Rethinking It All—An Editorial Statement, the editors

A More Complete Realism: Grand Strategy in a New Key
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.

Statesmanship for Political Economy in the National Interest
Only the nation, outlasting the life of individuals and private companies now present, is the proper vehicle for conserving the general welfare.

Women’s Liberation in Soviet, Sino, and American State Building: Theory and Practice
Women’s liberation is a concept that is almost always found at the heart of revolutionary thinking.

Professing Literature: The Example of Austin Warren
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?

A German Tocqueville? The Unrecognized Importance of Francis Lieber’s Letters to a Gentleman in Germany, or The Stranger in America
Tocqueville commented on the American characteristics of equality, democracy, individualism, restlessness, and enterprise, but he was not the first foreigner to do so.

The Dictatress and the Decisionmakers
Lurking in John Quincy Adams' famous foreign policy oration is a dangerous confidence about the trajectory of history.


The Mechanics of Freedom
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.


The Great Illusion: Foreign Policy Advocacy and the Problem of Knowledge
Look—look at all this empirical proof that interventionist policy has disastrous results! The anti-interventionist persuasion business kicks into overdrive, but with little long-term effect.



Church of Woke: Next American Religion?
The Church of Woke is not just another righteous uprising in American Reform. Its mission, like fourth-century Christianity, is existential change.


“The Same Procedure as Every Year”: U.S. Counterterrorism Policy since 9/11
Even though Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump could not be more different, there has been a remarkable continuity in their approaches.


Was Irving Babbitt an Educational Counterrevolutionist?
Christian theology, Western civilization, and, above all else, mental discipline—Babbitt’s case for the humanities relied on none of these foundations.


American Statesmanship: Contrasting Views of Leadership
Washington's greatness stemmed from his being grounded in historical experience, his philosophical realism, and his refusal to conflate the things of God and the things of Caesar.


Altruism Plus High Explosives
The imperial imagination has always been there. But it was checked. How was it checked?


History, Social Science, and the ‘Literary Conscience’
More humanistic scholars recommend a return to history. This remedy, though, is incomplete. The statesman must learn from it, but what he must learn is not often clear.


A Plea to Our Readers
Humanitas urgently needs your support.


The Past in the Present: Ancient Patterns in the Emergent Middle East
Contrary to the belief of many in this age of radical presentism, much of what is in the past profoundly influences the present.


Beyond International Relations Theory
"Realism" and "Idealism" are not the only two ways to view world politics. Kissinger and Fukuyama are not our only options.


The Rise of the Administrative State and Decline of Constitutional Morality
What is meant by ‘the rule of law,’ and why is it of value?


Constitutional Morality and the Emerging Social Imaginary of the Information Revolution
Foundational commitments, from the place of the human to the expectations of social interaction to the nature of law, all are being transformed in a short period of revolutionary change.


Legal Conservatism and the Progressive Blame Game
It would have been helpful if Frohnen and Carey had addressed why we have a political consensus in favor of the constitutional disorder they identify.


Reflections on Judicial Duty
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.


A Response to Critics
Our book is less concerned with interpretive theory than with the grounds of constitutionalism.


The Variety of Historical Minds
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.


Liberal Dystopia
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.


Why Democracy Needs Aristocracy
Democracies can succeed, but only if they recognize and cultivate a humane leadership class.


Of Arms and the Men
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.


Russell Kirk: A Centennial Symposium – Reflections on Russell Kirk
Kirk's conservatism was rooted in culture and community, in contrast to the individualism of libertarianism and the national greatness model of neoconservatism.


The Chartered Rights of Americans: A Kirkian Case for the Incorporation of First Amendment Rights
Incorporation is a fact of modern jurisprudence; it is now interwoven into Supreme Court case history, having produced nearly a century of judicial precedents. A conservative cannot be limited to lamenting changes.


Extremism, The American Founding, and Russell Kirk’s The Roots of American Order
America’s political culture does indeed have deep roots in premodernity.


The Concept of Statesmanship in John Marshall’s Life of George Washington
Citizens pine for statesmanship to rescue them from (often self-imposed) political difficulties, but frequently struggle with defining the characteristics of such leadership.


Calvin Coolidge: Classical Statesman
According to the modern view, the task of the politician is not to minister—it is to administer. Can another vision be restored?


