Please note: HUMANITAS Journal is no longer affiliated with the Center for the Study of Statesmanship. We are now published by the Academy of Philosophy and Letters. Visit our new site here to subscribe, donate, and contact us.

A More Complete Realism: Grand Strategy in a New Key

January 14, 2022
Mainstream academics are accustomed to viewing the moral-spiritual and cultural dimensions of the problem of war and peace as esoteric and insignificant. Studying these dimensions is actually indispensable to a full-bodied realism.
Read More

Professing Literature: The Example of Austin Warren

January 14, 2022
For nearly a century the cliché “publish or perish” has haunted the professoriate. This gloomy refrain lingers on in faculty lounges and doctoral programs. Why must the professor write, and for what purpose?
Read More

The Mechanics of Freedom

January 14, 2022
The Venetian reality was one of conflict tamed and overcome through a combination of cultural pride and political mechanisms that built on without crushing local loyalties.
Read More

Reflections on Judicial Duty

July 20, 2020
The Supreme Court has failed to check the reach of the legislative and executive branches, but I respectfully disagree that it has exceeded its judicial power.
Read More

A Response to Critics

July 20, 2020
Our book is less concerned with interpretive theory than with the grounds of constitutionalism.
Read More

The Variety of Historical Minds

July 20, 2020
Decades past the peak of New Humanism’s renown, this fine volume ably demonstrates that the movement still has much of crucial value to teach us.
Read More

Liberal Dystopia

July 20, 2020
Deneen explicitly links the Framers to the Progressives of the early twentieth century, implying that the two projects were the same and that the Progressives would have met with the Framers’ approval.
Read More

Of Arms and the Men

July 20, 2020
Like modern America, Republican Rome was nearly always at war: between 415 and 265 BC, fewer than 10 percent of its years did not have at least one recorded campaign.
Read More

What Psychology Might Learn from Traditional Christianity

February 14, 2020
Much of modern psychology is based on discoveries made by psychiatrists and psychotherapists while observing their patients. But this is not the first time in history that a large group of professionals has been able to investigate the inner functioning of the human mind.
Read More

The Real Thucydides Trap

September 1, 2018
What we might learn from Thucydides today does not relate only to worries about the rise of China in its new role as Athens. The main lesson comes from Thucydides as an Athenian who reflects on his own city. Graham Allison and American policy makers need to be as self-reflective about America as they are about the rise of China.
Read More

Populism, Elites, and National Security

September 1, 2018
It was an effective myth system that allowed the national security state to operate smoothly in the United States. This was not a “noble lie” on anyone’s part; it wasn’t a lie at all, let alone some grand, “deep state” conspiracy.
Read More

The Neoliberal University and the Neoliberal Curriculum

September 1, 2018
Numerous jeremiads today about American higher education demonstrate a disinclination to examine their subject in a broad historical perspective. Thus many such works seldom cast their purview earlier than the academic culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, and see these decades as the years that inaugurated the push to treat higher education as a business.
Read More

The Danger of Too Much Safety

September 1, 2018
The authors quote the progressive activist Van Jones giving the perfect response to those who want to maintain a fugitive and cloistered virtue by not listening: "I don’t want you to be safe."
Read More

Encountering the Beautiful

September 1, 2018
James Matthew Wilson wants to overcome the opposition of mythos and logos. This involves going back to Plato, who is often read as setting up this opposition.
Read More

Unconstitutional Wars from Truman Forward

February 12, 2020
From President Truman’s initiation of war against North Korea in June 1950, presidents have exceeded constitutional and statutory authority in exercising the war power.
Read More

Rawls’s Justification Model for Ethics: What Exactly Does It Justify?

May 16, 2018
Rawls operates with a decision procedure for ethics that keeps corroborating the same moral outlook, a liberal one, whereas the objectivity he claims for the procedure might reasonably have been expected to be consistent with a wider range of moral, social, or political perspectives, or perhaps with a single position equidistant to polar extremes.
Read More

How Desperate Should We Be?

