The University Bookman
Reviewing Books that Build Culture
Watch James Panero of the New Criterion discuss “The Urbanity of Russell Kirk” at the 2025 Gerald Russello Memorial Lecture.
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.’”
Revisiting Walter Lippmann
“Lippmann sought to be—and was—what might be described today as an influencer. As such, he never sought to wield power, but he long desired to have the ears and eyes of the powerful. Arnold-Forster is certainly not unaware of that. But it is never his central message. If there is such a message in these pages, and there is, it is his effort to make the reader aware that Walter Lippmann, believer in and defender of the efficacy of progressive government, was also Walter Lippmann, believer in and defender of both the reality and importance of empire in general and of the American empire in particular.”
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.
"Delsol’s analysis stands out for the breadth of its perspective. Her essay covers topics as varied as corporatism, the French love for status and strikes, immigration, religion and secularism, populism and the role of intellectuals, Jacobinism, and the EU..."
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