The Necessity for a General Culture

“What Does Culture Mean?” From America’s British Culture, pp. 1–3 This slim book is a summary account of the culture that the people of the United States have inherited from Britain. Sometimes this is called the Anglo-Saxon culture—although it is not simply English,...

What Is All This?

Russell Kirk presented this lecture as the 1986 Commencement Address at La Lumiere School. Once upon a time I was seated in an automobile passing rapidly along the broad highway that runs between Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo. My companion in the back seat was the very...

The High Achievement of Christopher Dawson

A Historian and His Word: a Life of Christopher Dawson, 1889–1970 by Christina Scott. The Dynamic Character of Christian Culture: Essays on Dawsonian Themes edited by Peter J. Cataldo.“Years ago when I was an undergraduate your Ballad of the White Horse first brought...

Donald Davidson and the South’s Conservatism

From The Politics of Prudence Leviathan is a Hebrew word signifying “that which gathers itself in folds.” In the Old Testament, Leviathan is the great sea-beast: “Canst thou draw out leviathan with a hook?” In the 17th century, Thomas Hobbes—whom T.S. Eliot calls...

The Truth about Roy Campbell

An excerpt from The Sword of Imagination: Memoirs of a Half-Century of Literary Conflict (Wm. B. Eerdmans; Grand Rapids, Mich.; 1995) Another of Kirk’s friends of the Fifties, the lyric poet Roy Campbell, by accident went over an Iberian cliff, though he had survived...

The Moral Foundations of Economics

The following essay appears in the final chapter of Russell Kirk’s textbook Economics: Work and Prosperity (Pensacola, Fla.: A Beka Book Publications, 1989), pp. 365–368.Some people would like to separate economists from politics, but they are unable to do so. Another...