Dr. Bradley J. Birzer’s recent essay about the late Daniel Bell is faulty. Professor Bell was one of the most gifted and independent-minded scholars of the last century. Although he was more a man of the left than a conservative, he was a valuable ally to conservative traditionalists. Dr. Birzer’s piece describes the late Professor [...]
Barry Cooper Thomas Heilke’s and John von Heyking’s edited volume, Hunting and Weaving: Empiricism and Political Philosophy, is a festschrift to Barry Cooper, a political scientist at the University of Calgary. The themes of hunting and weaving are ones illuminated in Cooper’s own career as he brings together political philosophy and empiricism in [...]
Dr. James Otteson In the world of ideas, things can move rapidly. On August 19, 2013, one of the single best minds of our era, James R. Otteson II, announced his move to North Carolina to become the Executive Director of the BB&T Center for the Study of Capitalism and a full professor [...]
Stanley Rosen In the past couple of essays, I have looked at Leo Strauss and Harvey Mansfield as teachers in a climate of positivism, relativism, and academic mediocrity. In this essay, I will explore Stanley Rosen, as described by Nalin Ranasinghe in Teaching in an Age of Ideology. What we will discover is [...]
A Review of William H. F. Altman’s Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche: The Philosopher of the Second Reich (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2013). In this imaginative and refined commentary on Nietzsche’s political thought, Altman provides an incisive critique of the achievement of Nietzsche, as well as his limitations. The work is the third volume of a trilogy on German [...]
William Lee Miller’s complementary books, Lincoln’s Virtues and The President: The Duty of a Statesman, are a rare combination of historical investigation and moral reflection presented in comfortable prose filled with real world insight. The Publisher’s Review excerpt from the Amazon site is right on: Margaret Whalen Turner’s Attolia series makes a great gift for those who know nothing can [...]
The historian Michael Bellesiles tried to usher in the new millennium by claiming that guns were scarce in colonial America and even beyond. The problem was, it was quite easy to show that his research was flawed and his conclusions nonsensical. It wasn’t the first time that a historian with an agenda was found out, [...]
Over on the First Things blog, Robert George has blessed us, yet again, with the conventional and convenient wisdom of (Catholic) neoconservatism. The post, titled “No Mere Marriage of Convenience: The Unity of Economic and Social Conservatism,” is a sustained argument for just how convenient this marriage of utility and principle really is, and why [...]
“Are the good times really over for good?” asked Merle Haggard in his 1982 lament. Then, the good times weren’t over. In fact, they were coming back, with the Reagan recovery, the renewal of the American spirit and the end of a Cold War that had consumed so much of our lives. It is hard [...]
(Visitor: “What should be our national mission?”) A mission for Amurika! That’s surely what we need! A moral cause to save the world, a banner and a screed, So thousands of Amurikans, in every foreign land, Exacerbate the problems that we never understand. […]
Understandably, these days there is a great deal of political analysis swirling around. This morning, I read Pat Buchanan’s article, “Obama’s America – And Ours.” I was struck by this statement: From Jamestown in 1607 to Yorktown in 1781, there was no federal government. There was no United States. Yet generations of colonists had built forts, cleared [...]
Wind. All he could hear was wind. The voice of Max and the others vanished in the gale of his waking nightmare. It was dark, the kind of perfect darkness modern people rarely know and so find disorienting. And then he saw a circle, spinning like the outside rim of a wagon wheel and the [...]
Comes now news from across the pond that executives at one of the world’s most respected banks, Barclays, rigged Libor. Even the venerable Bank of England is apparently being investigated. For sports fans, this is like fixing the Super Bowl or doping a horse in the Derby. But it is rather more serious. For [...]
Since 1991, a new conception of Indian-white relations, known as the “middle ground,” has slowly emerged in Indian and western American historiography, challenging the old and New Western History and Indian history paradigms. The relations between Native Americans and white settlers—the middle ground—served as a gigantic trade zone in which culture became the economic goods [...]