A Philosopher of Ordinary Language

Wittgenstein: From Mysticism to Ordinary Language by Russell Nieli. SUNY Press 1987, 261 pp., $32 paper. One of the persistent themes of the Enlightenment was the need to simplify philosophy, to disentangle it from the rhetoric and methods of scholasticism, and to...

The Household Gods of Freedom

John Randolph of Roanoke: A Study in American Politics by Russell Kirk. Third ed., with select letters & speeches. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1978. [Fourth edition, 1997, cloth $24, paper $14.50.] For Southerners of my antique persuasion, Russell Kirk’s John...

What Is Happening to History?

In 1979 millions of Americans will have spent twenty-three to twenty-six years (about one-third of their expectable lifespan) in schools without having had a single history course. During the late Sixties the majority of colleges and universities abandoned all history...

Belloc’s Social Thought

Hilaire Belloc, Edwardian Radical by John P. McCarthy. Liberty Press, 1978 [IHS Press, 2009, 373 pages.] To have known someone very intimately and loved him very dearly is not a good qualification for making a useful judgment of his work. Under these limitations, not...
Uncanny Tales of the Moral Imagination

Uncanny Tales of the Moral Imagination

The Princess of All Lands by Russell Kirk. Arkham House Publishers, Sauk City, Wisconsin 53583. 1979. 238 pages. $8.95. [The stories from this volume are included in Ancestral Shadows (Eerdmans 2004), Kirk’s collected ghostly tales. —Ed.] On the surface, these are...

The Art of Intimacy

The Literary Correspondence of Donald Davidson and Allen Tate edited by John Tyree Fain and Thomas Daniel Young. Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1974. $15.00 Of those sources ordinarily consulted by literary historians and critics, letters are surely among...