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The Conservative Mission and Progressive Ideology

April 13, 2013 By 4 Comments
George Carey conservative

George Carey

by George W. Carey

At the risk of seeming too parochial, I want to outline the dimensions of a problem that has been of special concern for me and other conservative students of the American political tradition, broadly defined. This concern is not as narrow as it may at first seem. Nor, by any standard, is it insignificant; it involves no less than the future direction of our nation and whether our society will retain its legacy of liberty and self-government. As I will also indicate, our tradition has long been under assault and I see no reason to believe that it will abate in this century. What is more, for reasons I will spell out, I believe that the defense and the restoration of the tradition are missions that necessarily must be undertaken by conservatives. Certainly it is safe to say that conservative scholars, in the academy and elsewhere, are best equipped for this task. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Edmund Burke, George W. Carey, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Modern Age, Progressivism, Thomas Jefferson April 13, 2013

Prudence as Excellence: Edmund Burke, Abraham Lincoln and the Problem of Greatness

April 1, 2013 By Leave a Comment
Edmund Burke

Edmund Burke

by Greg Weiner

Our conference is subtitled “equality and the survival of heroism.”  My concern is the survival of prudence amid the longing for heroism—in particular, the misalignment between ambition and circumstance, the persistent pursuit of legacy, especially by presidents.  We live in a democratic age.  Whence greatness if it is also an ordinary age?  In that case, I would argue that Edmund Burke offers a way forward: prudence as a form of excellence.  The problem of greatness to which my title refers is the confusion of greatness with change and the equation of change with power.  This formulation leaves inadequate room for what Burke called the queen of political virtues—prudence.  The beauty—the excellence, I would argue—of Burkeanism, like baseball, often consists in the negative space, the prudent prevention of action, or in the careful calibration of action to circumstance, rather than in the volume of activity alone.  This is difficult to capture and, crucially, to communicate.  Historians do not write books about what did not happen; prudence is not the stuff of which legacies are made.  It is easier simply to celebrate the daring man of action, the hitter who racks up the runs. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Abraham Lincoln, Edmund Burke, Greg Weiner April 1, 2013

Oak and Stone and the Permanent Things: Some Reflections on Edmund Burke’s Becket

March 4, 2013 By 1 Comment
Edmund Burke

Edmund Burke

by Ian Crowe 

For the present is the point at which time touches eternity.-C.S. Lewis[1]

It was in 1939, in The Idea of a Christian Society, that T.S. Eliot defended what he called “the permanent things” against a world that appeared drunk on the politics of revolution and “change.”  Eliot’s purpose was not a defense of conservatism—which he referred to in the same passage as, too often, “conservation of the wrong things”—but of the vital role of the institution of the Church in Western society.  Eliot considered the province of the “permanent things” to be the “pre-political area,” and their intellectual guardian to be theology.[2]  The social sciences, Eliot mentions sociology and economics specifically, may guide us to what is expedient, or ameliorative, or even utopian—that is, they may inform our ethics and politics—but without a claim on permanence, they cannot really reinforce, and certainly cannot replace, theological understanding. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Edmund Burke, Ian Crowe, Permanent Things, T.S. Eliot, Thomas à Becket March 4, 2013

How Dead is Edmund Burke?

February 4, 2013 By 1 Comment

by Russell Kirk

BurkeWalk beside the Liffey in Dublin, a trifle west of the dome of the Four Courts, and you come to Number 12, Arran Quay. This is a brick building of three stories, which began as a gentleman’s residence, some time since became a shop, and now is a governmental office of the meaner sort—symbolic of changes on a mightier scale during the generations since 1729. For here in that year Edmund Burke was born. Across the river you see what once was the town house of the Earls of Moira and is now the office of a society for suppressing mendicity; and beyond that, the great Guinness brewery. Back of Burke’s house, toward the old church of St. Michan in which, they say, he was baptised, stretch tottering brick slums where barefoot children scramble over broken walls. If you turn toward O’Connell Street, an easy stroll takes you to the noble façade of Trinity College and the statues of Burke and Goldsmith; to the north, near Parnell Square, you may hear living Irish orators proclaiming through amplifiers that they have succeeded in increasing sevenfold the pensions of widows, a mere earnest of their intent. And you may reflect, with Burke, “What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue!” [Read more...]

