Chilton Williamson, Jr.’s column “Pragmatic Destruction” (What’s Wrong With the World, December 2011) attacks American democracy with a vengeance. He seems to be bothered by the fact that Southern blacks were “freed” (his quotation marks) by civil-rights laws through the negation of “states’ rights” (my quotation marks). I don’t see how restricting a certain class...
267 search results for: Tocqueville
Cannibal Statistics
In debate, it is always possible to be right for the wrong reason. For instance, in supporting the proposition that cannibalism is immoral, I might argue that, historically, cannibalism encouraged the killing of human beings who might otherwise have been kidnapped by Arabs or rival African tribesmen and sold ...
Republicanism, Monarchy, and the Human Scale of Politics
The Founding Fathers had to face hard and unprecedented questions about the size and scale of a political order. They occupied a vast region, and conventional wisdom said that such could only be governed by monarchy. They were determined to be republicans, however, and the conventional wisdom was that republics had to be small. The...
Essay: The Literature of Order
Nature imitates art: so Oscar Wilde instructs us. Whether or not natural sunsets imitate Turner’s painted sunsets, surely human nature is developed by human arts. “Art is man’s nature,” in Burke’s phrase: modeling ourselves upon the noble creations of the great writer and the great painter, we become fully human by emulation of the artist’s...
Scientific American Goes to Moscow
Who is Mr. Piel? He is an American, a Harvard graduate (1937 magna cum laude), and a journalist who has devoted his career to the promotion of public understanding of science. From 1947 to 1984 he was president and publisher of Scientific American and is now its chairman. (In 1984 his son, Jonathan Piel, became...
Jefferson or Mussolini?
The right side of the World Wide Web has been aquiver with reports on Executive Order 13083, otherwise known as Bill Clinton’s attempted coup d’etat. How seriously should we take the Clinton plot to abolish the last vestiges of states’ rights? Setting aside the equivocations and dissimulations that mark all of Mr. Clinton’s official utterances,...
Stalingrad, 80 Years Later: Amnesia and Folly
Willful amnesia, such as Germany recently exhibited on the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Stalingrad, ensures that past debacles will be repeated.
No Surrender
People whose families did not arrive in America yesterday or the day before yesterday are likely to discover, some time or another, among their parents’ and grandparents’ effects small, faded campaign buttons advocating Coolidge for President, or FDR, and later larger and more elaborate buttons promoting Eisenhower-Nixon, or Stevenson-Kefauver, Kennedy-Johnson, Goldwater-Miller, Reagan-Bush, and perhaps Clinton-Gore. ...
Great Minds
I found Scott P. Richert’s article “Taking Back the Culture” (The Rockford Files, December) very interesting. It brings to mind Robert Nisbet’s central thesis that the medieval was an era of higher civilization, since it had power spread over a wide field, rather than the concentration of everything in one institution. Nisbet, as I understand...
Federalism vs. Secession
“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively or to the people.” —The Tenth Amendment Following the passage of the national gun ban wrapped in pork, Representatives Gingrich and Gephardt congratulated each other for their bipartisan cooperation and remarked...
Tyranny in Our Time
From the December 2013 issue of Chronicles. There is a saying among jurists that hard cases make bad law. Similarly, every book critic knows that the best books make for hard reviewing. Faced with a truly fine work, the reviewer is tempted simply to reproduce the author’s thesis in abbreviation, while scattering as many of...
Le dernier rire
I am frequently asked to recommend the best book on ancient history or moral philosophy or the French Revolution, and, since I do not believe there is one best book on anything, I usually content myself with saying what not to read: Do not read Donald Kagan or Paul Rahe on the ancients; and do not...
The Education of George Bush
I used to wonder at the deep melancholia to which Evelyn Waugh was subject in the last years of his life. “Papa,” his eldest daughter Meg would plead with him, “why are you so unhappy?” Waugh’s misery, verging on despair, struck me as unwarranted. He had, after all, great literary success, a large and creditable family,...
Fending Off Barbarians
I just finished reading Chilton Williamson, Jr.’s May entry in What the Editors Are Reading, regarding Ed Abbey. I have been reading Edward Abbey’s work for years (my dog-eared copy of Desert Solitaire is a Ballantine paperback purchased in 1972 for 95 cents), and my library of Abbey’s work includes Appalachian Wilderness, Slickrock, Confessions of...
Waking Up to Dumbing Down
Chronicles readers may be rather tired of hearing about “dumbing down,” but the ugly term is just now starting to attain cliché status in Britain. Conservative newspapers like the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail have begun to talk about dumbing down recently, in reporting, for example, that almost 200,000 children entering British secondary schools (11-...
Old Story, New Resonances
A New World Begins: The History of the French Revolution by Jeremy D. Popkin; Basic Books; 640 pp., $35.00 Zhou Enlai was asked in the early 1970s what he, one of the architects of the Chinese communist revolution, thought of the French Revolution. His response: “Too early to say.” The international press seized upon that comment, which satisfied...
