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

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

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

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

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

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

Populism Against Progress

February 1, 2018
Populism, in spite of its possible authoritarian colorations, may be the only force that can meaningfully confront this emergent dystopia.
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

Literary Study and the Social Order

January 5, 2018
The question of the moral and social effects of literary study is so knotty that even people who have made a career of teaching literature sometimes reverse their beliefs concerning the effects of the study of literature upon human conduct.
Read More

An Emblematic American

January 5, 2018
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.
Read More

The Humbling of the Pride

January 5, 2018
If an ananalytic philosopher has a powerful argument, what difference does it make whether it came from reading Kant or from reading a comic book?
Read More

Antigone’s Flaw

January 4, 2018
Some theorists define politics as who gets what, when and how. Alasdair MacIntyre defines it as "civil war carried on by other means."
Read More

On Wu Mi’s Conservatism

January 4, 2018
Although broad tendencies that may be labeled "conservative" can be traced throughout history, to categorize any group of intellectuals as…
Read More

The Metaphysics of Postmodernism

January 4, 2018
Although most people do not consciously accept postmodernist doctrines, these doctrines may still reflect the working assumptions that most of us live by but refuse to acknowledge.
Read More

Religion and the Constitution

January 4, 2018
This book provides a good example of the distortion of reality, not to mention mind-torturing confusion, that occurs when political documents are viewed through sectarian glasses.
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

[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

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

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

Democratizing the Constitution: The Failure of the Seventeenth Amendment

January 1, 2018
More than twenty years earlier as a Nebraska congressman, "The Great Commoner" had joined the struggle to free the Senate from the control of corrupt state legislatures, and despite three failed campaigns for the presidency, he never wavered in his determination to make the Senate a popularly elected body. 
Read More

Babbitt, Literary Positivism, And Neo-Positivism

January 1, 2018
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.
Read More

God and the Constitution

January 1, 2018
Kramnick and Moore accept that anyone who finds anything positive to say about Christian teaching is a Christian. The architect of the “Jefferson Bible” has as much claim to speak for Christianity as anyone else.
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

The Tribalization of the Western Mind

January 1, 2018
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.
Read More

[Short Story] The Diorite Whales

January 1, 2018
Jim studied the drop from the bridge to the white caps. Too much time to regret it. A gun would be better. A gun wouldn’t allow for second thoughts like a plunge from the Gate, and a bullet would be more reliable than a fall from a four storey Victorian.
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

Phony Empathy, Phony Scholarship

January 1, 2018
It was recently reported that a number of colleges, including Emory, Kenyon and the University of Rochester, were encouraging some of their students to experience the conditions of homelessness by sleeping outside on gratings or in cartons.
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

Marxism as Psychodrama

January 1, 2018
Why did Marx so move the world? Did he shed new light on the human story, plumb its mysteries to previously unsounded depths?
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

The Political Moralism of Jacques Ellul

January 1, 2018
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.
Read More

Musings on Postmodern Politics

January 1, 2018
Postmoderns believe that life and politics, both, can be reduced to "problems" and "solutions." They are not only "problem solvers" but "problem finders."
Read More

‘The Living Embodiment of the Nation’

January 1, 2018
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.
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

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

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

Religion and American Liberty

January 1, 2018
Americans fulfilled the promise of their Revolution by establishing the Constitution, its written form intended to enshrine the moral values held by the people based on their religion.
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

‘Beyond Presentness’: The Practice of Criticism

January 1, 2018
In Panichas’ view, the critic’s responsibility consists, first, in identifying “the highest things,” and then in articulating how this time-bound aesthetic form can function as a means of transcendent revelation.
Read More

Characterizing Historicist Possibilities: A Reply to Claes Ryn

January 1, 2018
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.
Read More

Allen Tate and The Catholic Revival

January 1, 2018
Yet while the "southern mode of the imagination" in Tate's work has received extensive scrutiny, the Catholic mode of imagination in his writings has been left largely to conjecture.
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

History as Synthesis

January 1, 2018
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.
Read More

[Poem] Gate Talk for Brodsky

January 1, 2018
While trying at age eighty to survive my own recent heart attacks, I'm writing these rhythm-variations of dying for Joseph Brodsky (for, not about, not to), who died of a heart attack January 28, 1996.
Read More

Culture and Politics: The American Whig Review, 1845-1852

January 1, 2018
For Whigs, probably more than Democrats, literature and political rhetoric represented similar, closely related instructional devices for both individual and collective improvement. Whig literature was rarely ever for “idle” entertainment only and was almost always didactic.
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

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

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

A Post-Liberal Thinker

January 1, 2018
Gray’s essential argument is for a regrounding of human social experience in history and nature. If we want to live in a society that is even minimally civilized, there is simply no room for growth without end and ever-more-expansive rights doctrines.
Read More

The Road Not Taken

January 1, 2018
Which makes it urgent that their wisdom, much of which is summarized in these two books, be heeded.
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

Croce in America: Influence, Misunderstanding, and Neglect

January 1, 2018
The prestige of historical figures rises and falls, and the tendency for the biggest to fall hardest may be especially prevalent in intellectual history. But there seems something anomalous about Croce's case, as René Wellek, the distinguished historian of criticism, recently emphasized.
Read More

Reason’s Revenge on Sociology

January 1, 2018
Having developed into an ideology instead of a study of ideology, sociology amounts to a series of demands for correct politics rather than a set of studies of social culture.
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

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

The Origin of Modern Society

January 1, 2018
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.
Read More

[Poem] The Necktie

January 1, 2018
A man intrinsic as the thought If A then B and so on Will tie the hours in a knot,…
Read More

[Poem] Tolerance

January 1, 2018
When those who’d rather undermine than fight Approach with picks and spades to bring you down, To cave the earth…
Read More

Russell Kirk (1918-94)

January 1, 2018
Russell Kirk had a distinctive, engaging literary style, and he was accessible not just to academic specialists. He was a man of ideas rather than a technical philosopher.
Read More

An Ideal Vital Center?

January 1, 2018
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.”
Read More

A Humanist Romanticism?

January 1, 2018
When poets go wrong in this book, which they sometimes do in spectacular ways, they do so for morally comprehensible reasons. Gurney reminds us that Christian virtues can be practiced not only by pagan poets but by readers like ourselves.
Read More

Another Conception of Knowing

January 1, 2018
Rather than renew a misconceived theory of knowledge, we need to reconstitute the epistemology of the humanities and social sciences along historical-philosophical lines.
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