In Virtue and the Promise of Conservatism, Bruce Frohnen attempts to rescue the essence of conservative virtue from rationalists and materialists of whatever political colour. He argues that we have lost and must attempt to regain the conservative good life and the outlook which made it possible. The tools needed to do that, according to Frohnen, are humility and political action aimed at combating the centralising and materialistic structures and beliefs interfering with the formation and retention of family, church and neighbourhood.
“A must-own title.” —National Review Online American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia is the first comprehensive reference volume to cover what is surely the most influential political and intellectual movement of the past half century. More than fifteen years in the making—and more than half a million words in length—this informative and entertaining encyclopedia contains substantive entries on those persons, events, organizations, and concepts of major importance to postwar American conservatism. Its contributors include iconic patriarchs of the conservative and libertarian movements, celebrated scholars, well-known authors, and influential movement activists and leaders. Ranging from “abortion” to “Zoll, Donald Atwell,” and written from viewpoints as various as those which have informed the postwar conservative movement itself, the encyclopedia’s more than 600 entries will orient readers of all kinds to the people and ideas that have given shape to contemporary American conservatism. This long-awaited volume is not to be missed.
Russell Kirk (1918–1994) is renowned worldwide as one of the founders of postwar American conservatism. His 1953 masterpiece, The Conservative Mind, became the intellectual touchstone for a reinvigorated movement and began a sea change in the nation's attitudes toward traditionalism. A prolific author and wise cultural critic, Kirk kept up a steady stream of correspondence with friends and colleagues around the globe, yet none of his substantial body of personal letters has ever been published—letters as colorful and intelligent as the man himself. In Imaginative Conservatism, James E. Person Jr. presents one hundred and ninety of Kirk's most provocative and insightful missives. Covering a period from 1940 to 1994, these letters trace Kirk's development from a shy, precocious young man to a public intellectual firm in his beliefs and generous with his time and resources when called upon to provide for refugees, the homeless, and other outcasts. This carefully annotated and edited collection includes correspondence between Kirk and figures such as T.S. Eliot, William F. Buckley Jr., Ray Bradbury, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Charlton Heston, Nikolai Tolstoy, Wendell Berry, Richard Nixon, and Herbert Hoover, among many others. Kirk's conservatism was not primarily political but moral and imaginative, focusing always on the relationship of the human soul in community with others and with the transcendent. Beyond the wealth of autobiographical information that this collection affords, it offers thought-provoking wisdom from one of the twentieth century's most influential interpreters of American politics and culture.
Emerging from two decades of the Great Depression and the New Deal and facing the rise of radical ideologies abroad, the American Right seemed beaten, broken, and adrift in the early 1950s. Although conservative luminaries such as T. S. Eliot, William F. Buckley Jr., Leo Strauss, and Eric Voegelin all published important works at this time, none of their writings would match the influence of Russell Kirk's 1953 masterpiece The Conservative Mind. This seminal book became the intellectual touchstone for a reinvigorated movement and began a sea change in Americans' attitudes toward traditionalism. In Russell Kirk, Bradley J. Birzer investigates the life and work of the man known as the founder of postwar conservatism in America. Drawing on papers and diaries that have only recently become available to the public, Birzer presents a thorough exploration of Kirk's intellectual roots and development. The first to examine the theorist's prolific writings on literature and culture, this magisterial study illuminates Kirk's lasting influence on figures such as T. S. Eliot, William F. Buckley Jr., and Senator Barry Goldwater—who persuaded a reluctant Kirk to participate in his campaign for the presidency in 1964. While several books examine the evolution of postwar conservatism and libertarianism, surprisingly few works explore Kirk's life and thought in detail. This engaging biography not only offers a fresh and thorough assessment of one of America's most influential thinkers but also reasserts his humane vision in an increasingly inhumane time.