A Sympathetic Reading of Emerson’s Politics
Resisting a politics of rights and duties, he develops an epistemology and phenomenology of interiority and explores the circumstances under which one might move beyond one’s self.


What Psychology Might Learn from Traditional Christianity
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.


The Real Thucydides Trap
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.


Populism, Elites, and National Security
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.


Anatomy of a National Security Fiasco: The George W. Bush Administration, Iraq, and Groupthink
It is an understatement to say that the American intervention in Iraq in 2003 will have broad and decisive implications for how the administration of former President George W. Bush will be evaluated by historians.


History As Transcendence: What Leo Strauss Does Not Understand About Edmund Burke
Of the many thinkers who have had difficulty making sense of Burke’s historical consciousness the most celebrated in recent decades has been Leo Strauss.


The Neoliberal University and the Neoliberal Curriculum
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.


Straussian Witchcraft and the Need for Devils’ Advocates
Although I have been an earnest admirer of Leo Strauss since I first started reading his books, Straussians have a tendency to bewitch themselves with words and phrases from the master’s lexicon in ways that are preposterous.


The Danger of Too Much Safety
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."


Encountering the Beautiful
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.


Unconstitutional Wars from Truman Forward
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.


Can Alasdair MacIntyre Relieve Grene’s Polanyian Regret?
Under Polanyi’s revolutionary imaginary, we are deeply, even constitutionally, committed to truth. But in the “commitment to commitment” that Grene correctly perceives at the core of Polanyi, we are committed to some content.


Postmodernism, Multiculturalism, and the Death of Tolerance: The Transformation of American Society
On its face, the promotion of tolerance, like the promotion of multiculturalism, is unobjectionable and even praiseworthy. Multicultural tolerance, however, has little in common with the traditional Western virtue beyond a shared name.


The Medium Against the Message: The Dilemma of Utopian Narration
The inhabitants of utopia, their creators insist, are happy. But their lives are depicted as so relentlessly public, so entirely ordered and uneventful that their posited felicity is not something that many readers would willingly share.


A Lucid Portrayal of Ambiguity: Locating Meaning in Hawthorne’s ‘My Kinsman, Major Molineux’
Hawthorne’s tale is a finely crafted, perspicuous representation of aporia, that befuddlement or confusion. This is the kind of world we live in, and these are the kinds of creatures we are.


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


A Common Sense Approach to Literary Criticism
Seaton differs from other traditionalistic culture warriors in proposing a novel intellectual framework for this state of affairs.


Bradley Birzer and the Kirk Revival
Birzer’s book is very thorough and nearly flawless.


Saving Natural Rights from Subjectivism
Is it possible that the modern focus on the subject is not a radical break with classical natural Right, but rather the fruition of its latent promise?



A Welcome Complement to ‘The Inward Morning’
In the collection of writings published under the title Wilderness in America, David Rodick goes a long way toward filling out the arc of Henry G. Bugbee’s life and career.



The Image of an Executioner: Princes and Decapitations in John of Salisbury’s Policraticus
This "most readable" of medieval authors was fascinated by execution. Why?


The Intellectual Kinship of Irving Babbitt and C. S. Lewis: Will and Imagination in That Hideous Strength
According to Lewis scholar Alister McGrath, “From about 1937, Lewis seems to have appreciated that the imagination is the gatekeeper of the human soul.”


Sources of American Republicanism: Ancient Models in the U.S. Capitol
If America seeks a future inspired by the virtues of its past, then it must derive inspiration not merely from the founders but also from the Hebraic and Roman Republics.


The Coleridge Circle: Virtue Ethics, Sympathy, and Outrage
The Romantics’ value pluralism anchored in virtue ethics is not an abstraction but a concrete negotiation with a world that is by turns beautiful, baffling, and outrageous.


Emerson on Plato: Literary Philosophy, Dialectic, and the Temporality of Thought
Emerson sees his work as an extension of Plato's.


Conservative Pragmatism, Pragmatic Conservatism
A claim that Burke rejects or dismisses transcendent truths and is insincere or reluctant when he makes Natural Law-type arguments really demands considerable engagement with the literature.


Schooling for “Deep-Knowing”: On the Education of a Pithecanthropus Erectus
The student’s psyche must approach its beloved (the beautiful) with reverence, and under the discipline of the intellect.


