Ronald Reagan and Russell Kirk (This is one of a series The Imaginative Conservative is publishing in honor of the sixtieth anniversary of Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind. Essays in the series may be found here.) President Barack Obama’s decisive electoral victory last November caused panic in some conservative circles. Questions about the continuing relevance [...]
Featured Book: The Quest For Community, by Robert Nisbet, ranks high among the foundational works of post-war American conservatism. In it, Nisbet argued that the emergence of the “centralized territorial State” in the wake of the Middle Ages decisively impacted Western social organization. Nisbet was particularly sensitive to the rise of the “national community,” the total political [...]
If a conservative order is indeed to return, we ought to know the tradition which is attached to it, so that we may rebuild society; if it is not to be restored, still we ought to understand conservative ideas so that we may rake from the ashes what scorched fragments of civilization escape the conflagration [...]
Ideas Have Consequences by Richard Weaver Ideas Have Consequences contributed significantly to the philosophical coherence of contemporary conservatism. Frank Meyer went so far as to say that “the publication of Ideas Have Consequences can well be considered the fons et origo (source and origin) of the contemporary American conservative movement.” For Mr. Meyer, what was adumbrated [...]
Edmund Burke: Volume 1, 1730-1784 by F. P. Lock, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Thomas Copeland, the editor of The Correspondence of Edmund Burke and a central figure in Burke’s twentieth-century revival, once observed that of all the books written about Burke the most important was the work never written: his “official biography.” Unfortunately for posterity, Burke’s literary [...]
The judicial branch has a particularly vital function of securing the balance of powers necessary for liberty to triumph, and so that branch’s propensity to overreach and simply dictate new law has led to an imbalance in the system as designed. The result is a broken constitutional framework for American democracy. Popular support for the [...]