Russell Kirk and the Age of Ideology
Russell Kirk and the Age of Ideology

Author: W. Wesley McDonald

Publisher: University of Missouri Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 0826262589

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Russell Kirk, author of The Conservative Mind and A Program for Conservatives, has been regarded as one of the foremost figures of the post-World War II revival in conservative thought. While numerous commentators on contemporary political thought have acknowledged his considerable influence on the substance and direction of American conservatism, no analysis of his social and political writing has dealt extensively with the philosophical foundations of his work. In this provocative study, W. Wesley McDonald examines those foundations and demonstrates their impact on the conservative intellectual movement that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. Kirk played a pivotal role in drawing conservatism away from the laissez-faireprinciplesoflibertarianism and toward those of a traditional community grounded in a renewed appreciation of man's social and spiritual nature and the moral prerequisites of genuine liberty. In a humane social order, a community of spirit is fostered in which generations are bound together. According to Kirk, this link is achieved through moral and social norms that transcend the particularities of time and place and, because they form the basis of genuine civilized existence, can only be neglected at great peril. These norms, reflected in religious dogmas, traditions, humane letters, social habit and custom, and prescriptive institutions, create the sources of the true community that is the final end of politics. Although this study does not challenge Kirk's debts to a predominantly Catholic and Anglo-Catholic tradition of natural law, its focus is on his appeal to historical experience as the test of sound institutions. This aspect of his thought was essential to Kirk's understanding of moral, cultural, and aesthetic norms and can be seen in his responses to American humanists Paul Elmer More and Irving Babbitt and to English and American romantic literature.Russell Kirk and the Age of Ideology is particularly relevant because of the growing interest in Kirk's legacy and the current debate over the meaning of conservatism. McDonald addresses both of those developments in the context of examining Kirk's thought, attempting to correct some of the inadequacies contained in earlier studies that assess Kirk as a political thinker. This book will serve as a significant contribution to the commentary on this fascinating figure.

A Better World
A Better World

Author: William L. O'Neill

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-09-29

Total Pages: 378

ISBN-13: 1000159892

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This book chronicles the struggle among non-Communist leftists and liberals over American relations with the Soviet Union from 1939 through the 1950s. Few now care as passionately and as violently as people did then about Soviet-American relations. It was a time when friends became enemies, and others forged strange alliances, all in the name of commitments that today seem remote. A Better World evokes those times and their choices, and explains why these long-ago battles still arouse such deep feelings today - and should.Americans who were pro-Soviet without being members of the Communist party - 'progressives' as they called themselves - had a large emotional investment in the Soviet Union. From 1935 to 1939 literally millions joined the 'Popular Front' of pro-Soviet organizations. O'Neill takes us through the shock of the Stalin-Hitler pact of 1939, through the revival of the Popular Front spurred by government and business support after Russia entered the war against Hitler. He traces the isolation of the anti-Stalinists, the rise and fall of Henry Wallace, and the eclipse of progressivism. And he explores the shifting allegiances of intellectuals as they struggled, often with each other, to influence the course of public debate, with long-lasting consequences for American intellect, culture, and morals.As O'Neill observes in his introduction, 'More than any of my other books A Better World inspired correspondents to send me probing or reflective letters.' It was this response, along with the extraordinary critical debate spurred by initial publication of this volume, that makes the book's continuing importance clear. The dream of achieving a better world through radical violence never dies, and the willingness of apologists to cling to utopian visions persists. As long as it does, the lessons of this book need to be available to us.

God-Fearing and Free
God-Fearing and Free

Author: Jason W. Stevens

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2010-11-15

Total Pages: 449

ISBN-13: 0674055551

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Religion has been on the rise in America for decades—which strikes many as a shocking new development. To the contrary, Jason Stevens asserts, the rumors of the death of God were premature. Americans have always conducted their cultural life through religious symbols, never more so than during the Cold War. In God-Fearing and Free, Stevens discloses how the nation, on top of the world and torn between grandiose self-congratulation and doubt about the future, opened the way for a new master narrative. The book shows how the American public, powered by a national religious revival, was purposefully disillusioned regarding the country’s mythical innocence and fortified for an epochal struggle with totalitarianism. Stevens reveals how the Augustinian doctrine of original sin was refurbished and then mobilized in a variety of cultural discourses that aimed to shore up democratic society against threats preying on the nation’s internal weaknesses. Suddenly, innocence no longer meant a clear conscience. Instead it became synonymous with totalitarian ideologies of the fascist right or the communist left, whose notions of perfectability were dangerously close to millenarian ideals at the heart of American Protestant tradition. As America became riddled with self-doubt, ruminations on the meaning of power and the future of the globe during the “American Century” renewed the impetus to religion. Covering a wide selection of narrative and cultural forms, Stevens shows how writers, artists, and intellectuals, the devout as well as the nonreligious, disseminated the terms of this cultural dialogue, disputing, refining, and challenging it—effectively making the conservative case against modernity as liberals floundered.