How Desperate Should We Be?
Whatever one might think in theory, in practice acting morally is not something like following a blueprint. Guessing and taking risks are often necessary.


Decision Procedures, Moral Philosophy, and Despair: The Response of Virtue Ethics and the Connoisseur
The problem is that Ryn, like others who have become desperate, must assume that those who do not read the situation in the same pessimistic light are blinded by some intellectual or moral flaw.


David Hume and the Origin of Modern Rationalism
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.


Tradition, Principle, and the Rule of Law: A Response to Claes Ryn
Ryn asks the right questions but errs in his endorsement of Machiavelli. Machiavelli is not a tradition-minded "realist" but a political ideologue and a moral revolutionary.


Political Morality Reconsidered: A Rejoinder
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.


Deliberative No Longer: The Eclipse of the Intended Role of the U.S. Senate
The dysfunction stems, in large part, from the fact that the Senate no longer performs one of the important functions for which the Framers created it.


Symbols of the ‘Depth’ of Psyche and Cosmos in Eric Voegelin
Eric Voegelin does not offer us a formula but a temperate and mystery-respecting philosophy of consciousness.


Politics and Monsters: The Unmediated Desire for Order and Meaning in Shelley’s Frankenstein
There are people who, like Walton, will attempt to transform the state into an unrealistic paradisiacal land.


Economics and Morality: Friedrich von Hayek and the Common Good
It is possible, then, to argue that Hayek’s basic formulas are defective in that they try to disconnect social policies from a moral order that transcends individual self-interest narrowly understood.


The Common Core Standards: A Utilitarian Straitjacket for Education in America?
According to proponents, these new standards are “research and evidence based,” seemingly taking for granted that empirical data alone could provide sufficient warrant for the Common Core’s one-size-fits-all educational goals.


Hyper about Pluralism: A Review Essay
Diversity is par for human existence after Eden. Differences and pluralism are everywhere apparent even in the history of salvation.


Faith over Love a Formula for Social Atomism
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.


Principled Leadership in the Age of Opportunism: An Australian Perspective
Though Bernardi cites authorities as disparate as Sam Francis and Dinesh D’Souza, the author of 'The Conservative Revolution' is neither a paleoconservative nor a neoconservative.


Power Without Limits: The Allure of Political Idealism and the Crumbling of American Constitutionalism
For the framers of the U.S. Constitution no task seemed more important than to limit and tame power.


Innovative Conservation: An Unideological Interpretation of the Constitution
The Constitution cannot survive unless its conservative-liberal synthesis is respected and celebrated by all parties.


The ‘Wayward Sisters’ and Constitutional Interpretation
The story of the states that tarried in ratifying the Constitution helps us put an appropriate emphasis where the framers intended: on the State Conventions.
























[Poem] During the Protests, The Recluse, and Par Coeur
During the Protests We praise the clink of dinner plates Stirring in evening suds, and thank You for the snow’s…


Sic Est in Republica: Utopian Ideology and the Misreading of Thomas More
Utopia provides the earliest antidote to utopian ideology, which it subtly ridicules by the ironic deployment of stylistic variation.


Building Bridges: The Importance of Johann Gottfried Herder’s Humanism for the Humanities
Herder’s goal was to work against social fragmentation and contribute to restoring the human being to its “original unity,” which comprised more than the sum of its individual parts.


Radical Son: The Apprenticeship of John Stuart Mill
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.


Magnitudes: Leadership for Something Greater than Yourself
St. Augustine and Karl Jaspers wrote about humanity as a whole, humankind, the human race—not only everyone around the world, but throughout time, the past and the future, in one shared purpose.


Conservatism and Conservation
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.


A Flawed Book on ‘The Founders’
Those on the philosophical right habitually appeal to “the Founders” without ever having read them.


Allan Bloom and Straussian Alienation
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.


Modernity Through a Distorted Lens
The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, by Stephen Greenblatt. New York: W. W. Norton, 2011. 365 pp. $26.95 cloth.…


Burke and the Imaginative Grasp of Reality
The problem Byrne identifies is an unwillingness to jettison old categories of thought that inappropriately pigeonhole Burke’s novel epistemological approach.


‘God’s Middle Children’: Metaphysical Rebellion in Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club
The rebel does not understand his sense of justice as subjective and arbitrary but as universal and authoritative.


