France and the Problem of Abstraction
Prosperity and Torment in France: The Paradox of the Democratic Age By Chantal Delsol. University of Notre Dame Press, 2025. Hardcover, 154 pages, $30. Reviewed by Godefroy Desjonquères. Reading Chantal Delsol’s Prosperity and Torment in France as a French person is a...
Humane Literature and the Divided Soul
The Divided Soul: Duty and Desire in Literature and Life By Heidi White. Goldberry, 2025. Hardcover, 238 pages. $29.00. Reviewed by Gary Hartenburg. Heidi White’s debut book, The Divided Soul: Duty and Desire in Literature and Life, unites a memoir in fragments with a...
Antisemitism, a Foreign Tradition
Antisemitism, an American Tradition By Pamela S. Nadell. W. W. Norton, 2025. Hardcover, 352 Pages, $31.99. Reviewed by Elan Kluger. Every political movement has a philosophy of history and recent American politics has offered quite the olio. Barack Obama’s “Hope” was...
The Urbanity of Russell Kirk
The following was given by James Panero at the Fourth Annual Gerald Russello Memorial Lecture on December 8, 2025, in New York City. E.B. White famously declared that “No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.” Tonight, I feel such luck...
Buckley and Edwards: The Titan of Conservatism and His Titan of a Biographer
William F. Buckley Jr.: The Maker of a Movement By Lee Edwards. ISI Books, 2010/2019. Paperback, 224 pages, $16.95. Reviewed by Nicholas Mosvick. Last December, the venerable scholar of the conservative movement and the human force behind the Victims of Communism...
Robert Nisbet’s The Social Philosophers Revisited: Conservative Pluralism versus the Mania for Unity
The Social Philosophers: Community and Conflict in Western Thought By Robert Nisbet, with a new Foreword by Luke C. Sheahan. American Philosophical Society Press, 1973/2025. Paperback, 440 pages, $26.95. Reviewed by Daniel J. Mahoney. Robert Nisbet was one of the most...
The Social Philosophers: A Reading for the Present
The Social Philosophers: Community and Conflict in Western Thought By Robert Nisbet, with a new Foreword by Luke C. Sheahan. American Philosophical Society Press, 1973/2025. Paperback, 440 pages, $26.95. Reviewed by Lucía Vallejo Rodríguez. On June 3, 1973, in a...
A Sociology of the Permanent Things: Nisbet’s Tocquevillian Philosophy
The Social Philosophers: Community and Conflict in Western Thought By Robert Nisbet, with a new Foreword by Luke C. Sheahan. American Philosophical Society Press, 1973/2025. Paperback, 440 pages, $26.95. Reviewed by Michael Lucchese. Academia is hardly considered a...
Natural Law and the Need for Moral Clarity
Hopeful Realism: Evangelical Natural Law and Democratic Politics By Jesse Covington, Bryan T. McGraw, and Micah Watson. IVP Academic, 2025. Paperback, 264 pages, $26.00. Reviewed by Josh Herring. At the 2025 Academy of Philosophy and Letters meeting, Jason Jewell...
Why this book and why now? We can declare with certainty that it is never the right time for lazily written histories and now is no exception.
Division, dilemma, and conflict stand in the way of harmony, unity, and happiness, a point White announces in the introduction.