The University Bookman
Reviewing Books that Build Culture
The Urbanity of Russell Kirk
“The urban fabric must also be mended and darned through continuous upkeep. The city is not yours to experiment. From Russell to Russello, our ancestral spirits cast their shadows whether or not we choose to observe the city of god in the cities of men.”
Buckley and Edwards: The Titan of Conservatism and His Titan of a Biographer
“By examining the major individual intellectual influences in Buckley’s life, Edwards is able to organically put together the various strands and ideas that became known as ‘fusionism’ without a lengthy or pedantic philosophical explanation.”
Robert Nisbet’s The Social Philosophers Revisited: Conservative Pluralism versus the Mania for Unity
“…Nisbet shows that freedom and nobility (or excellence) can only survive when civic and social pluralism allows authentic human individuality and real (as opposed to ideologically-induced) community ample room to flourish.”
The Social Philosophers: A Reading for the Present
“…in Nisbet’s reading, conflict fulfills a paradoxical function: it is, to a large extent, the experience of uprooting and rupture that most strongly awakens the need for community. In other words, the longing for community becomes more conscious and pressing where community has been lost or weakened.”
A Sociology of the Permanent Things: Nisbet’s Tocquevillian Philosophy
“The great crisis of our time, which Tocqueville prophesied and Nisbet diagnosed, is the collapse of those intermediary institutions that can resist the drift toward democratic despotism.”
Natural Law and the Need for Moral Clarity
“Christians need clarity on the way their faith shapes their political activity. This ambiguous book fails to provide that clarity.”
Moral Realism Over and Against Contingent Pluralism
“The challenge for… all natural law theorists is the proper ordering and integration of the contingencies of a given culture and the universality of the primary precepts of natural law.”
History on Improper Principles
“The condescending attitude—even animus—behind this book is, in fact, among the reasons Trump came to power in the first place. Voters, clearly sick of being sneered at by elites like Lichtman and his colleagues in the established commentariat, have turned to populism as an outlet for their frustrations.”
Man’s Exposed Condition in a World of Severe Conflict
“When Czeslaw Milosz was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1980, he was introduced as a writer ‘who with uncompromising clearsightedness voices man’s exposed condition in a world of severe conflicts.’ As it is, he’s a poet of history whose warnings about despots carry a terrible weight… Here is a man who, from his exile, remembers his European homeland, his Poland, as a place of Gothic cathedrals, of Baroque churches and, yes, ‘synagogues filled with the wailing of a wronged people.’”
The Book Gallery
A collection of conversations with Bookman editor Luke C. Sheahan and writers and authors of imagination and erudition. Click on the icon in the upper right corner of the video to see more episodes in this series or check out our YouTube page.
Kirk saw poetry, fiction, tradition, and restraint as essential to understanding America and preserving its character. In his review of "On America," @cjscalia explores Kirk’s vision of the founding, statesmanship, literature, and the enduring ideas that have shaped the republic.
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