Conservatives Against Capitalism
Conservatives Against Capitalism

Author: Peter Kolozi

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2017-08-08

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 0231544618

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Few beliefs seem more fundamental to American conservatism than faith in the free market. Yet throughout American history, many of the major conservative intellectual and political figures have harbored deep misgivings about the unfettered market and its disruption of traditional values, hierarchies, and communities. In Conservatives Against Capitalism, Peter Kolozi traces the history of conservative skepticism about the influence of capitalism on politics, culture, and society. Kolozi discusses conservative critiques of capitalism—from its threat to the Southern way of life to its emasculating effects on American society to the dangers of free trade—considering the positions of a wide-ranging set of individuals, including John Calhoun, Theodore Roosevelt, Russell Kirk, Irving Kristol, and Patrick J. Buchanan. He examines the ways in which conservative thought went from outright opposition to capitalism to more muted critiques, ultimately reconciling itself to the workings and ethos of the market. By analyzing the unaddressed historical and present-day tensions between capitalism and conservative values, Kolozi shows that figures regarded as iconoclasts belong to a coherent tradition, and he creates a vital new understanding of the American conservative pantheon.

History, Historians, and Conservatism in Britain and America
History, Historians, and Conservatism in Britain and America

Author: Reba Soffer

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 0199208115

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Reba Soffer examines the subjects, motives, and origins of conservative historians who were also successful public intellectuals. Providing a comprehensive account of the content, context, and consequences of conservative ideas, Soffer explains their dominance in Britain and marginalization in America until the Reagan ascendancy.

Transplantings
Transplantings

Author: Peter Viereck

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-09-08

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 1351321382

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On being told that translation is an impossible thing, Anatole France replied: precisely, my friend; the recognition of that truth is a necessary preliminary to success in art. The task of Transplantings is to add flesh and bones to that familiar quip. Indeed, Daniel Weissbort notes that Viereck's study represented a sixty-five year long project. Now, it is finally being brought to print in its full form, with the completion of the final manuscript shortly before Viereck's death.If translation is a special genre in its own right, the translation of poetry, especially from major foreign languages, is a special subset of that genre. What emerges in the imperfect act of translation is an aesthetic dimension that Viereck considers unique in its own right. Transplantings provides new insight into Viereck as a poet of substance, but more than that as a public intellectual. He is critical in probing the work of the major figures such as Stefan George and Georg Heym. To round out this monumental new look at German poetical history, Viereck reviews Goethe, Novalis, and Rilke among others.For Viereck, the difference between the poetical and the political is critical. The quality of poetry is not measured by politics, nor can the worth of political action be defined by commitment to the poetical. The experience of German thought, as well as French and Italian efforts, reveals a divide that can be narrowed but hardly bridged by rhetoric. Transplantings does not simplify the task of the reader. Rather it shows without doubt that the passion of great poetry is part of a national tradition. Efforts at translation indicate how such poetry becomes part of an international culture. This is a major work by one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century. It merits reading, and then, re-reading.

Lionel Trilling and the Critics
Lionel Trilling and the Critics

Author: John Rodden

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 1999-01-01

Total Pages: 546

ISBN-13: 9780803239227

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Lionel Trilling and the Critics provides a comprehensive portrait of Lionel Trilling, perhaps the most influential American cultural critic of the twentieth century. The contributors are a who?s who of Anglo-American intellectuals from the 1930s through the 1970s. They include Edmund Wilson, Robert Penn Warren, F. R. Leavis, Leslie Fiedler, R. W. B. Lewis, R. P. Blackmur, Irving Howe, Irving Kristol, Raymond Williams, Norman Podhoretz, Gertrude Himmelfarb, William Barrett, Bruno Bettelheim, Gerald Graff, and Cornel West.