The Dictatress and the Decisionmakers
Lurking in John Quincy Adams' famous foreign policy oration is a dangerous confidence about the trajectory of history.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Descartes’s Paradoxical Politics
Politics for Descartes is not a part of philosophy proper.
Augustinian Radical Transcendence: Source of Political Excess
Augustinian Christianity is unable to sustain its own posture of radical transcendence. That position is so harsh, so immoderate, and so inhuman that it leads its advocates to succumb to an extremism of another kind.
An Emblematic American
More and more, educated and cultured Europeans recognize Irving Babbitt as an emblem of an almost hidden and all too easily ignored side of American culture.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Romantic Roots of Modern Democracy
Rousseau’s political ideas were at once idealistic, “mystical,” and collectivist.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Straussianism Descendant? The Historicist Renewal
Paraboschi seeks to show how the view of “historical consciousness” held by a given thinker will influence his or her stance toward the current political divisions.
Babbitt, Literary Positivism, And Neo-Positivism
There is another major element in Babbitt’s criticism which has a strong resemblance to the positivist method, even to the original statement of it by Comte. This is the concept of the interrelationship of all knowledge.
Origins of Nihilism: Actual and Alleged
Why did all the leading thinkers feel compelled to take sides or make personal statements? The issue involved the status of Enlightenment reason itself.
The Tribalization of the Western Mind
Culture has been degraded to somatic gratification, from which all meaning is now derived. Politically, this requires “using threats of high treason to silence doubt” about the status of the body as a justification for reshaping politics.
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.
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.
Marxism as Psychodrama
Why did Marx so move the world? Did he shed new light on the human story, plumb its mysteries to previously unsounded depths?
The Political Moralism of Jacques Ellul
On the most general level, then, his response to modernity is not unlike many others in the post-War period: a rediscovery of some form of personal moral anchor, in opposition to the surrounding sources of disorder, as a way out of the nihilism of the twentieth century.
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…
Regaining the Balance: An Augustinian Response to Eric Voegelin
Eric Voegelin’s treatment of Christianity is notoriously problematic.
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.
‘The Living Embodiment of the Nation’
History, to most of the authors of the Constitution, was more valuable than political theory because it was more real; as Bolingbroke put it, history was philosophy teaching by example.
Reflections on Piety: Euthyphro as Modern Man
Modernism’s essential features were already understood long before the era of modernity.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Characterizing Historicist Possibilities: A Reply to Claes Ryn
Most importantly, Ryn holds that I place such emphasis on contingency, particularity, and finitude that I have difficulty explaining the basis of the continuity and coherence, weight and responsibility, that I myself find necessary for the reconstructive middle ground.
How We Know What We Know: Babbitt, Positivism and Beyond
Careful, in-depth attention to questions of knowledge is one of the preconditions for a reinvigoration of the humanities and social sciences. In the study of man as a social and cultural being, how is knowledge obtained?
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.
Revelation Over Rationalism: The Thought of Seyyed Hossein Nasr
Praise of contemplation and speculation does not constitute a refutation of positivism.
History as Synthesis
Professor Roberts and I may have not so much a fundamental philosophical disagreement as a difference of philosophical nomenclature and emphasis. Ideas in Roberts’s thinking that are still only tentatively stated could well evolve in ways that will reveal further consonance between us.
Abraham Lincoln: The Man and the Myth
The uncritical view of our sixteenth President as a pious statesman has been extraordinarily influential. It has affected the most incisive minds.
The Medieval Mind: A Meditation
Men and women in the Middle Ages were far more alive to symbolism than the most sensitive moderns.
Locke the Hermenaut and the Mechanics of Understanding
How does Locke understand language and its role in conveying information and meaning between persons?
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.
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 Origin of Modern Society
Man is a creature of desires, and since these desires are the products of social and economic motives, good government is situated at the crossroads of individual desires. The focus of politics shifts from moral authority to the social contract.
An Ideal Vital Center?
Never does Green allow an early American leader to escape his carping scrutiny. He insists that George Washington was “an unmitigated snob whose personal integrity was protected by his social status at the top of the heap.”
Another Conception of Knowing
Rather than renew a misconceived theory of knowledge, we need to reconstitute the epistemology of the humanities and social sciences along historical-philosophical lines.
The Last Man of Letters? The Singular Life of Russell Kirk
Many autobiographies are written with an eye toward settling old scores, but this is not one of them. These memoirs are striking because of the absence of any rancor or bitterness toward old intellectual or literary adversaries.
Joseph Conrad’s Moral Imagination
Literary interpretation is at its maximum free of dogma.