Man: The Lonely Animal
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.


A Humane Economy versus Economism
Contributing to the multi-faceted crisis Americans now face is the loss of those values and principles that are essential to a healthy economy.


Guardians of the Word: Kirk, Buckley, and the Conservative Struggle with Academic Freedom
The conflict between advocates of the free market and traditionalist conservatives dates from the beginning of the modern conservative movement. Never have traditionalists and classical liberals comfortably shared the same space.


Pragmatic Conservatism: A Defense
In the “Conclusion” to the fiftieth anniversary issue of Modern Age, “The Decline of American Intellectual Conservatism,” Claes Ryn offers…


Orhan Pamuk on the Turkish Modernization Project: Is It a Farewell to Secularism?
The mainstay of the Turkish modernization project in the twentieth century has been relegating religion to the private sphere. To…


John Milton: Postmodern Hero?
He cut to the truth, and that characteristic, Hawkes believes, makes his work even more essential to our times than to his.


Shylock’s Conversion
The thesis of this essay is simply stated: The Merchant of Venice is a Christian play and a comedy that…


Natural Law and History: Challenging the Legalism of John Finnis
Introduction It is a truism, but nonetheless true, that modern philosophical discourse revolves around the question of how (or if)…


Debt and Sovereignty: The Lost Lessons
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.


More than ‘Parchment Barriers’: The Ethical Center of American Constitutionalism
Much has been written in the past century about the state of American constitutionalism and the political culture that serves…


Lawless America: What Happened to the Rule of Law
Though it has been obvious to discerning observers for a considerable period that the United States is moving at an…


Gambling from a Weak Hand: Radical Skepticism and an Ethics of Uncertainty
As such, the human world, for Sartre, is nothing but the aggregate of self-creating human beings.
























[Poem] An American Four Seasons
Winter snow covers
Twisted steel and cracked marble.


Dark Satanic Mills of Mis-Education: Some Proposals for Reform
Bacon asked that Nature be “put to the rack” and forced to reveal her secrets.
























[Poem] Dr. Sam Johnson
That great hulk of a man, Dr. Johnson,
Had many ills both of mind and body


The Challenge Confronting Conservatives: Sustaining a Republic of Hustlers
The hustling and corruption which I once celebrated as a sort of shady virtue that helped explain America’s spectacular growth now appear to me as a vice and, at its worst, a sin whose wages are death.


Hume’s ‘False Philosophy’ and the Reflections of Common Life
Because these hostile ideologies rest on opposing (and unexamined) “abstract principles,” contemporary
political discourse is usually shrill and fruitless.


The Protestant Roots of American Civil Religion
Whatever the merit of the claim that America can be called a Christian nation, this much is for sure: Americans are fish swimming in a civil religion that is not the same as Christianity.


Shakespeare’s Critique of Machiavellian Force, Fraud, and Spectacle in Measure for Measure
Shakespeare has the Duke stage a brilliant Machiavellian parody of the extremes of the Christian apocalyptic expectation of rewards and punishments by demonstrating their political usefulness.


The Old and New Testaments in U.S. Foreign Policy: McDougall and American Identity
Reflection on the Old Testament diplomatic traditions could provide the starting point for a return to a more sober foreign policy.


Defending America in an Age of Hustlers, Heists, and Unnecessary Wars: An Afterword
When and why did I begin to bristle under the rigid codes of belief and behavior imposed by American politics, academics, and culture?


“The Backside of the Universe”: McDougall’s Throes of Democracy
Perhaps its unsparing analysis of the psychology of utopian reformers still strikes a little too close to home for it to make its way onto reading lists at most schools and colleges.


Marshall vs. Jefferson Then and Now: How the Intellectual and Political Struggle Over the Constitution Resonates Today
Clear and irreconcilable differences in the political and constitutional philosophies of Jefferson and Marshall sparked heated debate over such monumental issues as the use of judicial review
over acts of Congress and the development of the doctrine of “implied powers.”


Seyla Benhabib, Wendell Berry, and the Question of Migrant and Refugee Rights
It is upon small-scale values and practices—not the abstractions of cosmopolitanism or “global thinking”—that the literal survival of the world depends.
