Book in Brief
The Burr Conspiracy: Uncovering the Story of an Early American Crisis, by James E. Lewis, Jr. (Princeton University Press; 728 pp., $35.00). This well-written and readable book considers the political and social context of the so-called Burr Conspiracy (1805-06), in which Jefferson’s former Vice President Aaron Burr was rumored to have plotted to enlist conspirators...
A Pacified Globe
If Ted Williams bats third in the Red Sox lineup on opening day at Boston’s Fenway Park in A.D. 2115, then Peter Augustine Lawler’s worst nightmare will have been realized. Lawler, a professor of government at Berry College in Georgia, has written Aliens in America as a jeremiad against the brave new biotech revolution that...
Establishing Christian America
We Americans like to think of our country as the most religious, the most Christian nation on the face of the earth. In an irritating article I wrote for the Spectator (“America: Not A Christian Country,” August 27, 2005), I demonstrated the hollowness of this claim. Whatever Americans may say they believe, they do not...
Lamentations of a Recovering Marxist
“Progress needs the brakeman, but the brakeman should not spend all his time putting on the brakes.” —Elbert Hubbard The case for pessimism has been easy to make since Lincoln, and mandatory since Franklin Roosevelt. Today, not much is left of the Old Republic. As early as the 1930’s, Frank Chodorov could describe Washington, D.C.,...
Comment
The recipients of the 1984 Ingersoll Prizes are Anthony Powell and Russell Kirk The T. S. Eliot prize goes to Mr. Powell and the Richard Weaver prize goes to Dr. Kirk. Anthony Powell The serious novel has undergone a radical transformation in the 20th century. The old narrative forms that had given...
Displaced Persons
In an age of anti-elite anger, it might seem otiose to publish an academic analysis of aristocratic ideas in Western thought. But as the post-1945 order rattles itself to pieces, it is time to look past its bankrupted beliefs and discredited leaders for other guiding principles—principles based on history instead of ill-defined and naive hopes,...
Books in Brief
America’s Political Inventors: The Lost Art of Legislation, by George W. Liebmann (New York: I.B. Tauris; 272 pp., £64.00). George Liebmann, an attorney and historian, argues that Friedrich Hayek’s definition of the rule of law (“uniform rules laid down in advance”) has not been observed recently by federal and state governments. Learned Hand said that...
Remembering Robert Nisbet
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...
Whither the Republic?
This month, we shall have an answer to an all-important question: Which arm of our bipartisan party state will occupy the White House for the next four years? This is an issue second in importance only to such urgent American questions as “When will Britney Spears be allowed to see her kids?” “How much weight...
Doing Well; Done Better
“These monstrous views, . . . these venemous teachings.” —Pope Leo XIII on socialism According to the jacket copy of Doing Well and Doing Good, Richard John Neuhaus is “one of the most prominent religious intellectuals” of our time (which helps explain our time). Neuhaus argues that while “Christianity has had nothing to say” to...
The Lesson From Pennsylvania
It’s likely that psephologists will discover from their postmortems on the recent primary election in Pennsylvania’s 18th Congressional District that the barely victorious candidate, Conor Lamb, won by appealing to the “nice” Republican portion of this overwhelmingly Republican district. Nice Republicans are not necessarily the equivalent of the Republicans in Name Only despised by the...
Money, Money, Money
American Jews (like other organized subgroups in American society) do some things superbly well and fail at others. Where we are strong, there is our weakness. When I consider the mistakes we American Jews make, these simple truths explain much. By “mistakes,” I refer to enormous, fundamental errors of public policy: the management of Jewish...
Down With the Presidency
The presidency must be destroyed. It is the primary evil we face, and the cause of nearly all our woes. It squanders the national wealth and starts unjust wars against foreign peoples that have never done us am harm. It wrecks our families, tramples on our rights, invades our communities, and spies on our bank...
DECLINE AND FALL
I cannot swear that we are completely on the other side of the age of reciprocal misunderstandings and ignorance, but I would venture that at this moment, in the late 20th century, our democracies are closer and more similar than ever before. On both sides of the Atlantic, we face the same big social questions,...
L’Ancien Régime Book I
In the first book, AT confronts the mystery of the French Revolution, which no one seemed to understand at the time and which baffled the succeeding generation. In chapter two, he makes a twofold argument, that the FR aimed neither at destroying religious authority nor at weakening the central authority ...
Cracks in the Crystal Ball
As the 21st century began, Americans appeared to have every reason to consider themselves the most fortunate citizens in the world. Though there are problems in virtually every sector of our society, resolutions are still within our reach and capabilities. Although the abundant nonrenewable natural resources our forebears found for the taking have largely been...
Towers of Babel
“Nations have lost their old omnipotence; the patriotic tie does not hold. Nations are getting obsolete, we go and live where we will. Steam has enabled men to choose what law they will live under. Money makes place for them.” —R.W. Emerson While Pierre Manent’s Democracy Without Nations? concerns itself principally with the erosion of...