Filed Under: Books, Conservatism, Edmund Burke, History, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Moral Imagination, Russell Kirk February 4, 2013

To Complain of the Age we Live In

January 12, 2013 By Leave a Comment

by Edmund Burke

To complain of the age we live in, to murmur at the present possessors of power, to lament the past, to conceive extravagant hopes of the future, are the common dispositions of the greatest part of mankind; indeed the necessary effects of the ignorance and levity of the vulgar. Such complaints and humours have existed in all times; yet as all times have not been alike, true political sagacity manifests itself, in distinguishing that complaint which only characterizes the general infirmity of human nature, from those which are symptoms of the particular distemperature of our own air and season.-Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents

Books by Edmund Burke may be found in The Imaginative Conservative Bookstore. Find essays by/about Edmund Burke here.

Filed Under: Edmund Burke, Quotes January 12, 2013

The Living Edmund Burke

January 12, 2013 By Leave a Comment
Edmond Burke

Edmond Burke

by Russell Kirk

Getting up in recent months an anthology of conservative writing, The Portable Conservative Reader, I had reason to reread much of Burke. More than ever before, I was impressed with how relevant Burke’s thoughts – and, indeed, Burke’s actions – remain to our present discontents. (It is with some reluctance I employ that word “relevant,” its abuse by the young ideological zealots or the ’sixties and ’seventies considered.) As the bicentenary of the Constitution of the United States approaches, we may expect another strong renewal of attention to Burke, comparable to that reawakened interest in his writings, which surged up in America about 1953, when my Conservative Mind was published. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Conservatism, Edmund Burke, Modern Age, Russell Kirk January 12, 2013

Worth the Wait: Edmund Burke

January 12, 2013 By Leave a Comment
by Jeffrey O. Nelson

Edmund Burke

by F. P. Lock, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.
 
Thomas Copeland, the editor of The Correspondence of Edmund Burke and a central figure in Burke’s twentieth-century revival, once observed that of all the books written about Burke the most important was the work never written: his “official biography.” Unfortunately for posterity, Burke’s literary executors, having completed a sixteen-volume edition of his Works, died before completing a planned biography. Copeland’s view is surely correct that this was a “decisive failure,” for as Sir James Mackintosh observed of Burke at the dawn of the nineteenth century, “perhaps a fit biographer is more important to his just fame than ever such a person was before to a great man.” Burke’s reputation was also affected by another misfortune. Lost to historians were the papers and letters compiled by Burke’s executors. This lacuna had obvious consequences on Burke scholarship, from the death of the last of his two executors in the 1820s until the papers were re-discovered and made available again in the 1930s. So an accident of history and the inability of the first chroniclers to complete their intended studies have made the pursuit of a definitive biography elusive. [Read more...]
Filed Under: Books, Edmund Burke, Intercollegiate Review, Jeffrey O. Nelson January 12, 2013

Living Conservatism: Burke and Tocqueville

January 7, 2013 By Leave a Comment
by Edward Ericson, Jr.
Conservatism

Virtue and the Promise of Conservatism: the Legacy of Burke and Tocqueville, by Bruce Frohnen.

Conservatism lives. It continues to exercise its power over bright young minds. It also shows us a way of life, how to live. For these assertions there could be no better evidence than Bruce Frohnen’s Virtue and the Promise of Conservatism. Conceived as a doctoral dissertation at Cornell University and midwifed by a university press, this book holds a promise of its own to find a long life on the short shelf of indispensable landmark studies of modern conservative thought. Frohnen’s fresh articulation of conservatism, telling old verities to a fin de siècle audience, does for his generation something akin to what Russell Kirk in The Conservative Mind did for his.  [Read more...]

