In 1920 a group of writers gathered at the home of playwright Sidney Hirsch in Nashville for bi-weekly sessions of reading and dissecting each other’s prose and poetry. It was the beginning of an outpouring of creativity from a group that would try to defend and restore the traditional Southern way of life against the...
At first glance, the personal history of Whittaker Chambers does not suggest a conservative frame of mind. His favorite poet was Walt Whitman, the bard of unshackled emotion and free-verse effusions. The most influential novel in his life was Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, with its profound pity for the downtrodden. His chosen religion was the...
Two years after the death of the man whom one of his biographers, John Judis, dubbed the patron saint of modern conservatism, Encounter Books brought out a splendidly packaged omnibus volume of his columns and essays, entitled Athwart History: Half a Century of Polemics, Animadversions, and Illuminations (2010). On the cover, William Francis Buckley stands...
Among the 20th-century conservative movement’s legendary leaders, Willmoore Kendall (1909-1967) stands out as the one who most effectively offered a grounding in a specifically American philosophy. There is also a timeliness in this remarkable political scientist’s thought. Our society has become divided to an extent that Kendall might well have found horrifying—although not surprising. His...
H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) may no longer seem relevant, but that is not his fault. Mencken was a well-read bon vivant with a taste for Teutonic philosophy and a fidelity to what he understood as truth. He was also a brilliant satirist, a longtime writer for the Baltimore Sun, and editor of The American Mercury. His...
Native Southerner and traditionalist conservative, Richard Weaver (1910-1963) was a unique figure in the rise of the modern American right. Weaver, a longtime professor at the University of Chicago, was an historian, literary critic, and rhetorician who despised the modern trend towards intellectual specialization. As an undergraduate, he embraced socialism after being convinced that the...
As a conservative “anarchist” and non-interventionist with anti-vocational views on education, Albert Jay Nock (1870-1945) can seem paradoxical. His influence was lasting and he took unconventional stances on many topics. He viewed conservatism as primarily cultural, anarchism as radical decentralization, education as a non-economic activity, and foreign policy as a noninterventionist endeavor. Raised in Brooklyn...
It is hard to imagine anyone today having a career like Robert Nisbet’s: professor at Berkeley, Arizona, and Columbia; dean and vice-chancellor at the University of California, Riverside; author of widely used sociology textbooks; and co-founder, along with his friend Russell Kirk and a few others, of postwar intellectual American conservatism. Nisbet greatly admired Edmund...
Eugene Genovese was one of the most influential and controversial historians of his generation. Whether Genovese ever self-identified as a conservative remains an intriguing question, without a simple answer. Few people knew him better than I did. In his teens, Genovese, the son of a Brooklyn dockworker, had joined the Communist Party USA. It eventually...
Robert Lewis Dabney was an American theologian and seminary professor. He was also a philosopher who wrote extensively on cultural and political issues of the second half of the 19th century. In our own day, when there is much confusion over what defines conservative political theory, we would do well to look to the writings...
Anyone who met M. E. Bradford was unlikely to forget him. There was his imposing bulk and his Stetson cowboy hat, but that was just the trimming. This Oklahoman, long a fixture at the University of Dallas, radiated vast erudition, lightly worn and easily shared, often in colloquial language. He emitted goodwill and sparkling humor,...
Murray Rothbard, the principal founder of post-World War II American libertarianism, died 24 years ago. Lew Rockwell, one of Rothbard’s closest friends and the founder of the Mises Institute and LewRockwell.com, offers this description of his core ideas: If you want to understand Murray Rothbard, you need to keep one principle in mind…Murray believed in a...