Neo-Alembics
In a spate of recent books, neoconservatives have rehearsed the drama of their radicalization and subsequent deradicalization. Typically the curtain rises on their active participation in, or engaged sympathy for, leftist movements of the 1960’s, and falls after they have regained their equilibrium and embraced liberal democracy. One thinks, for example, of former Ramparts editors...
Remembering George Santayana
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” It would not surprise George Santayana (1863-1952) that his most famous aphorism is all he is remembered for, nor that it has become almost a cliché, nor that the Americans, whom he knew so well, would consider that they had heeded his lesson by...
John Lukacs, R.I.P.
When long-time Chronicles contributor John Lukacs died on May 6, the country lost one of its finest adopted sons, who was also one of its finest writers and historians. The scope and extent of his work defies summary—he published over three dozen books between 1953 and 2017 on a wide-ranging list of subjects, including: the...
Commendables
Be True to Your School Ernest L. Boyer, High School, A Report on Secondary Education in America; Harper & Row; New York. by Carlisle G. Packard In 1955, two-thirds of Americans asked by a Gallup poll indicated that they would be willing to pay more taxes if the increase were applied to raising teachers’ salaries. In...
Waco in Moscow
The standoff between President Yeltsin and the Russian Parliament ended in flames and gunfire that can be compared to the sad scenes of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. Even the scare tactic of round-the-clock rap music was emulated by Russian spetsnats troops. Having crushed his opponents, Mr. Yeltsin returned Russia to its familiar...
Letter From Paris: Diana—Goddess of Illusion
We live in an increasingly hysterical, media-manipulated world in which almost nothing is sacred anymore except—the words must be italicized to emphasize their gravity—except popularity, or, to be more precise, what is popular. This was one of the first thoughts that occurred to me when, shortly before 8:00 A.M. (French time) on Sunday, August 31,...
The Present Age and the State of Community
The Present Age begins with the First World War, the Great War as it is deservedly still known. No war ever began more jubilantly, among all classes and generations, the last including the young generation that had to fight it. It is said that when Viscount Grey, British Foreign Minister, uttered his epitaph of the...
A Christian Humanist
Having access to personal correspondence and other private papers is every biographer’s dream, a potential difference between a decent biography and a great biography. In the case of Russell Kirk, the advantage was huge. Kirk maintained a “massive—in some ways, beyond comprehension—correspondence” over the course of a prolific life in letters. For example, Bradley Birzer,...
The Everlasting Frontier
Although the American frontier was officially closed 118 years ago, Americans remain in thrall to its mythic spell and the romance of the American West. Europeans have always viewed our cultural obsession with condescension, though they themselves—the Germans and the Italians especially—are hardly immune to its allure. (On my first visit to the Grand Canyon...
Our Stumbling Giant
Whatever the number of pluses in the portrait of Reagan that is beginning to take shape in the final months of his two-term presidency, there will be minuses also, and most of these will stem from his conduct of foreign policy and national defense. At first thought, this is almost bizarre. Wasn’t Reagan the leader...
Texas’s Pound of Pluck
Hello friends and neighbors in Mason and surrounding counties. Attention! Be a vic-tor, not a vic-tim! We will be having a beginners’ concealed-handgun class this coming Wednesday . . . at Keller’s Riverside Store on the beautiful Llano River. . . . We will attempt to teach you all the necessary information you need to...
Solzhenitsyn and the Religion of Revolution
The great Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn understood more clearly than most that the revolutionary spirit born in France was a perpetual revolution, one that would spawn revolutionary movements across the political spectrum and around the globe. During his exile in the West from 1974 to 1994, he recognized that among these new political religions was...
The Present Age and the State of Community
From the June 1988 issue of Chronicles. The Present Age begins with the First World War, the Great War as it is deservedly still known. No war ever began more jubilantly, among all classes and generations, the last including the young generation that had to fight it. It is said that when Viscount Grey, British...
Allies on the Transatlantic Right
Conservative nationalists in Europe face the same uphill struggle against the dominant left as do their American counterparts.
The Stupid Country
According to a recent Roper poll, only 13 percent of the college graduating class of ’96 could pass a simple quiz on material suitable for elementary school students. Ninety-two percent of those taking this quiz failed to identify the author or the document that is the source of the phrase, “Government of the people, by...
Reform From Within
Across Serpukhvskaya Street from my apartment is a vintage Soviet-style “Palace of Culture,” its blank concrete walls topped by an immense neon sign. Ten years ago it offered lectures on class consciousness to factory workers; now it houses a discotheque, which plays American rock music until 6 A.M. Ten years ago an order from the...
What the Founders Didn’t Count On
“I assert that the people of the United States . . . have sufficient patriotism and intelligence to sit in judgment on every question which has arisen or which will arise no matter how long our government will endure.” —William Jennings Bryan As citizens it is fitting that we engage in acts of civic piety...