Episcopal priest, professional baseball player, college instructor, lecturer, and prolific writer, Albert Jay Nock (1872-1945) had a varied life and a profound effect on the nascent American conservative movement in the decades preceding World War II. Largely known by libertarians as the first editor of The Freeman and the author of Our Enemy, the [...]
Fyodor Dostoevsky Readers of The Imaginative Conservative know well the phrase “beauty will save the world.” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn borrowed it from Fyodor Dostoevsky to set the theme of his Nobel Lecture in 1970. British conservative writer Roger Scruton has written extensively about how aesthetics—and beauty in particular—enlarges our vision of humanity, helps [...]
The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, by George Gissing The Big House: A Century in the Life of an American Summer Home, by George Howe Colt To recommend a book is an ethical undertaking that reveals something about both the giver and the recipient. It is an act that says, “I believe you are [...]
This is part 2 of this essay, for part 1 click here. Glenn Davis According to Nisbet, warfare seduces largely because acts of war demand certain qualities of character from its participants which the community values: valor, heroism, courage, and sacrifice. Individuals who are given the opportunity to manifest these moral qualities, [...]
Robert Nisbet In a recent posting on The Imaginative Conservative, Bruce Frohnen laments the loss of civility and decency in present-day America. By looking at the roots of foul behavior (in this case, a group of middle school boys bullying an elderly school bus monitor), he finds fault in the “warehouse model” [...]
“I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” As Thomas Fleming points out in his book, The Morality of Everyday Life (2004), when E. M. Forster made this statement, he was [...]
I often reserve my Sunday afternoons for trips to the local university library. These visits are bittersweet, for although I live in an area of the country which is considered to be “very conservative” and is very Republican (the Democratic Party often does not field a complete list of candidates in an election), I [...]
Irving Babbitt When Literature and the American College, Irving Babbitt’s critique of the new educational theories, was first published in 1908, it was a shot fired across the bow of the ship of progressive reform in American higher education. Babbitt fired a sound shot, but he lost the war. Since that time, [...]
There is no quicker way to get the blood up than to question the integrity of our nation’s war policies. Yet, on the political right, it used to be respectable, without being narrowly isolationist or pacifist, to examine and challenge the wisdom of military engagement, especially abroad. We need mention just a few names [...]
Our pessimism begins with the realization that very few of our neighbors subscribe to such views today, maybe excepting the “loathing of public debt, taxes, and excises.” As Professors Frohnen and Birzer state, with the Louisiana Purchase, the original republican himself, Jefferson politically succumbed to the impulse to expand the nation and inflate the [...]