Conservatism: A Lecture

By |2022-06-28T17:39:07-05:00June 28th, 2022|Categories: Christian Humanism, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, Conservatism, Featured, Political Science Reviewer, Timeless Essays|

The modern political conflict goes much deeper than the old party struggle. It has become a battle of ideas and beliefs. Practical politics are not enough. We need a Conservative sociology to set against the Socialist theory of society, and a spiritual ideal of Conservative order to meet the idealism of revolution. Introduction and Notes by [...]

Thomas Jefferson & the Declaration of Independence: The Power of a Free People

By |2023-07-03T16:27:40-05:00July 3rd, 2021|Categories: American Founding, American Republic, Declaration of Independence, Featured, Independence Day, Political Science Reviewer, Thomas Jefferson, Timeless Essays|

One of America’s most cherished symbols, of course, is the American Declaration of Independence, and its Promethean author, Thomas Jefferson—a document and a man whom subsequent generations have blurred together in a myth of no mean proportion. It is the immediate task of this essay to unravel that myth so we will know what we [...]

The Key to John Adams’ Political Principles

By |2020-10-29T23:06:14-05:00August 6th, 2017|Categories: American Founding, American Republic, Featured, John Adams, Liberty, Political Philosophy, Political Science Reviewer, Politics, Timeless Essays|

Of all John Adams' published writings, two works provide an especially fruitful resource for an inquiry into his deepest political reflection: his "Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America" and "Discourses on Davila." As a political writer, John Adams is most remembered today for the constitutional prescriptions by which he [...]

The United States as World Savior: Costs & Consequences

By |2017-06-04T15:14:20-05:00June 4th, 2017|Categories: American Founding, Democracy, Foreign Affairs, Political Science Reviewer, Timeless Essays, Woodrow Wilson|

U.S. foreign policy needs to be put back into a constitutional framework, even at a time of grave threats to national security and to American lives and property… Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Richard Gamble as he examines President Woodrow Wilson’s approach to foreign affairs compared with that of [...]

“Republican Government” According to John Adams

By |2021-10-29T12:14:40-05:00August 31st, 2016|Categories: American Republic, Featured, Great Books, History, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Adams, John Locke, Liberty, Natural Law, Philosophy, Political Science Reviewer, Republicanism|

John Adams wondered why men cannot live together “naturally” at peace, with the justice of their relations emerging immediately from the operation of reason in each individual. As elaborated thus far, natural law teaches that legitimate government is circumscribed by liberty in a dual sense: It derives from the consent of equally free individuals, and [...]

The Role of the “Middle Delegates” at the Constitutional Convention

By |2020-10-18T13:32:36-05:00January 7th, 2016|Categories: American Founding, American Republic, Constitution, Constitutional Convention, Featured, Forrest McDonald, Political Science Reviewer|

The contribution of the middle delegates—from Connecticut, Delaware, North and South Carolina—was crucial to the structural design of the Constitution. Without these these eight men, the Grand Convention might not have succeeded in its undertaking. Oliver Ellsworth Historians of the Constitutional Convention have agreed that there were divisions among the delegates, but have [...]

Religion and “The Conservative Mind”

By |2021-05-10T23:34:20-05:00November 15th, 2013|Categories: Political Science Reviewer, Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind|Tags: , |

To know The Conservative Mind is to know the mind of its remarkable author, Russell Kirk. He was an old-fashioned man—courtly, retiring, serene, formal in dress and manner—whose view of the world, proclaimed by every photograph, was traditional, anti-modern, even obscure. Captured in his study, his library, his home, surrounded by pens, books, family, and friends, he [...]

Kirk among the Historians: Myth and Meaning in the Writing of American History

By |2019-09-24T13:42:36-05:00October 1st, 2013|Categories: Mark Malvasi, Political Science Reviewer, Russell Kirk|

America is the land of progress, speculative, contingent, pragmatic, experimental, traditionless. An American conservatism, accordingly, is oxymoronic, blundering, graceless, and embarrassing in a society devoted to change and forgetful of the past. “The storybook truth about American history,” began Louis Hartz in The Liberal Tradition in America, is that the country “was settled by men who [...]

On the Place of Augustine in Political Philosophy

By |2019-10-30T12:32:16-05:00August 28th, 2013|Categories: Christianity, Fr. James Schall, Literature, Political Philosophy, Political Science Reviewer, St. Augustine|

“Shall it (the happy life) be that of the philosophers, who put forward as the chief good, the good which is in ourselves? Is this the true good? Have they found the remedy for our ills? Is man’s pride cured by placing him on an equality with God?”— Pascal, Pensēes, #430. “Salvation, such as it shall [...]

A Kind of Dignity and Even Nobility: Winston Churchill’s “Thoughts and Adventures”

By |2024-01-31T21:49:00-06:00August 10th, 2013|Categories: Books, Modernity, Political Science Reviewer, Winston Churchill|Tags: |

This material progress, in itself so splendid, does not meet any of the real needs of the human race…. No material progress, even though it takes shapes we cannot now conceive, or however it may expand the faculties of man, can bring comfort to his soul. It is this fact, more wonderful than any that [...]

Edmund Burke and the American Nation

By |2019-03-21T10:46:26-05:00July 19th, 2013|Categories: American Republic, Edmund Burke, Political Science Reviewer, Revolution|

In his politics and in his works, Burke spoke for the concept of the nation, and nowhere is this more apparent than in his Reflections on the Revolution in France[1] And rarely have his views been more relevant than in present-day America. Fortunately, Americans have never been subjected to a revolution as terrible as that of the [...]

Philosopher-Poet of the Rednecks: Donald Davidson and the Defense of the Agrarian South

By |2017-09-05T23:06:20-05:00June 27th, 2013|Categories: Mark Malvasi, Poetry, Political Science Reviewer, Southern Agrarians|

Donald Davidson Confident that industrial prosperity would create the material foundations for a vigorous, democratic civilization in the South, southern liberals since the 1880s had repudiated much of their heritage and embraced science and industry as the salvation of mankind. Liberal educators, journalists, and social scientists of the immediate postwar era, such as [...]

Willmoore Kendall & the Deliberate Sense of the Community

By |2022-03-07T16:04:02-06:00June 2nd, 2013|Categories: Books, Federalist Papers, Political Science Reviewer, Willmoore Kendall|

The Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition by Willmoore Kendall and George Carey (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1995). The Conservative Affirmation by Willmoore Kendall (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1963). John Locke and the Doctrine of Majority-Rule by Willmoore Kendall (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1965). Despite Willmoore Kendall’s (1909-1967) [...]

The Presidency: A Realistic Reappraisal

By |2020-11-12T15:40:47-06:00October 28th, 2012|Categories: Books, Featured, George W. Carey, Political Science Reviewer, Politics, Presidency|

Power has shifted from Congress to the presidency; the modern, “heroic” presidency represents the greatest threat to the Republic. The Cult of the Presidency: America’s Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power, by Gene Healy (Cato Institute, 2008, 262 pages) “Taken by and large,” Edward Corwin wrote, “the history of the presidency is a history of aggrandizement, [...]

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