Lord Jim (1900), Joseph Conrad’s fourth novel, is the story of a ship which collides with “a floating derelict” and will doubtlessly “go down at any moment” during a “silent black squall.” The ship, old and rust-eaten, known as the Patna, is voyaging across the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea. Aboard are eight hundred [...]
The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785-1800, by Conor Cruise O’Brien The Long Affair both succeeds and fails. By attacking the American iconic hero of liberty, Conor Cruise O’Brien succeeds in producing a stir, particularly among Jefferson scholars. The Irish scholar-politician selected passages for inclusion in The Atlantic Monthly (October 1996), entitled [...]
John Lukacs has given us a short, penetrating study of George Kennan, who is forever associated with the Cold War strategy of containment. For all of Kennan’s famed realism, Lukacs shows that there was also a streak of naïveté in some of his views. George Kennan: A Study of Character, by John Lukacs (Yale University Press [...]
Our civilized world is passing out of one age and into another epoch. The age that is passing has been called the Age of Discussion. The age that we are entering I call the Age of Sentiments. Most people are aware of this change only vaguely, if at all. As Disraeli put it, “Prevailing opinions [...]
Conservatives have struggled with the problem of adjusting their public posture so as to reflect changes in their situation. Following electoral triumph and the dramatic shift in the temper of their countrymen which produced so many encouraging results at the polls, they have been obliged to represent themselves, through the spoken or the written word, [...]
The Unbought Grace of Life: Essays in Honor of Russell Kirk, edited by James E. Person Jr. This Festschrift was in galleys when Russell Kirk‘s health began failing. On learning of Kirk‘s decline, Sherwood Sugden photocopied the galleys and mailed them to Mecosta. The editor, James Person, a close friend of the Kirks, made the long trek [...]
Is religious faith necessary for conservatism? A more basic question is whether it is necessary for good sense, since it is for the sake of good sense that we are conservative. If it were otherwise, conservatism would be a hobby or an ideology, and it is neither; it is simply the appearance good sense takes [...]
Edmund Burke. Volume II: 1784-1797 by F.P. Lock The two volumes of F.P. Lock’s biography of Edmund Burke span more than one thousand pages and, by the author’s own calculation, over twenty years of research. In structure, method, and argument, they constitute a work of extraordinary consistency and erudition, and one that, in its use of [...]
Recent liberal successes, such as the ongoing redefinition of marriage to include same-sex relationships, dramatize the failure of social conservatism in public discussion. What is most striking to conservatives about the situation is the conviction among intelligent and influential people that conservative social views are altogether baseless, so that adherence to them is an intellectual [...]
Above all, Forrest McDonald survived and thrived because he was not by temperament a party-line ideologue and was unfazed by the imprecations of those who were. Unlike too many of his fellow historians who let their present-day policy agendas control their interpretation of the past, McDonald refused to distort his subjects in this way. Recovering [...]
The use of criticism as T.S. Eliot sees that use in his Harvard lectures in 1932-1933 is to discover the degree of a proper accommodation of the poet as a person to his work, in a just judgment of both poet and poem. The judgment is not so limited as it had seemed in 1920 [...]
It is surprising that contemporary political thinking has paid relatively scant attention to St. Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo. It may be true, as some say, that we live in the post-Christian era. It certainly cannot be gainsaid that we live in an age of pervasive secularism in which a name such as Augustine seems [...]
Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred, by John Lukacs. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. 248 pp. There are few scholars whose intellectual achievements are so respected that their intuitions are as highly regarded as their more formal scholarship. John Lukacs is one of these rare individuals. He brings to his work a lifetime of devotion [...]
Paul Lake’s vision of the American future is conceivable, and may yet prove accurate, but it is also unlikely. Two more realistic possibilities, short of an American Götter-dämmerung, are the resurgence of a truculent bigotry or the decline of national cohesion. Neither prospect bodes well for the fate of the United States. Few books invite [...]