Welcome to the Edmund Burke Society

Welcome to the website of the Edmund Burke Society of America. Here you will find information about the society and its schedule, access to the society’s journal, Studies in Burke and His Time, extracts from our former newsletter Reflections, together with scholarly...

Faith and Twelve Presidents

The Faiths of the Postwar Presidents: From Truman to Obama by David L. Holmes. University of Georgia Press, 2012 296 pages, $30.Since the founding of the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies in the early seventeenth century, religion has powerfully affected...

History Resurgent

Historical Consciousness, or The Remembered Past by John Lukacs. New York: Harper & Row, 1968. [Rev ed. Transaction 1994, 411 pages.] “You couldn’t be more right,” is the warm affirmation of an amiable friend of mine that I would like to apply to this book. Dr....

Enoch Powell—Right from the start?

Enoch at 100 Edited by Greville Howard. London: Biteback, 2012, hardback, 320pp., £25. A century after his birth, the self-described “Tory anarchist” John Enoch Powell is still capable of arousing devotion or detestation. After his death in 1998, a major memorial...

Rediscovering a Neglected Conservative Mind

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, by James Fitzjames Stephen. Edited by Stuart D. Warner. Liberty Fund, Inc., 1993 xxix + 270 pp., $19.50 cloth; $7.50, paper. Although proclaimed by Sir Ernest Barker as “the finest exposition of conservative thought in the later half of...

A summary of the Conservative Mind

Aaron McLeod, a former Wilbur Fellow, has written an excellent Summary of Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind, the first number in the Alabama Policy Institute’s “Essential Readings for the Modern Conservative” series. Aaron takes 70 pages to explain the themes and...

A Global Life in Ideas

Political Woman: The Big Little Life of Jeane Kirkpatrick by Peter Collier. New York: Encounter Books, 2012. 241 pp. $26.Jeane J. Kirkpatrick was the intellectual giant of the first four years of the Reagan administration. After Reagan swept to a forty-nine-state...

Notes on the Cultural Revolution

The present age is distinguished by this: in the quest for a better life, man has chosen increasingly to put his faith in natural science. More than a century of unparalleled activity in that area of research has given a new bent to the imagination of several...

A Forward-Thinking Conservatism

There has been much commentary concerning a recent David Brooks editorial that in turn cites Rod Dreher’s article on what it means to be a conservative. Both Brooks and Dreher return to Kirk and his ten principles of conservatism, to define what Brooks describes as...

Omnipotence Is Provisional

A conversation with Will Self.Will Self was born in London in 1961 and published his first book of short stories, The Quantity Theory of Insanity, in 1991. To date he has published nine novels, three novellas, six collections of short fiction, and six books of...