ralph C. Wood. The Incarnational Art of Flannery O’Connor by Christina Bieber Lake. Flannery O’Connor continues to interest many readers and critics. A slow and painstaking writer who died young (of lupus at age 39), she did not produce a large body of literature, but what she did produce (in [...]
Crowd Culture: An Examination of the American Way of Life by Bernard Iddings Bell. Americans watching the political upheavals in Egypt and elsewhere feel a variety of emotions, ranging from excitement about potential reform to fear of political regression. Both instincts revolve around the image of crowds in the streets—their promise and their peril. While [...]
America as a Civilization by Max Lerner. By attempting to discuss everything in America, Professor Lerner succeeds in analyzing nothing well. Pretentious and shallow, America as a Civilization offers little insight into the culture of the United States. As a textbook, whether in college or high school, it is lamentably inadequate and prejudiced. What a [...]
In one of his syndicated columns published during the 1970s, the founder of The University Bookman famously wrote, “There is nothing more conservative than conservation.” Russell Kirk, considered one of the founders of post-war conservatism—that supposedly heartless, devil-catch-the-hindmost view of life that (again, supposedly) considers nature a nuisance to be tamed or destroyed—was a great admirer of [...]
What can a student today rightfully demand from a “liberal arts education”? A diploma that translates into a better-paid job? Such a certificate calls for vocational training. A smattering of a wide range of various disciplines? That would hardly make him a more useful citizen. “Liber” is the Latin word for “free.” A “liberal” education [...]
The secular university in the United States has reached a long-deferred moment of truth and ought to be ripe for the wisdom of John Henry Newman. Looking at the university today, its overextension, confusion about its purpose, catastrophic funding decline, and fundamental ineffectiveness for so many students, Newman could very well say, “I told you [...]
Historical Consciousness: The Remembered Past by John Lukacs, Transaction Publishers (Library of Conservative Thought), 1994. Applying a philosophical intellect to the study of history, Dr. Lukacs believes that historical studies may become the principal literary form and way to wisdom in the dawning age. This does not mean that he endeavors to present a “philosophy [...]
The Church and the Land, by Fr. Vincent McNabb. Few in our time have heard of Father Vincent McNabb—Irishman, Dominican theologian, leading light among the Distributists, and man of paradigmatic character. Nor would many today relish what he had to say if, by some chance encounter, they were introduced to one or more of his thirty [...]
Enemies of the Permanent Things – Russell Kirk Russell Kirk remains consistently one of the most interesting American defenders of the conservative cause. His book, Enemies of the Permanent Things, is important, timely, gracefully expressed, and charitable toward its opponents—all in all, a superior example of haut vulgarisation, in which Mr. Kirk undertakes to convince and [...]
The enormous span of Wilhelm Roepke’s interests and writings complicates the task of doing justice to his thought within the confines of an essay. Hence, I have elected to focus on just one aspect of his approach and of his philosophy, but one that has proved to be decisive in the practical implementation in [...]