The Babbitt School of Conservatism

The Babbitt School of Conservatism

The Failure of American Conservatism and the Road Not Taken By Claes G. Ryn. Republic Book Publishers, 2023. Hardcover, 468 pages, $24.95. Reviewed by Daniel McCarthy. In the 2020s, “conservatism” sounds passé, and its failure is taken for granted. A new right finds...
Russell Kirk’s Book of Love

Russell Kirk’s Book of Love

By Daniel McCarthy. Conservatism is a philosophy of love, which perhaps explains why it is so little understood in our time. Half a millennium ago Niccolò Machiavelli weighed whether it is better to be loved or feared. Those emotions—unlike their counterparts hate and...

The High Price of Duty

The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics by Mark Lilla. HarperCollins, 2017. Hardcover, 143 pages, $25.The publishing logic behind The Once and Future Liberal is impeccable. Defeated and divided after the 2016 election, liberals urgently asked themselves...
The Proxy War

The Proxy War

Symposium: Citizen, Community, and Welcoming the Stranger by Daniel McCarthyThe fight over immigration is a proxy war. The absolute number of immigrants to be welcomed into the country is only a secondary question: the primary question is how that number should be...

A Fair-Minded Polemic

LeoStrauss and the Conservative Movement in America: A Critical Appraisal by Paul Edward Gottfried. Cambridge, 2013. Paperback, 194 pages, $27. Every year brings a new crop of books about Leo Strauss. The New York Times last year reviewed two, Laurence Lampert’s The...