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“After all, money, as they say, is miraculous.” —Thomas Carlyle The economics profession, like many other branches of the social sciences, long ago had to decide whether to adopt positivist methods, as if its objects of study were organisms of constant and predictable motion, or to account for the infinite variety in human affairs by...

“I came to cast fire upon earth; and would that it were already kindled!” —Luke 12:29 In order to mark the 15th anniversary of Pope John Paul II’s election to the Papacy, Italian Radio and Television commissioned Vittorio Messori to conduct a live television interview with the Pope. It must have seemed a good idea...

Ever since the cinéaste Nino Frank first used the term in France in 1946 (he never said he invented it), there has been considerable controversy about the meaning of “film noir” and various attempts to define it, some more or less authoritative. The essential arguments have been usefully collected in Silver and Ursini’s Film Noir...

“There is nothing so likely to hand down your name as a poem: all other monuments are frail and fading.” —Pliny the Younger To say that O.B. Hardison, Jr., who died last August at the age of 61, was a poet is in some respects to diminish his memory. “Poet” has become a hollow accolade,...

        “The pure products of America go crazy.” —William Carlos Williams The go-to-hell attitude, unique features, and deceptive talent by which we know Robert Mitchum (1917-1997) were the product of his heredity and experience. His father was a Scotch-Irish South Carolinian with some Amerindian blood—he died young in a railroad accident. His...

In the opinion of Marshall DeRosa, one of the contributors to this book, The transition from states’ rights to unitary nationalism, i.e., domestic imperialism, was the most significant development in American politics.  This marks one of the worst fears of the framers coming to fruition, tyranny. That is a self-evidently correct judgment.  It is also...

Chris Hedges, a former New York Times war correspondent, is not happy with the current state of American civilization, a view he makes crystal clear in Empire of Illusion.  Hedges is an independent man of the left and a cultural conservative.  Chronicles readers may recall the controversy over his commencement address in 2003 at Rockford...

That imperial anthem, the hymn of the U.S. Marine Corps, is today somehow an obscure exercise.  The halls of Montezuma? The shores of Tripoli?  Our gum-popping, Gucci-schlepping youth can no more respond to its referential difficulties than could the Ivy League-credentialed savants of the War Party.  What’s more, the pseudopatriots would be shocked to know that...

        “When a culture of freedom becomes a cult of freedom, injustice, suffering, and social dysfunction get explained away as ‘choices.’” —R.R. Reno The burden of this important book by the editor of First Things is the need to restore genuine freedom to American society—and, by implication, Western society as a whole....

As the author of a travel book as well as many novels, I’ve often suspected that writing a superior work in the first category is a greater challenge than writing one in the second.  The comparative difficulties become clear when you develop the same material, as nonfiction first and then again as a novel, with...

“The Empire is peace.” —Napoleon III Bill Williams was an Eagle Scout, basketball star, paperboy, and jazz drummer in the Atlantic, Iowa, of the Depression. He was a wholesome mixture of small-town bohemian and Jimmy Stewart: he shared bottomless ice cream sodas with his girlfriend and read Hemingway; he played piano and made a soapbox...