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.
Continuity in Change: Revisualizations of Philostratus’s Eikones
The Eikones is translated and transmuted time and time again by those who wish to 'recapture' antiquity.
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.
Timeless Prescription for the Ills of Our Time
Redeeming the Time is a pointed, prescient and at times disturbing collection. It is filled with the sense of "the unbought grace of life" by which Kirk lived his own life, and through which we renew our commitment to the permanent values of our civilization.
Second Thoughts on Graduate Education
My own ideal, already partially fulfilled, is for my work to be made obsolete, of mere historic interest, by the much better achievements of my apprentices. That is the only way I know to surpass my own limitations.
New Dogmas for Old In the American University
This book, despite its solid scholarship and publication by a major university press, will be ignored by the author’s own generation of academicians because it truly is radical; that is, it goes to the roots.
Forgotten Roots of Individualism
The opposition between an individualistic and an anti-individualistic culture is not identical with the opposition between a world-affirming and a world-negating culture.
Rethinking It All: An Editorial Statement
Two seemingly contradictory tendencies—fragmentation and a push for conformity—are widely present in the humanities as in society at large.
Universality and History: The Concrete as Normative
Moral nihilism and relativism seem not to carry the academic prestige that they once enjoyed. Philosophers and others are drawn…
The New ‘Public Order’: Within and Above
In Sources of the Self Charles Taylor is both guide and traveling companion on a long, rewarding journey through the history of Western philosophy.
Edmund Burke: The Perennial Political Philosopher
Professor Stanlis’ book is an excellent work of historical and interpretive scholarship, but it may place too much emphasis on Burke’s reliance on the natural law tradition.
Metaphysics and History: The Individual and the General Reconciled
Introduction: Perennial Philosophy Historicized The mainstay of perennial philosophy is the problem of "the one and the many." In the…
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.
Thomas More: Virtuous Statesman
Of the statesman's charge, More in Utopia says: "What you cannot turn to the good, you must at least make as little bad as you can."
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.
Two Liberalisms: The Contrasting Visions of Hobbes and Locke
Neither Hobbes nor Locke said much about the transmutations of human nature in the past because they were more concerned about how it might be transformed in the future.
History, the Past, and the Inner Life
Historical consciousness is to civilized society what memory is to individual identity.
Imagination and Historical Knowledge in Vico: A Critique of Leon Pompa’s Recent Work
In the view of many scholars, Leon Pompa has played a crucial role in reviving the study of Vico in…
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.
Reflections on Past and Present
The study of the past always confronts two difficulties. The first is particularism, which exaggerates the difference between past and present. The other is its opposite, anachronism.
In Search of Human Universality: Context and Justification In Cultural Philosophy
A critical exploration of cultural beliefs will enable us to see how people make rational or justificatory connections among their socio-culturally structured evidence, counter-evidence, relevant alternatives, and beliefs.
Defining Historicism
The American academy has been abuzz in recent years with a need to identify and get rid of "foundational" thinking. There are, we are told, no suprahistorical essences, no permanent ends, no enduring identities, meanings, or truths.
Which Liberalism? Which Soul?
It may be possible to make Walsh’s hermeneutic inclusiveness work, but there is no evidence it does, and certainly not on the basis of his lavishing of liberal certificates upon a multitude of dead and living thinkers.
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)…
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.
Philosophical Reason: Historical, Systematic, and Humble
The intellectual power, originality and prescience of Irving Babbitt becomes with each passing decade more obvious. Scholars familiar with Babbitt's…
Liberty’s Aristocratic Roots And Modern Democracy
Depending on the meanings of the terms involved, liberty and liberalism can be incompatible with democracy and with each other.
A Dialogue on Reason and Imagination
Philosophical Reason: Historical, Systematic, and Humble Claes G. Ryn [From HUMANITAS, Volume VI, No. 2, 1993 © National Humanities Institute] The intellectual…
Concentric Imagination: An Alternative to Philosophical Reason
Does humanist individualism need supplementation by a form of reason that is not simply practical-analytical?
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.
Philosophical Reason: Historical, Systematic, and Humble
While applauding these Babbittian ideas, I have argued in various places that Babbitt unduly discounts reason’s contribution to
the search for reality.
An Oasis in an Arid Desert
Paul Gottfried, in his revised and expanded edition of The Conservative Movement, expresses a similar short term pessimism about political and cultural developments in the United States.
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.
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.
Reinvigorating Culture
Have we failed in our duty to sustain and develop the humane traditions of learning?
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.
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.