For a century and a half, the artists and intellectuals of Europe have scorned the bourgeoisie. And for a millennium and a half, the philosophers and theologians of Europe have scorned the marketplace. The bourgeois life, capitalism, Mencken’s “booboisie” and David Brooks’s “bobos”—all have been, and still are, framed as being responsible for everything from financial to moral poverty, world wars, and spiritual desuetude. Countering these centuries of assumptions and unexamined thinking is Deirdre McCloskey’s The Bourgeois Virtues, a magnum opus that offers a radical view: capitalism is good for us. McCloskey’s sweeping, charming, and even humorous survey of ethical thought and economic realities—from Plato to Barbara Ehrenreich—overturns every assumption we have about being bourgeois. Can you be virtuous and bourgeois? Do markets improve ethics? Has capitalism made us better as well as richer? Yes, yes, and yes, argues McCloskey, who takes on centuries of capitalism’s critics with her erudition and sheer scope of knowledge. Applying a new tradition of “virtue ethics” to our lives in modern economies, she affirms American capitalism without ignoring its faults and celebrates the bourgeois lives we actually live, without supposing that they must be lives without ethical foundations. High Noon, Kant, Bill Murray, the modern novel, van Gogh, and of course economics and the economy all come into play in a book that can only be described as a monumental project and a life’s work. The Bourgeois Virtues is nothing less than a dazzling reinterpretation of Western intellectual history, a dead-serious reply to the critics of capitalism—and a surprising page-turner.
An acclaimed portrait of Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the origins of modern conservatism and liberalism In The Great Debate, Yuval Levin explores the roots of the left/right political divide in America by examining the views of the men who best represented each side at its origin: Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine. Striving to forge a new political path in the tumultuous age of the American and French revolutions, these two ideological titans sparred over moral and philosophical questions about the nature of political life and the best approach to social change: radical and swift, or gradual and incremental. The division they articulated continues to shape our political life today. Essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the basis of our political order and Washington's acrimonious rifts today, The Great Debate offers a profound examination of what conservatism, progressivism, and the debate between them truly amount to.
In his recent book Against Liberalism, philosopher John Kekes argued that liberalism as a political system is doomed to failure by its internal inconsistencies. In this companion volume, he makes a compelling case for conservatism as the best alternative. His is the first systematic description and defense of the basic assumptions underlying conservative thought.Conservatism, Kekes maintains, is concerned with the political arrangements that enable members of a society to live good lives. These political arrangements are based on skepticism about ideologies, pluralism about values, traditionalism about institutions, and pessimism about human perfectibility. The political morality of conservatism requires the protection of universal conditions of all good lives, social conditions that vary with societies, and individual conditions that reflect differences in character and circumstance. Good lives, according to Kekes, depend equally on pursuing possibilities that these conditions establish and on setting limits to their violations.Attempts to make political arrangements reflect these basic tenets of conservatism are unavoidably imperfect. Kekes concludes, however, that they represent a better hope for the future than any other possibility.
30th Anniversary Edition with a new introduction by Michael Federici! Throughout his career, whether as a man of letters, professor, soldier, journalist, novelist, or world traveler, Russell Kirk found himself in the thick of the intellectual controversies of his age. In The Politics of Prudence, his twenty-ninth book (and the last to be published during his lifetime), Kirk endeavors to defend a truly conservative "prudential politics," as opposed to the "ideological politics" now often advanced by self-identified conservatives and those with whom they are allied, including libertarians and neoconservatives. Kirk lays out, in separate chapters, ten principles, events, thinkers, and books that have defined and shaped the American conservative mind and heart. He also examines the difficulties posed for conservatives by increasing political and economic centralization, imprudent foreign policy, educational decline, and other symptoms of cultural decay.
The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot by Russell Kirk is arguably one of the greatest contributions to twentieth-century American Conservatism. Brilliant in every respect, from its conception to its choice of significant figures representing the history of intellectual conservatism, The Conservative Mind launched the modern American Conservative Movement. A must-read. (Abridged edition)