January 2, 2018
Whatever one might think in theory, in practice acting morally is not something like following a blueprint. Guessing and taking risks are often necessary.
Read More

David Hume and the Origin of Modern Rationalism

January 1, 2018
It is true that a moral tradition may contain an error that lasts for centuries, but there is no shortcut. Error must be exposed and corrected by loyal and skillful participants in that very tradition.
Read More

Political Morality Reconsidered: A Rejoinder

January 1, 2018
The cries of righteous indignation that I can hear show the force of ingrained habit. How could universality possibly express itself in particularity? This is surely “relativism,” “solipsism,” “historicism,” “nihilism” “situationism”! This reaction points to the need for rethinking not just morality but epistemology.
Read More

Faith over Love a Formula for Social Atomism

January 7, 2018
The promotion of faith from its traditional subordination to charity led to the virtual destruction of solidarity. Had more Christians lived genuinely Christian lives, things might have been different.
Read More

Radical Son: The Apprenticeship of John Stuart Mill

January 1, 2018
Few parents raise their children from infancy to assume a specific occupation or role in life. Fewer still raise them to be radical reformers. This, however, is precisely what James Mill did with his first-born child, John Stuart Mill.
Read More

Conservatism and Conservation

September 8, 2017
Conservative aversion to environmentalism has contributed to a tendency of many self-identified conservatives to ignore, reject, or simply not involve themselves in real environmental concerns.
Read More

Allan Bloom and Straussian Alienation

July 20, 2020
The reaction of putative conservatives to the publication of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind in 1987 was symptomatic of deep intellectual confusion.
Read More

Man: The Lonely Animal

September 8, 2017
In Qatar, my students are perplexed by this fixation American students have about eliminating suffering on a global scale. And they cannot quite escape the suspicion that something more than charity is at work in the minds of the Americans they meet.
Read More

A Humane Economy versus Economism

September 8, 2017
Contributing to the multi-faceted crisis Americans now face is the loss of those values and principles that are essential to a healthy economy.
Read More

Pragmatic Conservatism: A Defense

September 8, 2017
In the “Conclusion” to the fiftieth anniversary issue of Modern Age, “The Decline of American Intellectual Conservatism,” Claes Ryn offers…
Read More

Shylock’s Conversion

September 8, 2017
The thesis of this essay is simply stated: The Merchant of Venice is a Christian play and a comedy that…
Read More

Debt and Sovereignty: The Lost Lessons

September 8, 2017
The national debt is roughly 100 percent of our gross national product, and the people who lend to the federal government are beginning to worry that they will not get their money back. Yet without continuous borrowing, the nation cannot possibly sustain its accustomed lifestyle. Something has got to give.
Read More

[Poem] Lovers

January 3, 2018
Betty, I cried in the night, come closer. I’m chilled to the bone, and my brain is foggy; A kind of numbness steals through every limb.
Read More

Butterfield as Historian: Objectivity Over Partisanship

January 2, 2018
McIntire’s study would have been better had the author provided a stronger historical context, but this deficiency should not obscure the fact that this is an impressive work of scholarly research and textual analysis. Herbert Butterfield is not a typical biography; rather, it is an analysis and explication of the subject’s intellectual achievement.
Read More

Condorcet and the Logic of Technocracy

September 8, 2017
From Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre in the eighteenth century through such twentieth-century critics as Lewis Mumford, Karl Popper, and Isaiah Berlin, the utopian concept of a rationally planned or dirigiste society is viewed as one of reason’s most nightmarish monsters.
Read More

Aesop, Aristotle, and Animals: The Role of Fables in Human Life

January 3, 2018
While animals cannot reason, plan for the future, or think through a long-range plan of action, people can and should engage in these actions. Why should we choose to act like animals when we can choose not to and when we can create an environment in which acting like animals is unnecessary?
Read More

