 |
 |
|
|
|
||
[A]ll the enduring institutions which human societies have attained have been reached, not of a set design and forethought of some group of statesmen, but of that unbidden and uncoerced consequence of many thoughts and wills in succeeding generations, to which, as it obeys no single guiding hand, one may give the name of ‘drifting.’ [...]
Filed under: Conservatism
TAC is hiring, and while we already have an impressive constellation of candidates, from highly skilled young graduates to several big names within the world of traditional conservatism, we’re eager to give as wide an array of contenders as possible a chance to join us. This is a pivotal time for conservatives: as the painful [...]
Filed under: Conservatism, magazines
Todd Seavey has a surprising, if not altogether implausible, idea: “If Buckley had outlived the 2008 presidential campaign, I could imagine he might even have become an ardent Ron Paul fan in time, which would have helped speed the right’s education along immensely. He was anti-Iraq War, after all.” Well, John Derbyshire in 2007 also [...]
Filed under: Conservatism, Politics, Ron Paul
On Monday, July 18, one of the titans of postwar American conservative scholarship died. Peter Stanlis was a key figure in the revival of interest in Edmund Burke in the 1950s, and his Edmund Burke and the Natural Law was a powerful influence on Russell Kirk and other traditionalist thinkers. Stanlis also devoted much study [...]
Filed under: Conservatism, the dead
Last week I discussed “prodigal conservatives” — prodigal in both senses of the term — with the Daily Paul’s Kurt Wallace. Listen here.
Filed under: Conservatism, Elections, Politics, Ron Paul
My note on @TAC about Reagan’s centenary already links to my review of William F. Buckley Jr.’s The Reagan I Knew. Here I’ll also tout my review of John Patrick Diggins’s Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History, a piece that ran in Reason a few years back. Here’s a preview: There’s a [...]
Filed under: Books, Conservatism, Politics, World
Samuel Huntington’s “Conservatism as an Ideology” is still a pretty good roadmap to how conservatism is conceptualized in the United States. There are basically three approaches: one roots conservatism in the specific circumstances — the class structures and institutions — of Europe’s ancien regime; a second attaches conservatism to natural law or some other transcendent [...]
Filed under: Conservatism
I’ve lately been reading Pierre Manent’s Intellectual History of Liberalism, a brief but dazzling book that I highly recommend — it’s the clearest and most persuasive account of the “Straussian” interpretation of liberalism that I’ve come across, with Manent’s Thomistic Catholicism compensating for the more dubious elements of Strauss. A 125-page book that covers Machiavelli, [...]
Filed under: Books, Conservatism, Philosophy
About two years ago I was asked to contribute to a volume of essays on seminal 20th-century American conservative thinkers. My assignment was Willmoore Kendall, the “wild Yale don” (as Dwight Macdonald called him) known, among other things, for his defiantly populist commitment to majority rule. When Bill Buckley quipped that he’d rather be ruled [...]
Filed under: Books, Conservatism, Liberty, Philosophy
My piece on the subject for Shalom, the newsletter of the Jewish Peace Fellowship, is now online here. (Scroll to p. 9.)
Filed under: Conservatism