Filed Under: Alexis de Tocqueville, Books, Bruce Frohnen, Conservatism, Edmund Burke, Edward E. Ericson, University Bookman January 7, 2013

Edmund Burke on Manners

December 28, 2012 By 1 Comment

by Ian Crowe

Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke

It took Edmund Burke a very little time to decide that French Revolutionary philosophy posed a massive threat to civilization and social stability throughout Europe. By the end of his life, eight years after the storming of the Bastille, his fears of Jacobin contagion had led him to ask for a secret grave, removed from his family sepulchre and hidden from those-the English Jacobins-who would plunder the lead from tombs for bullets to assassinate the living. In 1796 he wrote: “…out of the tomb of the murdered monarchy in France has arisen a vast, tremendous, unformed spectre, in a far more terrific guise than any which ever yet have overpowered the imagination, and subdued the fortitude of man.” He demanded nothing short of a war of extermination against this “armed doctrine.” [Read more...]

Filed Under: Edmund Burke, Ian Crowe, Manners, Modern Age December 28, 2012

The Sharpening of the Conservative Mind

November 16, 2012 By 1 Comment

by James E. Person, Jr.conservative

Virtue and the Promise of Conservatism: The Legacy of Burke & Tocqueville, by Bruce Frohnen.

In his role as a professor of English literature, Thomas Howard sometimes gives his class a list of the following words: majesty, magnanimity, valor, courtesy, grace, chastity, virginity, nobility, splendor, ceremony, taboo, mystery, purity. The reaction he gets is quite predictable and never intelligent: “…either a total blank, embarrassed snickers, or incredulity,” he writes, adding:

The entire list of words land in their laps like a heap of dead basalt meteorites lately arrived from some other realm. They don’t know what to do with them. They have never encountered them. The words are entirely foreign to the whole set of assumptions that has been written (or I should say televised) into these students’ imaginations for the whole of their lives. Majesty? The man must be mad. Valor? What’s that? Courtesy? What a bore. Virginity? Ho-ho-there’s one for you!After all, Howard’s young charges must reason, if it can’t be touched, tasted, seen, heard, or smelled it must not exist (a fine philosophy, if one happens to be a dog). Of what use are such hieroglyphs?  [Read more...]

Filed Under: Alexis de Tocqueville, Books, Bruce Frohnen, Conservatism, Edmund Burke, James Person, Modern Age November 16, 2012

Russell Kirk, please meet Edmund Burke

November 12, 2012 By 2 Comments

by Bradley J. Birzer

Russell Kirk

Not Chesterbelloc, but Bur-Kirk.

[Dedicated to the genius and patience of Winston Elliott]

In the fall of 1950, Russell Kirk turned the ripe old age of 32. He had been publishing articles and reviews (and soon his M.A. thesis on John Randolph of Roanoke through the University of Chicago) since 1936. Even during college, academic journals had accepted his undergraduate work, assuming him to be a tenure-track professor.

Throughout his earliest publications, Kirk full explored the ideas of tradition and liberty, attempting to balance the sometimes tension-filled influences of Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More, Albert Jay Nock, and Isabel Patterson. Indeed, he immersed himself in any and every work imaginable, but he kept returning to these four. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Bradley J. Birzer, Conservatism, Edmund Burke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Libertarianism, Russell Kirk November 12, 2012

Reflections on Edmund Burke, Capitalism, and the Mob

October 26, 2012 By 2 Comments

Edmund burkeby Darrin Moore

‘Mob’ is an interesting word because of its dual meaning.  It means not only ‘organized crime’, that is, a small group of men working corporately and criminally in their own self-interest, but it also means a large group of rancorous, disgruntled people rioting for special interests they share in common.   This irony is particularly interesting in an age when both crony capitalism and the egalitarian spirit that seek to redistribute wealth are rampant.  When neither the ‘free-market’ capitalists nor the equalitarian mass of men are willing to accept prudent restraints upon their unbridled avarice (something to which they insist they have a right), these two wrongs are likely to feed to the dogs whoever is leftover whose behavior is guided by a more transcendent set of values.  As a society, are we capable of constructing a civilization instilled with a justly ordered liberty when it seems liberty itself is a candle that is being burned at both ends?  Edmund Burke asked: “But what is liberty without wisdom and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.” [Read more...]

Filed Under: Capitalism, Civilization, Conservatism, Darrin Moore, Edmund Burke October 26, 2012
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