Geometries of Force in Homer’s Iliad: Two Readings

January 3, 2018
The idea that war might somehow be mediated by reasonable agreements, heroic values of resistance, and religious scruples, such as those governing the burial of the dead, has been reduced to a shambles by the internal dynamics of war and the logic of violence itself.
Read More

Tradition and Modernity in Postcolonial African Philosophy

January 3, 2018
The relationship between tradition and modernity has been a central theme of postcolonial African philosophy. While African philosophers have examined this theme from many angles, several basic questions have become the focus of ongoing debate and discussion: What is the relevance of indigenous African traditions to the challenges of contemporary life?
Read More

George A. Panichas Conservator Extraordinaire

January 3, 2018
Ultimately, it is this reverence, this humility before God, and this faith in the goodness of life that are at the heart of Panichas’s long and productive career, and that also underlie the sort of conservatism that he has defended so admirably over the course of the past four decades.
Read More

The Hidden Depths in Robert Frost

January 3, 2018
Over a long and accomplished career, Peter J. Stanlis has often worked at the intersection of literature, philosophy, and political philosophy, and this emphasis is evident in Robert Frost: The Poet as Philosopher, a study that explores Frost’s relationship to developments in the sciences, the humanities, and politics from the age of Charles Darwin to the time of John F. Kennedy’s presidency.
Read More

Debacle: The Conservative Movement in Chapter Eleven

September 8, 2017
It should also be stated that, needless to say, the socalled conservative movement has had many admirable features. Some of its members resisted the trends that brought it to its present low point. Unfortunately, as it tries to recover, it may ignore those voices again and repeat its old mistakes.
Read More

Burke’s Historical Morality

September 1, 2017
To say that justice is mutable and that it adapts to meet moral needs specific to historical circumstances is not to imply that justice is arbitrary or historically relative.
Read More

How the Right’s Gone Wrong

September 1, 2017
As in his previous work, Gottfried is critical of the neoconservative project. Gottfried attributes the neoconservatives’ success mostly to their relentless self-promotion and what in the business world is called cross-selling, massive fundraising efforts, and their close ideological (and, in some cases, personal) connections with the liberal establishment.
Read More

Peter Viereck (1916-2006)

January 1, 2018
Peter Viereck was born in New York City in 1916. He died on May 13, 2006, at the age of 89 in South Hadley, Massachusetts, in the same house on the edge of the Mount Holyoke College campus where he and his family had lived since he started teaching at the College.
Read More

Burke’s Higher Romanticism: Politics and the Sublime

September 8, 2017
It is argued here that understanding Burke’s romanticism is an important part of understanding Burke. Understanding Burke’s romanticism also helps one understand the subtle ways in which aesthetics, ethics, and politics interact.
Read More

American Culture: A Story

September 8, 2017
My goal in this essay is less to impart a specific teaching than to tell a story. This story, I first should point out, is not a myth made up for didactic purposes, as so many such stories tend to be.
Read More

Strauss and the Straussians

January 1, 2018
Everything I have seen of the Straussians over the years leads me to the unfortunate conclusion that they are agenda-driven political intellectuals.
Read More

Have We Lost Humility?

January 1, 2018
To examine the role of humility in contemporary society, we must look in unexplored places. The best sellers of our time rarely deal directly with theological or moral issues.
Read More

Kafka’s Afflicted Vision: A Literary-Theological Critique

January 1, 2018
The novel’s aesthetic and interpretive complexity, it will be seen, underlines the multi-layered meaning of salvation itself, in a modern world in which salvation is not necessarily one of divine grace, of deliverance from sin and damnation, in short, of redemption in the hands of an all-powerful God.
Read More

Method and Civic Education

January 1, 2018
1. Introduction Ceux qui, comme porte nostre usage, entreprenent d’une mesme leçon & pareille mesure de conduite, regenter plusieurs esprits…
Read More

Metapolitics Revisited

January 1, 2018
There are now three changed editions of my Metapolitics, with varying subtitles. Written between 1936 and 1941, while the author…
Read More

