Old Roads and Montesquieu’s Library

by | Sep 25, 2011

On Essays and LettersStudents of mine travel. Not a few of them manage to send me a note or a card, especially when they run across something they read in class or something they thought Schall would enjoy seeing. “I am currently in France,” a recently graduated...

A Child’s Imagination is a Terrible Thing to Waste

by | Sep 25, 2011

Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child by Anthony Esolen (ISI Books, November 2010), 320 pp., $26.95.“A good book is a dangerous thing. . . . It carries within it the possibility . . . of cracking open the shell of routine that prevents us from seeing the...

And the Tragedy Continues

by | Sep 18, 2011

Symposium: Conservatism and EmpireTen years on, September 11 is a tragedy that continues to break hearts. Family and friends continue to mourn loved ones whose lives were cut short. Many, many Americans mourn the loss of our long and closely held illusion that our...

How the GOP swallowed the Conservative Movement

by | Sep 18, 2011

Symposium: Conservatism and EmpireThe state of “American conservatism” can be fully appreciated by turning on FOX News and then listening to Karl Rove, Sean Hannity, or Bill Kristol present their customary civics lesson. One supposedly becomes a conservative by...

Empire and the Crisis of American Conservatism

by | Sep 18, 2011

Symposium: Conservatism and EmpireConservatism is the will to remain true to type, so American conservatism is a preference for America to remain American. In most ways that makes it a conservatism like any other. America is a particular society, and as such connects...

Metternich vs. McEmpire

by | Sep 18, 2011

Symposium: Conservatism and EmpireConservatism is poorly understood in the United States. It is not right-wing liberalism or nationalism; nor is it political Protestantism. It has nothing to do with a neurotic longing for an ideal past, and reactionaries who insist...

Love and Evil in Nazi Germany

by | Sep 11, 2011

In the Garden of Beasts by Eric Larsen (Crown, 2011). 464 pages, $26. In the Garden of Beasts features William E. Dodd, the American ambassador posted to Nazi Germany from 1933 through the end of 1937. Dodd, a 64-year-old University of Chicago history professor, was...

First Principles: Remedy for a Nation at Risk

by | Sep 11, 2011

This April occurs the tenth anniversary of the now historic educational report A Nation at Risk. A flurry of activity from educators, editors, and legislators came as a result of that document, which stated “The ideal of academic excellence as the primary goal of...

rak variety

by | Sep 1, 2011

A “conservative character [is] suspicious of doctrinaire alteration, respectful toward history, preferring variety over uniformity, acknowledging a moral order composed of human persons, not of mere political and economic atoms subservient to the state.”

Updated Kirk Bibliography

by | Sep 1, 2011

A second edition of our archivist Charles C. Brown’s Russell Kirk: A Bibliography has been released by ISI Books, fully revised and updated. There is a kind review by James Heiser at The New American.