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Dr. E. Christian Kopff on “Classical Greek Philosophy and American Democratic Thought.” […]
I confess to having approached Mr. Charles Murray’s book with a little ambivalence. I imagined that I might be one of those educational romantics he described and wondered whether a certain kind of educational romanticism might provide, not an unkindly lie, but a noble spur to a better life for our nation’s young. But this book [...]
Conservatism Revisited: The Revolt Against Ideology, by Peter Viereck. With a major new study of Peter Viereck and Conservatism by Claes G. Ryn Developments in recent American politics have raised questions about the intellectual roots and philosophical depth of conservatism. The direction of American foreign policy, for example, has inspired debates about the meaning of American [...]
In the mid-twentieth century, English historian Christopher Dawson (1889-1970) was widely considered to be one of the finest Catholic scholars in the English-speaking world. Today his name and work is largely unknown, even among Catholics. But that is beginning to change as Dawson is being discovered and recovered by a number of writers and historians. One [...]
Permit me to offer you some desultory reflections concerning the effect of the electronic computer upon the reason and the imagination. We are told by many voices that the computer will work a revolution in learning. So it may; but that accomplishment would not be salutary. The primary end of the higher learning, in all [...]
One of the many advantages in reading the Great Books is that truly Great books have the ability to remove us from our present moment and take us somewhere else, expose us to different ideas, issues, and landscapes, and then return us to our own. This enables us to see our own world, and more [...]
The serious writer of today lives in a very much secularized world, a world of measurable objects, a world of space and time considerations, a world that must be studied not only rationally, but scientifically. Now, this situation did not suddenly come about in the middle of the seventeenth century. It has been developing since [...]
Modern society is based on the idea of economic growth, a continually expanding cycle of expectation (which supplies the motivation to drive the economy forward), trade leading to income, income leading to consumption and investment. This expansion is made possible by improvements in technology making possible cheaper production (machines replacing slaves and eventually workers) and [...]
There was the Great Flood. There were the Ten Plagues of Egypt. There was the Fall of Rome. There was the destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem and the Fall of Constantinople. And now this: The Encyclopedia Britannica is going out of print. While the Simpsons just celebrated its 500th show, the world’s greatest learned [...]
It doesn’t take much imagination to guess what Thomas Jefferson would think of the U.S. government today, when its supposed “implied” powers are virtually infinite and nobody bothers measuring them against the powers expressly granted. When the federal government claims a new power nowadays, nobody even asks just which clause of the Constitution “implies” it. [...]
This presentation, “A Brief History of Economic Crisis in the United States,” was part of the Free Enterprise Institute’s Founders’ Day Breakfast, November 2011. […]
Literature in Revolution. Edited by George Abbott White and Charles Newman. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston-Triquarterly Book, 1972). Time was when the study of humane letters stood central in formal education. Public men were brought up in a literary discipline, and “rhetoric” meant more than an orator’s style. The domination of the political order [...]
Music and rhythm find their way into the secret places of the soul. –Plato Music transcends the classroom, the concert stage, and professional recordings. It pervades life. Mankind has long used music in all sorts of ways, to celebrate, to lament, to dance, to pray, to soothe or arouse, to woo, to infuse courage and [...]