“…[Kirk] located the mainstream of the American Founding not with the Jeffersonian Republicans, but with their rivals in the Federalist party. Kirk admired them not only as practical statesmen, but also as anti-revolutionary thinkers in their own right. As he put it, the Constitution they supported was both ‘the most successful conservative device in the history of the world’ and a ‘great monument’ to the Federalists.”

Throughout the semiquincentennial year celebrating America’s independence, The University Bookman will invite a range of writers and speakers to contribute to a series drawing upon Russell Kirk’s work on the American Revolution and the constitutional order it secured.

“The Federalist party, of course, is no more. It barely lasted past the fiftieth anniversary of American independence. But, as Russell Kirk demonstrated throughout his work, its conservative vision remains one of the most profound expressions of the meaning of the American Founding itself. Its adherents cannot simply be dismissed as retrograde aristocrats—they were patriots who understood that ‘order is the first need of all.’”

“How did this fifty-year period and 33-year separation shape West Berlin into a city? How did the identity of this city evolve over time from simply being the Allied stronghold in Communist territories into a flourishing city in its own right? And what were the limitations that this identity imposed on the city’s day-to-day existence and its local culture?”

“But there is nothing new about the ‘spiritual but not religious’ crowd: they are, in a certain, degraded sense, merely the spiritual and intellectual heirs of the occult revivalists who popped up in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries…”