For a long time after “modern” first came into the language, it was an innocuous little word, the simple opposite of “ancient,” and insofar as it had connotations, they were not very good ones. Shakespeare always used it to mean “commonplace,” with strong suggestions of the slipshod and the second-rate. The Enlightenment and the French...
This book is a collection of largely reprinted material (with revisions in some cases) and a couple of original essays. Its nine chapters cover (according to section titles) “the Catholic human rights revolution,” “peace and economy, again,” and “the life of the mind.” The expected repetitions are sometimes distracting if one reads the book straight...
Of the making of books there is no end, Ecclesiastes has it. Of the making of books about the making of books there is also a perennial flow. The shelves of a well-stocked bookstore are sure to include dozens of titles on freeing the trapped writer within, on finding one’s voice, on creating that winning...
Those who know anything of contemporary scholarship or the political philosophy of Edmund Burke know that Peter J. Stanlis clearly holds the title of “Dean of Burke Studies.” While Russell Kirk ushered in the return to Burke in America, it is Stanlis who has, more than any other scholar, sustained the revival of Burke scholarship....
Mr. Navrozov is a serious man and his political concerns, no matter how improbable they may appear, must be taken seriously. He believes, first, what has been happening in the Soviet Union since March 1985, namely its visible decomposition, is a KGB disinformation achievement, that the “collapse of communism” (he puts the phrase in quotation...
“Culture, with us, ends in headache.” —R.W. Emerson While the state of American—in fact of Western—society today is probably unique in human history, it is in some ways the inverse of the situation that prevailed at the end of the Roman Empire, when the barbarians had Roman citizenship extended to them without their ever becoming...
“Canst thou draw out leviathan with a hook?” —Job 41:1 No idea is more central to the American political tradition than that of limited government. As a nation we began with our commitment to the liberty of commonwealths, of communities, and of citizens. When we collectively rejected the remote, arbitrary, and potentially hostile power that,...
Suddenly everybody is writing about Lyndon Johnson—Robert Caro, Robert Dallek, Joseph Califano: holding the late President’s lanky carcass up to the light, prodding and poking to see what the man was made of. The political pathologists differ among themselves. Caro, in two volumes, with two more due, has virtually nothing good to say about his...
“What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honor.” —Psalm 8:4-5 Ellis Sandoz’s new book is of such importance to us in our intellectually disoriented day as...
“Man was wade of social earth.” —R.W. Emerson Ever since Frederika MacDonald published her massive two-volume work, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: A New Study in Criticism (1905), scholars favorably disposed toward Rousseau have pursued the difficult task of rehabilitating him from the “audacious historical fraud” perpetuated by Frederic- Melchior Grimm, Denis Diderot, and Mme. d’Epinay. On the...
The “free and open exchange of ideas” lies at the very heart of what was once called, in more innocent times, liberal education. These days, the American university is the last place to look for that unhindered flow of thought. Instead, as books like John Ellis’s Against Deconstruction, Dinesh D’Souza’s overstated Illiberal Education, Roger Kimball’s...
When Albert Jay Nock died in 1945, American civilization had known saner times. Having just conquered the world through the Final Deal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the new colossus had a growing appetite, undaunted-by expanse or expense. It was something on the order of: Today the earth, tomorrow the universe! The author of Our Enemy,...
Frank Kermode began his excellent review of this fat and feisty volume with a statement that is at once factual and wildly misleading: “Sir Victor Pritchett is a Victorian.” To be sure, Pritchett was born in 1900, when the Good Queen still sat on the throne and the sun never set on the empire, a...
This latest installment in Paul Hollander’s series of exposes of left-liberal thinking has a broader perspective than his previous work. His first book, Political Pilgrims, and subsequent writings focused on the affinity of Western liberals for communist states vis-a-vis the United States. Now, with the Cold War over and communism discredited, the real motive of...
He was unknown and disregarded during the whole of his short life and for years thereafter. But fortune relented. Gerard Manley Hopkins, dead for 30 years, was provided with an editor who had known, admired, and loved him and who had preserved the body of his work until he felt the time was ripe. Once...
“Human rights are fictions—but fictions with highly specific properties.” —Alasdair MacIntyre In 1960 John Courtney Murray, S.J., warned of the possibility that America was slipping into a new barbarism. In his best known work, We Hold These Truths, Father Murray said that barbarism “threatens when men cease to talk together according to reasonable laws.” Argument...
From one point of view, Who Owns the Children? is a manifesto of educational freedom, an exhaustively researched broadside aimed at the pseudo-academic pretensions of our federal and state governments. Starting from the premise that all instruction is by its very nature religious, since it necessarily springs from certain assumptions about man and the universe,...