[Four Poems] Florissant Fossil Beds, In the Brooklyn Museum, North Park, and Carrots
Among tall aspen—leafy, elegant—and spruce, severe,
the road has crested over Willow Creek Pass,


From Civilization to Manipulation: The Discrediting and Replacement of the Western Elite
Civilization stands or falls with those who set the tone in society. Are they proper models for emulation? Do they inspire others to realize their better selves, or are they schemers manipulating others for their own benefit?
























[Poem] Lovers
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.


Butterfield as Historian: Objectivity Over Partisanship
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.


Quantification and Intelligence Testing: A Reassessment
Though not a student of the history of testing for intelligence, I have always thought that intellectual ability, the ability…


Progressive Change in Emerson’s “The Conservative”
Emerson scholars have long noted the ubiquity of change in his perspective on the natural and social worlds. They have…


Being “Other Cheeky”: Moral Hazard and the Thought of Stanley Hauerwas
At its core, the emphasis on communal perfection seeks to quell the religious anxiety generated by a faith that is demanding, uncertain, and absolutist in its claims.


Altruism and the Art of Writing: Plato, Cicero, and Leo Strauss
Justice’s enemies, both Ancient and Modern, were not entirely wrong.


Shackling the Imagination: Education for Virtue in Plato and Rousseau
In an ironic turn, the highly imaginative Rousseau worries about arousing the imagination of his pupil. He regards the imagination as “the most active of all” the faculties, but also highly undesirable.


William Dean Howells’s America and What Went Wrong
March 1, 2012, will mark the 175th anniversary of William Dean Howells’s birth. Experience has disgraced my prophetic abilities more…


Freedom and the Family: The Family Crisis and the Future of Western Civilization
Yet an historical perspective reveals that the conflict over the family may only be beginning and that we may be on the verge of a wider confrontation that will decide not only the survival of the family but fundamental questions about the scope and nature of the modern state.


The Moral Hazard of Modern Banking
In his Essay on Duties, Marcus Tullius Cicero tells a story about Cato the Elder, a wealthy man renowned as…


Condorcet and the Logic of Technocracy
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.


To Dreamworld and Back: A Movie Out of the Ordinary
In a non-didactic manner, the film offers a lesson that our time badly needs to learn: that all is not gold that glimmers.


A Covenant with all Mankind: Ronald Reagan’s Idyllic Vision of America in the World
Many who have heard Reagan's words have not really listened to them. They have taken away vague impressions of his rhetoric and have not fully understood the meaning and significance of what he actually said.


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


Geometries of Force in Homer’s Iliad: Two Readings
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.


Did Somebody Evade Totalitarianism? On the Intellectual Escapism of Slavoj Žižek
I contend that Žižek does not deliver the insights that he repeatedly promises. I propose to subject one of his works
Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? to close examination.


Tradition and Modernity in Postcolonial African Philosophy
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?



George A. Panichas Conservator Extraordinaire
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.


The Hidden Depths in Robert Frost
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.


Poetry and the Mystique of the Self in John Stuart Mill: Sources of Libertarian Socialism
After Mill discovered Romantic poetry he decided to abandon the “mere reasoning machine” that was his old self—and he emerged from this period a changed man.


Deadly Nothingness: A Meditation on Evil
Evil as nothing cannot triumph in the face of goodness that is something—indeed everything.


More than “Irritable Mental Gestures”: Russell Kirk’s Challenge to Liberalism, 1950-1960
Liberalism “is now fading out of the world,” Russell Kirk proclaimed in 1955 in the liberal Catholic periodical Commonweal. “And…


Debacle: The Conservative Movement in Chapter Eleven
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.


Imperialism Destroys the Constitutional Republic
What is at issue is the meaning of greatness. Our first president chose a modest path, the greatness of Cicero and Cato.


“The Last and Brightest Empire of Time”: Timothy Dwight and America as Voegelin’s “Authoritative Present,” 1771-1787
His orations, sermons, and poems in the last third of the eighteenth century—during the critical years of the nation’s founding—reveal a framework of thought that situated America as the endpoint toward which all prior history had been tending.
























[Poem] On Loving Thy Neighbor
Loving thy neighbor is hard to do: that dirty, ignorant, stinking fellow Black or white, Hindu or Jew, requires you…


Burke’s Historical Morality
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.


History for Life: Simms and Nietzsche Compared
Thus it is my purpose in this article to discuss the balance of similarities and differences between Simms and Nietzsche on the question of historiography.


