As American conservatism sifts its soul regarding political economy, scrutiny of the economic thought of Dr. Russell Kirk, who more than anyone else gave post-war conservatism coherence and intellectual respectability, is appropriate and timely. Kirk’s economics, and its treatment by modern conservatives, afford an invaluable perspective on this controversy. Kirk believed that economics has been [...]
M.E. Bradford It is a paradox of our times that close observers of the American literary scene residing beyond our borders receive, from the self-appointed guardians of “high” culture and the life of the mind within this country, so little really useful direction or assistance in identifying what American writing is worthwhile or [...]
Was the American War of Independence a revolution? In the view of Edmund Burke and of the Whigs generally, it was not the sort of political and social overturn that the word “revolution” has come to signify nowadays. Rather, it paralleled that alteration of government in Britain which accompanied the accession of William and Mary [...]
The American Presidency, by Forrest McDonald Twice, in The American Presidency, Professor Forrest McDonald states that the executive office of our government “has been responsible for less harm and more good … than perhaps any other secular institution in history.” In the same sentence, he also notes that “the caliber of the people who have served as chief [...]
The Language of Liberty, 1660-1832: Political Discourse and Social Dynamics in the Anglo-American World, by J. C. D. Clark The historiography of the American Revolution and Founding period has been dominated for more than two decades by works that follow the examples of Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood. In their books, particularly Bailyn’s The Ideological [...]
A number of Americans, fancying that the world is governed mainly by economic doctrines and practices, are inclined to think that an era of international good feeling lies before us. I intend to sprinkle some drops of cold water on such hasty hopes. I have no faith in the notion that an abstract “democratic capitalism” [...]
Modern political conservatism takes its origin in Edmund Burke’s insistence upon the rights of society and its historically formed groups such as family, neighborhood, guild and church against the “arbitrary power” of a political government. By common assent modern conservatism, as political philosophy, springs from Edmund Burke: chiefly from his Reflections on the Revolution in [...]
What we think of Thomas Jefferson is likely to express precisely what we believe America is all about. For this most versatile and likeable of the Founding Fathers looms large in our history and in the symbol and imagery by which our imaginations have colored the past. For some, Jefferson is the preeminent voice of [...]
The Greening of Conservative America, by John R. E. Bliese The first thing to say about this fine book is that it is much better than its misleading title. Professor John R. E. Bliese does not really argue that conservatives should join the Green Party or Greenpeace. While true conservatives have always been conservationists, their [...]
The New Communitarians and the Crisis of Modern Liberalism, by Bruce Frohnen, Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1996. Community and Tradition: Conservative Perspectives on the American Experience, edited by George W. Carey and Bruce Frohnen, Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998. Communitarianism at one level is a contemporary school of thought that takes to [...]
Edmund Burke: A Genius Reconsidered, by Russell Kirk, with a Foreword by Roger Scruton, Wilmington, Delaware: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1997. Russell Kirk’s book on Edmund Burke, first published in 1967, now revised and handsomely re-issued, testifies not only to the “enduring Burke,” but also to the enduring Kirk. As a British statesman and political [...]
By the early twenty-first century, Americans had become accustomed to, even took for granted, virtually everything against which George Washington and Thomas Jefferson had warned: gigantic public and private debt, a massive national government, entangling foreign alliances, a standing army, undeclared war in the form of military interventionism, the destruction of American agrarianism, and the [...]
The Iliad by Homer, translated by Herbert Jordan (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008) It is noteworthy that when the freedman Livius Andronicus (c. 250 B.C.) gave the Romans their first translation of Homer it was the Odyssey, not the Iliad he chose to render in the old Saturnian verse: Virum mihi Camena, insece versutum, [...]
Irving Babbitt Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?—T.S. Eliot, Choruses from the Rock Irving Babbitt (1865–1933) is not much remembered today, except perhaps through Sinclair Lewis’s snarky naming of the eponymous villain of the satire of mid-American manners and mores, Babbitt, after [...]