Humanizing the Social Sciences
Adventures of an Accidental Sociologist: How to Explain the World Without Becoming a Bore by Peter L. Berger. Prometheus Books, 2011, 264pp, hardcover, $26.Sociology was invented in the nineteenth century by the French philosopher Auguste Comte, who envisioned a...Textbooks and the Audience for Poetry
My grandfather learned his rhetoric in a nineties two-horse town in north-central Ohio. His high school book (which I have inherited) was one of the popular ones of the day—Virginia Waddy’s Elements of Composition and Rhetoric. Like most rhetorics of its time, and...kirk wise species
The conservative believes that the individual is foolish, although the species is wise; therefore, unlike the confident intellectual, he declines to undertake the reconstruction of society and human nature.Oakeshott and Conservatism
Rationalism in Politics and Other Essaysby Michael Oakeshott. New York: Basic Books, 1962. 333 pp. [rev ed. Liberty Fund, 1991] It is a pleasure to have Professor Oakeshott on my side, even though there are moments when I have trouble in understanding just where his...
The book’s defense of McCarthyism also fares even better over half a century after its publication, as the opening of the Soviet archives gave Americans far more information than the authors had in 1954 and made abundantly clear not only the reality of Soviet infiltration of the…
Today, we know so much more about the communist infiltration of our government and society in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s than William F. Buckley, Jr. did in his early career. Yet, it turns out that Buckley and his allies were closer to the truth about domestic communism than their…