The Politics of Prudence, by Russell Kirk (Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1993) Dr. Russell Kirk observes in this book that “the greatest works of politics are poetic.” The rationalistic formulae set forth by most contemporary philosophers will not endure because they are not poetic; they divorce politics from religion, from imaginative literature, and from tradition, and [...]
“We are at the beginning of great troubles.” Once upon a time, it was the assumption of most of the people in the world that the fundamental constitutions of their society would endure to the end of time; or at least for a very great while; or certainly for the lifetime of those who had [...]
With Gratefulness to dead ancestors and the living family. Of early memories, Kirk’s most painful is his crying for water in a hospital at Ann Arbor. At the age of three, Russell had contracted acute nephritis, fell scourge, and was puffed up to the likeness of a large ball, too hideous for his mother to [...]
Conservative principles must somehow permeate the American soul if they are to change the course of American society and politics. The path to success and rejuvenation is not through political parties but instead through social persuasion. Bringing America Home: How America Lost Her Way and How We Can Find Our Way Back by Tom Pauken [...]
Of all the men significantly involved in the major events leading up to and following from the American Revolution none has been so undeservedly neglected by our political historians as the mysterious John Dickinson. The oversight would seem on its face unlikely. For this planter and prototypical Philadelphia lawyer is as complicated and intellectually interesting [...]
At first glance, there would seem to be much work awaiting the teacher and scholar of language in the twenty-first century. The powers that be are obsessed with the industrial pollution of water, land, and air. The case seems to be clearer, or foggier, for pollution of language. Useful old words are no longer part [...]
No intellectual task could be more urgent today than refuting the pseudo-scientific distinction between ”facts” and “values” and restoring to the humanities and social sciences a sense of transcendent moral purpose.[1] In this effort we would be well-advised to reconsider the work of a great American whose ideas have yet to be fully comprehended and [...]
What Mortimer Adler has to say in “Reforming Education” is worth listening to and reflecting on. He may at times seem like a humorless Puritan, but he is certainly preferable to the many clowns that have cluttered up the road to education in recent years. Reforming Education: The Schooling of a People and Their Education [...]
No man of his time defended more passionately the cause of sanity and “centricity” than did G. K. Chesterton—despite his aversion to watches and his uncalculated picturesqueness of dress. Yet no imaginative writer touched more often than did Chesterton upon lunacy, real or alleged: a prospect of his age with the madhouse for its background. “It [...]
We propose to publish a bi-monthly magazine, The Conservative Review. More people are literate in America than in any other country; we have several times as many college graduates as we had at the beginning of this century; and yet probably there is less serious reading, per head of population, than in any other great [...]
M.E. Bradford Ideas about property, language, and memory established the contours and parameters of M.E. Bradford’s Southern inheritance. In Bradford’s thought, property, language, and memory were linked in defense of what his mentor, Donald Davidson, characterized as “the great vital continuum of human experience to which we apply the inadequate term ‘tradition’….”[1] The [...]
“It is imagination that governs the human race.” No professor of literature wrote those words: that is an aphorism of the master of the big battalions, Napoleon Bonaparte. In a time when we Americans ought to be entering upon an Augustan age, we seem enervated. A feeling of powerlessness oppresses many Americans. Even the [...]
Universities were founded to sustain faith by reason—to maintain order in the soul and in the commonwealth. My own university, St. Andrews, was established in the fifteenth-century by the Scottish Inquisitor of Heretical Pravity to resist the errors of the Lollards, the levellers of that age. The early universities’ teaching imparted both order and freedom to [...]
Cokie Roberts, a celebrated radio and television commentator, once participated in a discussion concerning congressional term limits and commented on American solidarity (or the lack thereof). She stated, “We have nothing binding us together as a nation—no common ethnicity, history, religion or even language—except the Constitution and the institutions it created.” This is a curious [...]