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.

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.”

Marxism and the Rising Generation

“Gonzalez and Gorka have performed an important service in bringing together a wide range of fact and theory and in establishing a coherent line stretching directly from Marx through many important figures to the present day.”

Cracking the Code to Civilization

“In a world flooded with online influencers, ‘red pill’ rhetoric, and algorithmic posturing, Newell offers something older, wiser, and far superior: a code of manliness rooted in the Western tradition of virtue, character, and service. His message is that true manliness is not a pose or performance; it is the integration of moral and intellectual excellence, what he calls ‘the manly heart.’”

France and the Problem of Abstraction

“…French people’s love for ideas, indeed for ideology, often puts them at odds with the pragmatic requisites of a mature democracy and with reality itself. France is, as she very aptly puts it, ‘a country of dreamers who fall into melancholy when reality catches up with them.’ But far from being merely a psychological explanation for French unhappiness, this idealism is the key to a political understanding of our complicated relationship with the very principle of democracy.”

The Best Form of Government

Politics being the art of the possible, I venture to suggest here the general lineaments of the kind of government which seems reasonably consonant with true human happiness. I think that in this problem we need to refer to two principles. The first principle is that...

Kirk in the 1950s

We have new posts of several articles of Russell Kirk in the online archive, including four from the 1950s. Kirk covers topics including tradition, revolution, the age of boredom (addressing themes that later became Eliot and His Age), and "The Inhumane Businessman."...

The Inhumane Businessman

“A man is seldom more innocently occupied than when he is engaged in making money,” said Dr. Samuel Johnson. But he may be cheating himself, says an observer of modern American money-makers.American businessmen are inhumane. I do not mean that they are inhuman; they...

Friedrich Gentz on Revolutions

A little book forgotten for a century and a half, Gentz’s Origin and Principles of the American Revolution, compared with the Origin and Principles of the French Revolution, has recently been reprinted in the United States. For the revolutions of our own century have...

English Letters in the Age of Boredom

Some day I shall write a book with the title The Age of Eliot. The span of Mr. T. S. Eliot’s life, extending from the ascendancy of President Cleveland and Lord Salisbury to our present troubled hour, has been characterized by as much material change as any age in the...

What Are American Traditions?

Everyone seems to be enthusiastic about tradition nowadays—especially the people who denounce most things established in morals and politics. Professor Henry Steele Commager thinks that the great American tradition is a tradition of doubting everything; Mr. E. V....

June Chesterton Centennial

The Kirk Center is pleased to join the G. K. Chesterton Institute for Faith & Culture to co-sponsor a conference on the theme of “What’s Wrong With the World,” a centenary celebration of the publication of G. K. Chesterton’s book. The conference will be held in...

Intercollegiate Review on Kirk

To commemorate the 16th anniversary of the death of Russell Kirk on April 29, we would like to highlight the new archives of the Intercollegiate Review, particularly the 1994 commemorative issue on Russell Kirk, featuring essays from several noted writers and friends...

Books in Little

Authority Not Majority: The Life and Times of Friedrich Julius Stahl by Ruben Alvarado (Wordbridge Publishing, 134 pp.) Principles of Law by Friedrich Julius Stahl, ed. and trans. Ruben Alvarado (Wordbridge Publishing, 140 pp.) Alvarado’s two volumes make available...

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..."

Cracking the Code to Civilization
@CliffordBates12 on "The Code of Man: Love, Courage, Pride, Family, Country" (2nd Edition) by @waller_newell

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