Buying Liberty or Empire? The Problem of the Louisiana Purchase

By |2024-03-09T21:02:12-06:00March 9th, 2024|Categories: Bruce Frohnen, Ordered Liberty, Timeless Essays|

The Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the size of the United States in one fell swoop, may sound of little relevance to ordered liberty today. But as we face a national government of ever-increasing power and hostility toward the institutions, beliefs, and practices undergirding ordered liberty and local affection, we should consider whether the price of [...]

Reflections on American Order

By |2023-04-28T16:56:22-05:00April 28th, 2023|Categories: Essential, Order, Ordered Liberty, RAK, Roots of American Order, Russell Kirk, Timeless Essays|

Order is the first need of all. One finds happiness in restoring and improving the order of the soul and the order of the republic—not in acts of devastation that make a desert of spirit and of society. Imagine a man travelling through the night, without a guide, thinking continually of the direction he wishes [...]

Franklin Pierce, Political Protest, & the Dilemmas of Democracy

By |2021-11-22T14:23:22-06:00November 22nd, 2021|Categories: American Republic, Christianity, Civil Society, Civilization, Constitution, Democracy, Government, History, Ordered Liberty, Political Philosophy, Religion, Timeless Essays|

Franklin Pierce’s suspicions reflected a tension within the antebellum Democratic Party in relation to slavery—how can we reconcile an advocacy of democratic decision-making with the existence of transcendent moral values, the Constitution with the Bible? On the stump in New Boston, New Hampshire in early January 1852, Franklin Pierce gave a long oration during which [...]

How Do We Restore the American Order?

By |2020-04-02T01:50:26-05:00November 25th, 2018|Categories: American Republic, Civilization, Culture War, Freedom, John Horvat, Ordered Liberty|

This is America’s tragic situation: The unifying framework of the American creed is now broken. The result is an America that is coming apart. On every American coin, there is the Latin expression, e pluribus unum, meaning “one out of many.” The motto is a celebration of the variety found in America expressed by different [...]

Edmund Burke, Daniel O’Connell, & Catholic Emancipation in Ireland

By |2019-06-11T16:09:23-05:00December 2nd, 2017|Categories: Catholicism, Christianity, Edmund Burke, Europe, History, Ordered Liberty, Politics, Rule of Law|

Despite their differing political views, the conservative Edmund Burke and the radical Daniel O’Connell played major roles in combatting the suppression of Catholics in eighteenth-century Ireland… In the past couple of decades, the Catholic Church has fallen upon bad times in an Ireland whose overwhelmingly Catholic population had been among the most observant in the [...]

Edmund Burke and the Principle of Order

By |2023-04-13T12:06:37-05:00September 8th, 2017|Categories: Conservatism, Edmund Burke, Essential, Featured, Ordered Liberty, RAK, Russell Kirk|

Edmund Burke’s principle of order is an anticipatory refutation of utilitarianism, positivism, and pragmatism, an affirmation of that reverential view of society which may be traced through Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, the Roman jurisconsults, the Schoolmen, Richard Hooker, and lesser thinkers. It is this; but it is more. What Matthew Arnold called “an epoch of concentration” [...]

Edmund Burke and the American Nation

By |2017-04-06T01:20:09-05:00February 5th, 2017|Categories: American Republic, Edmund Burke, Featured, Ordered Liberty, Timeless Essays|

Edmund Burke believed that a constitution rooted in the fundamental beliefs and practices of the people was essential for preserving a nation and guiding its leaders… Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Robert Heineman as he argues that pluralism is destroying America’s political institutions as they were understood [...]

Reclaiming Our Constitutional Heritage

By |2023-02-07T21:07:41-06:00January 10th, 2017|Categories: Alexis de Tocqueville, American Founding, Books, Featured, Ordered Liberty, Ted McAllister|

The so-called American Revolution was a rebellion to preserve and reinstitute long-established liberties and to develop a system of governance that put those liberties on a more secure foundation. We might even think of the “Revolution” as a rebellion that prevented or postponed a revolution… By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission by Charles Murray (Crown [...]

Will Progressivism Win?

By |2016-08-02T18:41:46-05:00June 26th, 2016|Categories: Featured, Ideology, Ordered Liberty, Progressivism|

Understanding Progressivism and the Progressive Era is one of the most important tasks for intellectual defenders of ordered liberty. In just under two generations, Progressivism captured the minds of the American intellectual class, which then transformed traditional governance institutions into the modern bureaucratic-administrative state. As Thomas C. Leonard shows in his new book, Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, [...]

Can Civility Be Restored to Our Campuses?

By |2016-05-22T13:28:49-05:00April 17th, 2016|Categories: Bruce Frohnen, Civil Society, Civilization, Featured, Liberalism, Liberty, Ordered Liberty|

Critics have taken to calling the leftist agitators who are running roughshod over university campuses hypocrites. The reasoning is that these self-described social-justice warriors, by shouting down speakers, silencing dissent on social media, and forcing resignations from those they accuse of “injustice,” are betraying the very toleration that allows them to speak freely. Unfortunately, the [...]

The Enduring Significance of Edmund Burke

By |2018-10-16T20:24:33-05:00July 9th, 2015|Categories: Conservatism, Edmund Burke, Featured, Order, Ordered Liberty, RAK, Russell Kirk, Social Order|

What Matthew Arnold called “an epoch of concentration” seems to be impending over the English-speaking world. The revolutionary impulses and the social enthusiasms which have dominated this era since their great explosion in Russia are now confronted with a countervailing physical and intellectual force. Communism, Fascism, and their kindred expansive ideologies all in their fashion [...]

The Chronicle of an Undeception: Freedom and Order

By |2019-10-10T14:56:53-05:00February 27th, 2013|Categories: Christianity, Conservatism, Faith, Moral Imagination, Ordered Liberty|Tags: |

  The central myth of the sixties was that [its] wretched excess was really a serious quest for new values.–George Will I. The Tragic Vision of Life I confess to believing at one time or another nearly all the pervasive and persistent fantasies of the sixties. In the words of Joni Mitchell's anthem for the Woodstock [...]

Ordered Liberty under God

By |2019-08-15T14:32:27-05:00January 21st, 2013|Categories: Christendom, Christianity, Ordered Liberty|Tags: , |

Christian Faith and Modern Democracy: God and Politics in the Fallen World by Robert P. Kraynak To identify any particular form of government with Christianity is a dangerous error: for it confounds the permanent with the transitory, the absolute with the contingent….Those who consider that a discussion of the nature of a Christian society should [...]

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