An Introduction to Conservatism for “Well-Meaning Liberals”

By |2023-11-15T05:47:05-06:00November 14th, 2023|Categories: Books, Conservatism, Economics, Government, Natural Rights Tradition, Political Philosophy, Senior Contributors, Thomas R. Ascik, Timeless Essays, Western Civilization|

Instead of considering contemporary political issues, or politicians, Roger Scruton attempts to rebuild conservatism by looking seriously at its past. Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition, by Roger Scruton (176 pages, All Points Books, 2018) In his Conservatism, An Introduction to the Great Tradition (2017), long-time Anglo-American conservative champion and author Sir Roger Scruton says [...]

Reading “The Politics of Prudence” in a Time of Troubles

By |2023-07-14T16:42:09-05:00July 14th, 2023|Categories: American Republic, Books, Conservatism, Ideology, Neoconservatism, Political Philosophy, Politics, Russell Kirk|

Russell Kirk would agree that what is happening these days is civil liberty (gone astray) prioritized over public morality. Kirk urged the rising generation to take up the defense of the moral order and the social order, the order of the soul, and the permanent things. It’s a faith worth fighting for. In  the opening [...]

Thoreau’s Guilty Conscience

By |2023-07-12T00:21:51-05:00July 11th, 2023|Categories: Henry David Thoreau, Justice, Philosophy, Political Philosophy, Politics, Timeless Essays|

There could be no Henry David Thoreau without a Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson glorified the individual independence of the new American; Thoreau evolved that into a nation-less, anarchic, natural man of subjective conscience. In 1838, Harvard College exiled a young James Russell Lowell to the tutelage of a minister in Concord, Massachusetts, a suspension for [...]

Orestes Brownson’s New England & the Unwritten Constitution

By |2023-04-16T17:38:55-05:00April 16th, 2023|Categories: American Republic, Civil Society, Constitution, Culture, Featured, History, Political Philosophy, Politics, Timeless Essays|

Orestes Brownson so esteemed New England people, customs, and institutions that they dominated his writings and fit at the heart of his political ideas. The danger of majoritarian tyranny hangs over republics. The dilemma of constituting a virtuous republic while also restricting interests, sects, and factions’ use of unchecked political power possessed eighteenth century American [...]

A Backwards Civilization: Unthinking Leaders, Frenzied Citizens

By |2023-02-07T17:08:49-06:00February 7th, 2023|Categories: Civil Society, Civilization, Democracy, Featured, Meno, Modernity, Plato, Political Philosophy, Politics, Socrates, Timeless Essays|

In America today, we are living in a toxic political climate that is the product of a very dangerous combination: Our rulers lack the learning necessary to ask the kinds of deep and fundamental questions that leaders and lawgivers ought to make a habit of pondering, while our people rebelliously scrutinize all orthodoxies and impose [...]

Harrington’s Cake: Institutions, Power, and Virtue

By |2022-12-12T14:22:47-06:00December 12th, 2022|Categories: American Republic, Congress, Government, Political Philosophy, Politics, Timeless Essays|

James Harrington insists on the possibility of an empire of laws. The claim that institutional arrangements can force self-interested behavior to serve the common interest underlies the system of separated powers and checks and balances central to the American constitutional order. But is he right? Can this theory of “dividing-and-choosing” give us confidence? “Two [girls] [...]

Nicolás Gómez Dávila and the ‘Authentic Reactionary’

By |2022-10-25T14:22:59-05:00October 25th, 2022|Categories: Culture War, History, Imagination, Philosophy, Political Philosophy, Politics, Timeless Essays|

It is fitting that one of the most profound thinkers of the 20th century should also have been one of its most obscure. Nicolás Gómez Dávila's critique of democracy may go some way in explaining why he remains a relatively unknown figure in the English-speaking world, for we in the modern West are all children [...]

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Romantic Conservative

By |2022-10-20T17:39:25-05:00October 20th, 2022|Categories: Conservatism, Philosophy, Political Philosophy, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Timeless Essays|

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s romantic conservatism is passionate, incisive, and high-minded. His notion of the “Idea” is persuasive in regard to how it exists in human society, and he lit the way to resolving the ever-present conservative tension between theory and practice. The life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, if tumultuous and at times disastrous, was a [...]

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 [...]

Machiavelli: The Prince of Darkness?

By |2021-05-02T16:00:52-05:00May 2nd, 2021|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Political Philosophy, Politics, Timeless Essays|

Niccolò Machiavelli openly embraced the use of power and utility over the restraint and charity of love and dignity. In Machiavelli’s corruption, “prudence” came to mean knowledge of when to choose good and when to choose evil. In his magisterial Roots of American Order, Russell Kirk tried to put the Renaissance, Reformation, and Counter Reformation [...]

Robert Nisbet’s “The Social Group in French Thought”

By |2021-02-24T19:24:01-06:00February 24th, 2021|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Civilization, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Political Philosophy, Politics, Robert Nisbet, Senior Contributors|

In “The Social Group in French Thought,” Robert Nisbet explains that social philosophers such as Bodin, Hobbes, and Rousseau undermined and sabotaged private law and intermediary institutions. Their thought culminated in the French Revolution and in its radical and nationalist legislation. Robert Nisbet’s dissertation began by lamenting that the history of freedom has been written [...]

Rousseau’s and Kant’s Competing Interpretations of the Enlightenment

By |2020-12-15T09:27:57-06:00December 13th, 2020|Categories: Great Books, Immanuel Kant, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Philosophy, Political Philosophy|

Immanuel Kant and Jean-Jacques Rousseau stand at contrary poles in their assessments of the Enlightenment. As modern citizens grapple with the choice between cosmopolitan integration into the global community and a civic affection for their particular society, they will be forced to confront the arguments advanced by these thinkers almost three centuries ago. Introduction At [...]

The Specter Haunting Marxism

By |2020-09-14T14:20:46-05:00September 14th, 2020|Categories: Communism, Equality, Ethnicity, Political Philosophy|

Marx and Engels’ endorsement of the racially-charged project of European imperialism, their casual dismissal of vast swathes of racialized humanity as ‘backward’ or immutably despotic, their indifference to the enslavement of millions of black Africans, and above all their unshakeable belief in the superiority of the white Germanic races, should leave no doubt in anyone’s [...]

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