Henrie on Kirk

by | Mar 27, 2007

Kirk was convinced that in our age, the unimagined life is not worth living for a human being. He labored to reform our sensibilities, so that we could see ourselves both for what we are and for what we have become. He labored to make available an intellectual...

Kirk on Eliot on PT

by | Mar 27, 2007

By ‘the Permanent Things’ [T. S. Eliot] meant those elements in the human condition that give us our nature, without which we are as the beasts that perish. They work upon us all in the sense that both they and we are bound up in that continuity of belief...

Kirk on Progress

by | Mar 27, 2007

Real progress consists in the movement of mankind toward the understanding of norms, and toward conformity to norms. Real decadence consists in the movement of mankind away from the understanding of norms, and away from obedience to norms.

Books in Little

by | Mar 22, 2007

A Gift of Freedom: How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America, John J. Miller (Encounter Books, 241 pp. $25.95). As American conservatism matures, and its histories are written, the entities and individuals that made its rise and influence possible have begun to...

On Russian Conservatism

by | Mar 22, 2007

Russian Conservatism and Its Critics: A Study in Political Culture by Richard Pipes. Yale University Press (New Haven, Connecticut), 216 pp., $30.00 cloth, 2006. Constructing a sustainable political order has been the fundamental challenge for Russia since the Soviet...

American Conservative

by | Mar 22, 2007

Political Philosophy and Cultural Renewal: Collected Essays by Francis Graham Wilson, edited by H. Lee Cheek, Jr., M. Susan Power, and Kathy B. Cheek. Transaction Publishers (New Brunswick, New Jersey) 263 pp., $49.95 cloth, 2001. It has been argued, perhaps most...

Looking Behind the Mask

by | Mar 22, 2007

Masquerade by Joseph S. Salemi. Pivot Press (Expansive Poetry Online Bookstore), 84 pp., $12.00 paper, 2005. It is an act of courage to publish such a collection as Masquerade in the face of today’s feckless critics and the mindless gruel that most call poetry....

Toward a New Kind of History

by | Mar 22, 2007

Remembered Past: John Lukacs on History, Historians, and Historical Knowledge A Reader by John Lukacs (edited by Mark G. Malvasi and Jeffrey O. Nelson). ISI Books (Wilmington, Delaware), 922 pp., $30.00 cloth, 2005. “By the end of the second decade of my...

A Placid Portrait of the Enlightenment

by | Mar 22, 2007

The Enlightenment & the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture by Louis Dupré. Yale University Press (New Haven, Connecticut), 397 pp., $25.00 paper, 2004. One of the more promising cultural developments in these waning days of the West is the growing...