Lyric Poetry, the Novel, and Revolution: Milan Kundera’s Life is Elsewhere
A careful reading of Kundera’s observations about the novel suggests that they do not quite cross the border to unmeaning, but in any case it is the novels themselves that embody the deeper insight, as the author himself would no doubt cheerfully concede.


Homer’s Humor: Laughter in The Iliad
Few critics have stressed the humorous aspects of the Iliad, or pursued Pope’s hint “That Homer was no enemy to mirth."


How the Right’s Gone Wrong
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.


“The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor”: The Utopian as Sadist
Only these figures, their inner lives properly regulated, are meant by nature to rule the rest, just as the head rules the body. “A multitude,” Plato asserts, “cannot be philosophical,” a capacity reserved for a select few.


Goethe’s Faust: Poetry and Philosophy at the Crossroads
There is much that is still alive in Santayana’s philosophical explication of Goethe’s Faust, especially Goethe’s appeal to the understanding to be derived from phenomena themselves.


Political Theology and the Theology of Politics: Carl Schmitt and Medieval Christian Political Thought
The Medieval understanding of theology and politics, rooted in Exodus, exceeds the limiting categories Carl Schmitt provides.



John of Salisbury, the Policraticus, and Political Thought
It is not the mere division of tasks that results in the collective good—there is no “invisible hand” in John’s functionalism.



Peter Viereck (1916-2006)
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.


Locke the Hermenaut and the Mechanics of Understanding
How does Locke understand language and its role in conveying information and meaning between persons?


Mysticism in Contemporary Islamic Political Thought: Orhan Pamuk and Abdolkarim Soroush
His noetic mysticism makes him better equipped to transcend the ideological deformations of modernity and the Islamic world. Yet his mysticism is ultimately solitary, making it insufficient to accomplish its task.
























[Poems] My Nineteenth Year and Gate
Idea-drugs don’t help very much.


Joseph Conrad’s Moral Imagination
Literary interpretation is at its maximum free of dogma.


The Tears of Priam: Reflections on Troy and Teaching Ancient Texts
Unlike most other texts, the “classics” have the potential to upend our typical modes of understanding, challenge our baser impulses, and confound our historically and culturally constituted presuppositions.


Irving Babbitt, the Moral Imagination, and Progressive Education
Babbitt and the romantics agree that imagination is vital to the development of the educated person, but each school of thought advocates a different quality of the imagination.


Richard Rorty’s Postmodern Case for Liberal Democracy: A Critique
While Rorty makes a sound move in attempting to defend democracy on a non-foundational basis, he goes too far in the Sophists’ direction.


Michael Polanyi, Alasdair MacIntyre, and the Role of Tradition
The work of both Michael Polanyi and Alasdair MacIntyre contributes significantly to overcoming the problems posed by late modernity. They harbor no nostalgic illusions; neither do they believe that skepticism and despair are satisfying alternatives.


The Legacy of Peter Viereck: His Prose Writings
Much of Peter Viereck’s prose writing was framed as an attempt to define a proper conservatism for our time. In…


Burke’s Higher Romanticism: Politics and the Sublime
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.


American Culture: A Story
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.


The Unraveling of American Constitutionalism: From Customary Law to Permanent Innovation
Because constitutional rights were synonymous with the restraints on government embodied in customary law, the greatest threat to English liberties were governmental innovations that undermined centuries-old customs.


Leo Strauss, Willmoore Kendall, and the Meaning of Conservatism
What is conservatism? Is it simply an older version of liberalism? Which traditions do conservatives “conserve” in an age of modern change? Is conservatism populist or elitist, democratic or aristocratic?


Strauss and the Straussians
Everything I have seen of the Straussians over the years leads me to the unfortunate conclusion that they are agenda-driven political intellectuals.


Leo Strauss and History: The Philosopher as Conspirator
Because of the elusiveness of Truth, Strauss is tempted to doubt the existence of universality, and he flirts with nihilism.


In the Clearing: Continuity and Unity in Frost’s Dualism
Frost’s perception of the continuity and unity in historical events came to him through an intuition, or revelation, expressed in “Kitty Hawk”: “Then I saw it all.”