Terry Teachout was a clumsy, nearsighted teacher’s pet who grew up in Sikeston, Missouri, population 17,431—”A Community That Works!” as its boosters trumpet. Teachout stumbled through Little League and Boy Scouts, he tells us in his memoir, and distinguished himself in school as “the very worst kind of Goody Two-Shoes.” He carried an olive-drab briefcase...
Over the last three decades Fred Chappell has been steadily accumulating both an enviable publishing record—he has some twenty novels and collections of poems and stories to his credit—and a well-deserved reputation as one of the South’s foremost men of letters. His latest book of short fictions, the aptly tided More Shapes Than One, may...
A few months after the close of the American Civil War there was a brief but intense and interesting correspondence between Lord Acton, the European historian of liberty, and General R.E. Lee, hero of the defeated Confederacy, on the issues of the war. In the course of this correspondence Acton commented that Appomattox had been...
“Self, self, has half filled Hell.” —Scottish Proverb James Lincoln Collier is the descendant of well-to-do New Englanders, mill-owners “who lived in a grand house on a hill, overlooking a row of . . . the cottages of the- workers [they] . . . employed.” Nevertheless, his new book—which could as well be called The...
Throughout his long life, Henry Miller (1891-1980) wrote a handful of good books, among them The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (1945), in which the prodigal son and narrator returns from self-imposed exile in France to tour his native United States by automobile, and Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (1956), a back-to-the-land meditation that prefigured...
“I don’t know where democracy will end, but it can’t end in a quiet old age.” —Klemens von Metternich Rowland Evans and Robert Novak were among the first political commentators to designate the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan a watershed date in American political history. From their perspective in 1981, “What was so quickly started...
Despite Stanley L. Jaki’s distinguished and protean career, his books are not often reviewed in our most prominent cultural journals. The best response of the progressive scientistic establishment seems to be to ignore his work as much as possible, in the hope that such neglect will doom it. Books by feminist witches. New Age gurus,...
He arrived at the highest seat of power late in life, after a career that most considered inappropriate for a world leader. He consolidated his popularity by the successful invasion of a small island. Although his influence on the structure of government was momentous, he was mocked as sleepy and forgetful. His enemies said his...
There are two—equally indispensable—Paul Fussells: one is the erudite professor of English (at the University of Pennsylvania) who is the author of such brilliant studies as The Great War and Modern Memory; the other is the scalding critic of American pretension who writes such astute books as Class: A Guide Through the American Status System....
I remember having dinner with John Singlaub shortly after he retired from the Army. The Young Americans for Freedom chapter at the University of Tennessee, of which I was president, had invited him to speak on campus. Singlaub had gained considerable notoriety for having been fired as Chief of Staff of the U.N. Command and...
“Newspapers have degenerated, they may now be absolutely relied upon.” —Oscar Wilde It is 36 years since the gaseous incorporeal soul of Henry Louis Mencken, summoned before the throne of Him in Whom he for 76 years had expressed unbelief, presumably uttered the words the fleshly Mencken had rehearsed for such unlikely occasion: “Gentlemen, I...
“Nature, which is the time-vesture of God and reveals Him to the wise, hides Him from the foolish.” —Thomas Carlyle I don’t believe I realized, until I began reading up on the subject of Deep Ecology, how far the rot of despair and self-loathing has penetrated the Western world. Multiculturalism as an expression of the...
That Presidents—chief magistrates of the nation—ought to possess solid character was taken for granted in the early Republic and for a long time thereafter. No longer is this the case. Character comes up for discussion mainly when someone like Gary Hart, caught with his pants down, throws the political odds-makers into a sudden tizzy. Even...
“Money is human happiness in the abstract; he who can no longer enjoy happiness in the concrete devotes himself entirely to money.” —Schopenhauer The Lewis Lapham story, as recounted in his earlier books, Fortune’s Child and Money and Class in America, is that of a rich boy who, having been exposed as a reporter to...
This is an important and optimistic book, and the fact that it has been published by a major secular publishing house perhaps bears out the author’s thesis that Western culture is ripe for a major spiritual revival. On one level, After Ideology is another statement of the now familiar “bankruptcy of secular liberalism” idea that...
On the fringes of most American towns of more than fifty thousand inhabitants lies an odd no-man’s-land. Rarely more than a few blocks long, this zone—identical in every region of the country—sports a complement of gogo bars, topless clubs, pawn shops, liquor stores, a video arcade or two, check-cashing joints, and barely disguised houses of...
