In 1955, in the pages of Commonweal magazine, Russell Kirk sought to explain the gradual disappearance of serious journals of opinion in the United States and Britain. He offered several possible reasons for this trend: hard economic times and the material sacrifices required to fight two world wars. Yet these causes did not suffice. While [...]
Christopher Henry Dawson has been called “the greatest English-speaking Catholic historian of the twentieth century.“[1] He was also a profound conservative critic of contemporary Western culture and his indictments were based on a synthetic interpretation of the history of mankind which is one of the most impressive ever produced. His analysis of the decline of [...]
Thomas Jefferson: A Strange Case of Mistaken Identity by Alf J. Mapp, Jr. Reviewing selected letters of Edmund Burke in the American Spectator in 1985, Professor Charles R. Kesler claimed that American conservatives attempting to propagate Burke’s principles “have always faced an embarassing obstacle: namely the almost complete lack of a Burkean tradition in America.” [...]
In the ancient world the perimeters of tragic vision and experience were clearly established and recognized. One could be quite clear as to the meaning of tragedy and the manifestations of tragic experience and tragic heroism. One could readily comprehend the noble stature and the transcendent realm of tragedy. One could, in short, measure oneself [...]
Disappearing Through the Skylight: Culture and Technology in the Twentieth Century by O. B. Hardison Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology by Neil Postman The polarities of boundlessness and limits have helped to define the human experience. Although men and women have always lived with infinite longings, at one time they could not avoid [...]
The end of the twentieth century of the Christian era is not far distant, and all about us things fall apart. There comes to my mind the last drawing from the pencil of William Hogarth, who died in 1764: it is a sufficient representation of the state of civilization today. Hogarth’s final drawing is known [...]
Bernard Iddings Bell Bernard Iddings Bell (1886-1958) wrote several controversial books examining the American way of life. These fine little books attracted considerable attention, many of them beginning as articles in the New York Times Magazine, Commonweal, and the Atlantic Monthly. By 1950 Bell, an ordained priest in the Episcopal Church, was known [...]
It would be too much to say that the postwar conservative movement began with the publication of Russell Kirk’s “The Conservative Mind,” but it was this book that gave it its name, and more importantly, coherence. The critic of his time must accept the risk of being accused of negativism, but he can console himself [...]
John Adams was the most traditionalist of the American Founders and arguably the finest scholar among them. Perhaps because of this traditionalism, his immense contribution to the Founding goes largely unrecognized today. John Adams and the Spirit of Liberty, by C. Bradley Thompson, Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1998. John Adams (1735-1826) was the [...]
In the days when the Constitution lay under active consideration by the state conventions, The Federalist gained only a limited circulation. The speeches, newspaper articles, and pamphlets of several other Federalists played larger roles in securing the constitution’s final ratification. Friends of the Constitution: Writings of the “Other” Federalists, 1787-1788, eds. Colleen A. Sheehan and [...]
Russell Kirk understood that politics was determined by deep cultural and intellectual influences that included the arts, literature, philosophy, religion, and community life. In short, he believed that it was not by politics alone that American and Western civilization would be restored. A Critical Biography of a Conservative Mind by James E. Person, Jr. Russell [...]
Edmund Burke, Volume 1, 1730-1784, by F.P. Lock The Portable Edmund Burke, ed. Isaac Kramnick On Empire, Liberty and Reform: Speeches and Letters, Edmund Burke, ed. David Bromwich F.P. Lock’s Edmund Burke is the best biography of Burke to have come out in recent times, and it is all the more impressive for not trying to be what it [...]
Perhaps contemporary conservatives misunderstand their own movement because conservative philosophy distorts conservative history. Ideas, not material conditions, drive history, conservatives aver. Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences (an editor’s title much disliked by Weaver) established a powerful model for tracing moral and civilizational change— often decline—to rather small alterations in beliefs, such as medieval nominalism. Importantly, most of [...]
In The Duel, a riveting account of Churchill’s confrontation with Hitler in the spring and summer of 1940, John Lukacs wrote that Churchill was the opponent of Hitler, the incarnation of the reaction to Hitler, the incarnation of the resistance of an old world, of old freedoms, of old standards against a man incarnating a force that was [...]