RIP Irving Louis Horowitz

by | Apr 16, 2012

The Kirk Center and The University Bookman regret the passing of sociologist Irving Louis Horowitz, who died in March. Recipient of many accolades, Horowitz was a sociologist of wide-ranging interests, from religionto analysis of state power and social order in...

Grounding the Life of the Mind

by | Apr 9, 2012

Blue Collar Intellectuals: When the Enlightened and the Everyman Elevated America by Daniel J. Flynn. ISI Books (Wilmington, DE), 2011. 187 pp., $28 clothThe Great Books approach to education, promoted by one of the subjects of this book, Mortimer Adler, is noble in...

A Thundering Paradox of a Life

by | Apr 2, 2012

George F. Kennan: An American Life by John Lewis Gaddis. New York: The Penguin Press. 2011. 784 pp. $40. William Manchester in his acclaimed biography of Douglas MacArthur, American Caesar, introduced his subject as a “thundering paradox of a man.” The same could be...

Man, Proud Man

by | Mar 25, 2012

Liberalism: A Counter-History by Domenico Losurdo, translated by Gregory Elliott. London and New York: Verso Books, 2011. Pages viii+375. $35. Paradox and irony immediately confront the historian of liberalism. Commonly understood as the tradition of political thought...

On Being a Basel Professor

by | Mar 25, 2012

On Essays and LettersIn Walter Kaufmann’s chronology of Nietzsche’s life, under 1889, it states briefly, that “Nietzsche becomes insane early in January in Turin.” Insanity, evidently, is no impediment to writing letters. Chesterton said that the maniac was the man...

Defining the Middle East

by | Mar 18, 2012

The Coming Revolution: Struggle for Freedom in the Middle East. By Walid Phares. Threshold Editions, 2010. Cloth, 400 pages, $26“Revolution is coming to Middle Earth.” So wrote Dr. Walid Phares prophetically and appropriately on July 4, 2010, in the afterword of his...

The Art of Intimacy

by | Mar 18, 2012

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...

Undoing the Ties that Bind

by | Mar 11, 2012

Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 by Charles Murray. New York: Crown Forum, 2012, 416 pp., hardcover, $27. In America, it is currently difficult to define what it means to be an American. Not anecdotally, as in “what does it mean to you?” or “what...

What Holds America Together?

by | Mar 11, 2012

The Roots of American Order by Russell Kirk. La Salle, Illinois: Open Court Publishing Company, 1974. [Revised edition: ISI 2003, 534 pages]The President of a great American university told me not long ago that most of his students shared the opinion of Mr. Henry...

Kirk in Time

by | Mar 7, 2012

In an article in the February 13, 2012 TIME magazine, “The Conservative Identity Crisis,” the author says that “modern conservatism was born in the early 1950s” when “a young writer named Russell Kirk unearthed a rich philosophical tradition going back to British...