Sentimental Hogwash? On Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life
Concern about the ethical condition of mankind has exercised great minds from the beginning of time. In Biblical chronology, the…


Classical Precariousness vs. Modern Risk: Lessons in Prudence from the Battle of Salamis
The very purpose of the prudential tradition is to prepare men and women with the deliberative capacity to decide how to act in such situations.
























[Poem] I Met a Gentle Maid Named Democracy
She tapped, three times at my door, Each time she tapped, I shouted— “Who is there?” Each time she paused,…


Herder: On the Ethics of Nationalism
Herder’s philosophical work forces us to reexamine the objections made against nationalism from a philosophical point of view.


Have We Lost Humility?
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.


Irving Babbitt’s Influence in China: Four Perspectives
Babbitt’s influence has been substantial and salutary, and that there is a major resurgence of interest in Babbitt that may prove significant for the future of China and thus the world.


The Birth of a Chinese Cultural Movement: Letters Between Babbitt and Wu Mi
My late father, Wu Mi, had carefully kept three letters written to him by his esteemed and beloved teacher Irving…


Chinese Reactions to Babbitt: Admiration, Encumbrance, Vilification
Irving Babbitt, the great American humanist, was bound to the modern Chinese culture even though Babbitt himself might not have been aware of it. His erudition and glamour enticed a dozen young Chinese scholars into Harvard University to seek instruction from him.


Babbitt’s Impact in China: The Case of Liang Shiqiu
Irving Babbitt and his intellectual ally Paul Elmer More played a crucial role in Liang’s literary battle with Lu Xun, who was everywhere regarded as China’s leading leftist or “proletarian” writer.


“Which West Are You Talking About?” Critical Review: A Unique Model of Conservatism in Modern China
They were in direct opposition to the New Culture Movement led by the New Intellectuals, and it is in this sense that I consider them conservatives.


Kafka’s Afflicted Vision: A Literary-Theological Critique
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.


Bedeviled by Boredom: A Voegelinian Reading of Dostoevsky’s Possessed
When existence is understood as boring and burdensome, often a more dangerous rejection of reality follows.


The Matrix, Liberal Education, and Other Splinters in the Mind
Here are superbly imaginative treatments of logical principles, the uses and meanings of words, the functions of names, the perplexities…


On the Skeptical “Foundation” of Ethics
Skepticism, albeit in a Humean “mitigated” sense, has a guiding role to play in philosophy.


Cain, Abel, Obligation, and Right
We live in a postmodern spiritual wasteland created by an impenetrable wall of separation between the City of God and the City of Man.


History, the Past, and the Inner Life
Historical consciousness is to civilized society what memory is to individual identity.


Method and Civic Education
1. Introduction Ceux qui, comme porte nostre usage, entreprenent d’une mesme leçon & pareille mesure de conduite, regenter plusieurs esprits…


Metapolitics Revisited
There are now three changed editions of my Metapolitics, with varying subtitles. Written between 1936 and 1941, while the author…


Nietzsche on the Cross: The Defense of Personal Freedom in The Birth of Tragedy
At the conclusion of his writing career, Nietzsche ironically and unintentionally ends up affirming a perspective on life that resonates with what can be termed a “Christianity of Joy.”


Augustine and the Case for Limited Government
Augustine’s thought has ever held a deep attraction for the Western mind and has, of course, profoundly shaped the moral traditions that inform Western political culture.


Harmony and Beauty, Disease and Suffering: Indeterminacy a Necessary Condition for Free Will
It follows, then, in the light of the Anthropic Principle, that, if man is to exist as a subject endowed with free will, the iniquity of nature, pain and suffering must also exist.


Sources of Order in History: Voegelin and His Critics
What separates Voegelin from most modern philosophers is not so much a difference of intellect as a difference of imagination.


Roosevelt’s Failure at Yalta
The United States Government was fully warned, almost prophetically, by its diplomats who had studied the Soviet Union and understood what recognition entailed.


Morality and Virtue In Poetry and Philosophy: A Reading of Homer’s Iliad XXIV
It is apt for Plato to describe the quarrel between poetry and philosophy as an ‘ancient’ one (Republic 607b). Art…


Lost in Place? On the Virtues and Vices of Edward Casey’s Anti-Modernism
To be modern is to give up the “sense of place” associated with the late medieval hierarchical world in favor of a space and time conceived to be populated by infinite numbers of entirely exchangeable loci.