This slender volume—it embodies the 33 rd of the Mercer University Lamar Memorial Lectures—is most welcome. The topic is a matter of broad interest, and the author knows his stuff. As scholar and critic, professor and editor, Fred Hobson is a respected authority, one to be alertly attended. He doesn’t let us down. He wants...
In the ancient world no one could talk or read too much about philosophy. Wealthy Athenian nobles, Plato and Xenophon, for instance—even Roman emperors, like Marcus Aurelius—lived for the hours they could devote to philosophical discourse. The pagan’s conversion to philosophy was as important to him as conversion to Christ was for a Christian. When...
In 1920, when Rose Wilder Lane met Dorothy Thompson, Lane was 33 and working in Paris, writing publicity stories for the American Red Cross. She had started out in California at the San Francisco Bulletin; written biographies of Herbert Hoover, Henry Ford, and Jack London; and she would go on to be one of the...
American liberals have long been troubled by a sinister force lurking in our society, namely conservatism. Albert O. Hirschman’s motive in writing The Rhetoric of Reaction is to explain this phenomenon to his fellow liberals. He refrains from psychoanalyzing conservatism; instead, he argues that conservatives, regardless of personal quirks, are bound to certain forms of...
The landscape of American fiction is a bleak and dreary place these days. It wends through the somber back lots and blue highways of rural America, tends toward the grimy streets of crumbling cities, populated by somewhat dim and desperate characters whose main goal seems to be making it to another day. Call it realism,...
“Contrary to widespread belief, evidence is accumulating that Western democracy is in continuous and serious decline,” writes Claes Ryn in the opening of this eloquent, concise, and hard-hitting manifesto that goes immediately to the heart of our times. “Many commentators proclaim democracy’s triumph over evil political forces in the world and hold up today’s Western...
“It is not merely that speeches, statistics, and records of every kind must be constantly brought up to date in order to show that the predictions of the Party were in all cases right. It is also that no change in doctrine or in political alignment can ever be admitted.” —George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four Harry...
There is nothing else like the careening prose of Sir Kingsley Amis. Somehow his syntax, his diction, and his tone have a way of collapsing in sync, so that the reader is left lurching in an air pocket of laughter. I have long thought Amis to be the funniest writer in the English-speaking world, and...
“There is a kind of revolution of so general a character that it changes the tastes as well as the fortunes of the world.” —La Rochefoucauld There is a popular myth of Abraham Lincoln, our 16th President, that is known to most Americans. According to the orthodox version of this highly sympathetic construct, Lincoln was...
Memory and testimony have kept alive the reputation of Fernando de Lucia, and so have the four hundred recordings that tenor made between 1902 and 1921. His old discs- Gramophone and Typewriters, Fonotipias, and Phonotypes—are among the most fascinating of historical recordings. What they suggest about the man and his context has inspired Michael Henstock...
“The curious have observed that the progress of humane literature (like the sun) is from the East to the West. . .” —Nathaniel Ames As both a reality and an interpretive problem, the American West has retained its long-established hold on the attention of our scholars. And the same is true of Western American literature:...
The heroic age of modern poetry has been over for some time. The learned reactionaries who shaped it for two generations have all been dead for many years: Eliot (1965) and Pound (1972), Valéry (1945) and Claudel (1955), Ungaretti (1970) and Montale (1981). Diverse in style and technique, the great modernists were all ambitious in...
Elected Provost of King’s College, Cambridge, in his 30’s and subsequently Vice-Chancellor of the University of London, Lord Annan is a delightful person who has given us a delightful book of scintillating erudition that ranges far beyond the confines of its subtitle. Indeed, there can hardly be a single English intellectual of significance in this...
“He was just five years old when Mattie Barry, seeking a fresh start in life, moved north with her son and two older daughters to Memphis. . . . Her husband had been killed a year earlier in Itta Bena. Neither Marion Barry, Jr., nor his mother, who now lives in Memphis, will talk about...
“Vae victims” Perhaps because it is itself so completely ahistorical, the left has a great need for history, which it proceeds to squeeze with the fiendish rapacity it would attribute to the Tropicana fruit juice corporation. Of the three books under review here, all purportedly of a historical nature, only one of them—David Henige’s—really is...
Jacques Barzun, for nearly half a century, has been telling us what is wrong with our schools and what we might do to improve them. This he continues to do in his most recent book, Begin Here. Pointing out that American schools have long been bad and are getting worse; that from grade school through...
“Why did God let my puppy die?” —Anonymous “The first thing to understand is that we are all practical atheists,” Stanley Hauerwas once declared in a phone conversation. “So when we ask, ‘Why does a good God allow bad things to happen to good people?’ what we really mean is, ‘Why doesn’t modern medicine cure...