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...

Show Me a Statesman

Jim Reed, Senatorial Immortal: A Biography By Lee Meriwether. Kessinger Publishing (Whitefish, Montana) 296 pp., $28.95 paper, 2007 Sen. James Alexander Reed of Missouri was one of the titans of the isolationist, individualist Old Right—though, like others of that...