Santayana’s Liberty

The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy and Character and Opinion in the United States by George Santayana, edited by James Seaton. Yale University Press, 2009. Paper, 240 pp. $16.This volume contains in full the two title works of George Santayana (1863–1952) as...
Modern Flaws and Lasting Norms

Modern Flaws and Lasting Norms

Enemies of the Permanent Things: Observations of Abnormity in Literature and Politics, by Russell Kirk. New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1969 [Open Court 1999]. Russell Kirk remains consistently one of the most interesting American defenders of the conservative...

On What Knowledge Pertains To

On Essays and LettersIn tightly reasoned and intricate books, especially those of great writers, we find short segments that we do well to spell out as short essays of our own. A thing is never ours unless we state it, articulate it. The great Platonic teaching is...

The Dark Ages of the Enlightenment

The Brave New World of the Enlightenment by Louis I. Bredvold. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961. 164 pp. Fifteen years ago, Louis I. Bredvold noted that Carl Becker’s The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers needed badly to be rewritten....

Significance and Missteps

Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy: The Making of GKC, 1874–1908 by William Oddie. Oxford University Press (Oxford) ix + 401 pp., $50.00 cloth, $29.95 paper, 2008.The poet David Jones once called one’s formative period “the years of becoming.” William Oddie...

Wilhelm Roepke and the ‘Third Road’

The enormous span of Wilhelm Roepke’s interests and writings complicates the task of doing justice to his thought within the confines of an essay. Hence, I have elected to focus on just one aspect of his approach and of his philosophy, but one that has proved to be...

Democracy’s Immoderate Friends

A conversation with Daniel J. Mahoney.The University Bookman is pleased to present this interview with Daniel J. Mahoney, Professor of Political Science at Assumption College in Worcester, Massachusetts, and author of a recent book, The Conservative Foundations of the...
The Merging of Cultures

The Merging of Cultures

The West in Russia and China by Donald W. Treadgold. Volume 1, Russia 1472–1917, xxx + 324 pp. Volume 2, China 1582–1949, xxi + 251 pp. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1973. This work is an extraordinary undertaking. One scholar working by himself traces the...

The Public Responsibilities of Known American Poets

Recently, Forbes magazine attempted to measure the effect of Ruth Lilly’s $185 million bequest to the Poetry Foundation. That foundation, which publishes Poetry magazine, claims that it reached 19 million new poetry readers last year. John Barr, its president, a poet...

The Great Historian of Culture

A Historian and His World: A Life of Christopher Dawson by Christina Scott. With a new introduction by Russell Kirk, and a postscript by Christopher Dawson: “Memories of a Victorian Childhood.” Transaction Books, New Brunswick, New Jersey, [1984] 1991.Christopher...