Irving Babbitt and Cultural Renewal
It is tempting to think of Irving Babbitt as a voice crying in the wilderness, a lonely prophet attempting the…


Jacob and Esau
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.


From Democracy to Hyperdemocracy
I soon began to wonder how this cheapening of the word "democracy" might be linked to the cheapening of the underlying concept


History, Reason and Hope: A Comparative Study of Kant, Hayek and Habermas
The respect which Habermas accords to Kant’s moral and political ideals is what separates his interpretation of the Kantian project from Hayek’s.


Ethics and the Common Good: Abstract vs. Experiential
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.


Knowing Beyond Science: What Can We Know and How Can We Know?
According to a perhaps naive, but still dominant positivistic view of science, scientific knowledge is the only reliable knowledge. It…


Reflections on Piety: Euthyphro as Modern Man
Modernism’s essential features were already understood long before the era of modernity.


The River: A Vichian Dialogue on Humanistic Education
I went down yesterday to the River. I was walking along the park where today the barge will be landing…


Concerned with Everything in the Universe
In the history of writing history, there are a handful of volumes that become established as a model. The most recent work by Jacques Barzun is such a volume.


Revelation Over Rationalism: The Thought of Seyyed Hossein Nasr
Praise of contemplation and speculation does not constitute a refutation of positivism.


Edward Rozek: A Student’s Tribute
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.


The Medieval Mind: A Meditation
Men and women in the Middle Ages were far more alive to symbolism than the most sensitive moderns.


Regaining the Balance: An Augustinian Response to Eric Voegelin
Eric Voegelin’s treatment of Christianity is notoriously problematic.


The End of Art Theory
In the present age Hegel claims that "the form of art has ceased to be the supreme need of the spirit."


Irving Babbitt on Lincoln and Unionism
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.


The Problem of Lincoln in Babbitt’s Thought
Babbitt claimed to be rescuing Lincoln from the sentimentalists of his day; he claimed that he knew the “real Lincoln.”


The Heritage of Lincoln
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.


The Authoritarian Secularism of John Stuart Mill
As Mill proceeds in On Liberty, he seems to take away a good deal of what he “gives” at the beginning.


Descartes’s Paradoxical Politics
Politics for Descartes is not a part of philosophy proper.


Mill’s Religion of Humanity: Consequences and Implications
Mill muddied the waters of classical-liberal philosophy by his conviction that the end of government is the “improvement of mankind” and not the preservation of individual liberty.


William James and the Moral Will
A closer examination shows a thinker not simply dismissive of metaphysics and religion, nor one necessarily hospitable to leftist agendas.


Deconstruction: Fad or Philosophy?
Like other great neologisms—ones we wish we would have thought of but didn’t—deconstruction has suffered the fate of its own ascendancy.


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


Savior Nation: Woodrow Wilson and the Gospel of Power
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.


Left and Right Eclecticism: Roger Kimball’s Cultural Criticism
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.


Piety, Universality, and History: Leo Strauss on Thucydides
When Thucydides’ understated but crucial role in Strauss’s thought is fully exposed, Strauss’s philosophy as a whole starts to appear differently.


Power Is Coercion: A Response to Claes Ryn
Professor Ryn ascribes too much philosophical and aesthetic baggage to those who simply craved material security and were not equipped to think about the larger questions.


A Broader, Subtler View of Power
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?


Tradition, Habit, and Social Interaction: A Response to Mark Bevir
I wish to take issue with Bevir’s treatment of tradition precisely because it is so utilitarian. It reduces a social reality to an amorphous material with no meaning or purpose of its own.


On Practices
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.


Dimensions of Power: The Transformation of Liberalism and the Limits of ‘Politics’
Not even dictatorial rule can be sustained without the grudging acceptance of a populace whose anxieties and other propensities incline them to submit rather than to rebel.


On Tradition
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.


The Sense and Sensibility of Betrayal: Discovering the Meaning of Treachery through Jane Austen
Betrayal changes not only our sense of the world, but our sensibility toward the world.



Charles Austin Beard: Liberal Foe of American Internationalism
Lionized in his early career by much of the historical establishment, Beard fell out of favor with his fellow liberal and progressive academics because of his opposition to the nation’s foreign policy in the years prior to World War II.


A Worthy Kaddish
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.