Roosevelt’s Failure at Yalta

January 1, 2018
The United States Government was fully warned, almost prophetically, by its diplomats who had studied the Soviet Union and understood what recognition entailed.
Read More

Jacob and Esau

September 6, 2017
Esau grew to be a “natural man,” a man of the field and the hunt, an “elder” or more primitive image of humankind, while Jacob grew to be a “smooth” civilized man, a logo-centric man of the tent, or the polis.
Read More

Ethics and the Common Good: Abstract vs. Experiential

January 1, 2018
I shall argue, on the other hand, that Kant is not the final word on personal or political ethics. Indeed, his thought suffers from a fundamental weakness that is retained by both Habermas and Professor Day and, to a lesser degree, by Hayek.
Read More

Edward Rozek: A Student’s Tribute

January 1, 2018
I did not really understand the battles that swirled about us on campus in those days. Yet I learned to discern with my heart the quality of a man’s character and to cleave to what proved true.
Read More

The End of Art Theory

January 1, 2018
In the present age Hegel claims that "the form of art has ceased to be the supreme need of the spirit."
Read More

Irving Babbitt on Lincoln and Unionism

January 1, 2018
Babbitt holds up what he calls “our great unionist tradition” as the crucial “offsetting influence” to all the temptations to which democracies are particularly vulnerable.
Read More

The Heritage of Lincoln

January 1, 2018
Like Gamble and Babbitt himself, I think that the Progressives distorted the historical Lincoln. In my view, however, a careful study of the words and deeds of Lincoln reconfirms Lincoln’s moral and intellectual stature.
Read More

William James and the Moral Will

January 1, 2018
A closer examination shows a thinker not simply dismissive of metaphysics and religion, nor one necessarily hospitable to leftist agendas.
Read More

Deconstruction: Fad or Philosophy?

January 1, 2018
Like other great neologisms—ones we wish we would have thought of but didn’t—deconstruction has suffered the fate of its own ascendancy.
Read More

From ‘Inner Check’ to ‘Bank Check’: Post–Babbitt Literary Criticism

September 5, 2017
I shall concentrate on four themes in Babbitt’s writings that are relevant today to the discipline of comparative literature as well as to related disciplines for which the study of literature may be more important than is generally recognized, whether or not these themes have been reflected in recent critical texts.
Read More

Savior Nation: Woodrow Wilson and the Gospel of Power

January 1, 2018
Sixteen hundred years ago, St. Augustine warned against the inherent idolatry of empire. To assign to one’s earthly nation the mission that by right belongs only to the Kingdom of Christ is to be guilty of the worst of disordered loves.
Read More

Left and Right Eclecticism: Roger Kimball’s Cultural Criticism

January 1, 2018
Mark Lilla held that for Kimball "the cause of the Sixties was quite simply . . . the Sixties. They just happened, as a kind of miracle, or antimiracle—Why did such a profound revolution take place?" In my opinion, Kimball’s reply is not entirely satisfactory.
Read More

A Broader, Subtler View of Power

September 8, 2017
How weak are my putatively weakest points? What about the relevance of “beautiful language,” or female beauty? Are they quite so extraneous to a discussion of political power as Gottfried assumes?
Read More

On Practices

September 7, 2017
Practices are concrete social realities, but they are not natural kinds. Thus, we have to allow, as I do but Frohnen does not, that in a sense we construct or individuate particular practices to suit our purposes.
Read More

On Tradition

November 13, 2017
The ability of traditions to confer legitimacy on social practices helps to explain why cultural nationalists, states, and even radical movements have tried to invigorate their political projects by inventing appropriate traditions, symbols, and rituals.
Read More

A Worthy Kaddish

November 13, 2017
He deliberately sets out to defy Platonic Truth, worshiping the Shadows—the felt, believed, imperfect, flawed perception of touched reality. This—and nothing else—is truth, or at least the only truth that matters.