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Noel O’Sullivan puts it well:
In the Vindication of the English Constitution he had indeed professed allegiance to the ideal of a balanced constitution, and consequently insisted that the House of Commons alone could not be regarded as the representative of the nation; it was, on the contrary, merely the representative of one estate of the [...]
Filed under: Books, Conservatism
I have a review of the new book by George H. Nash, dean of conservative historians, up at History News Network here.
Filed under: Books, Conservatism
Ayn Rand acknowledged Aristotle as the only thinker to whom she owed a “philosophical debt.” But Rand’s Aristotle was, in at least one instance, really Albert Jay Nock’s Aristotle, as this footnote in Jennifer Burns’s Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right reveals:
Her late use of Aristotle was often inaccurate. According to [...]
Filed under: Books
No, but this is what people who connect Hobbes and liberalism have in mind (from de Jasay’s masterpiece, The State):
Recalling the regimes of Walpole, Metternich, Melbourne or Louis Philippe (only more so), with a blend of indifference, benign neglect and a liking for amenities and comforts, the capitalist state must have sufficient hauteur not to [...]
Filed under: Books, Conservatism, Liberty, Philosophy
Very interesting piece on Thomas Hobbes in The Nation, all the more interesting for being a blend of fairly astute political philosophy and a hard-left political agenda. I’ve been intending to read up on the Hobbes literature — in the past few weeks I’ve acquired Hobbes on Civil Association (Oakeshott), Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Skinner, [...]
Filed under: Books, Conservatism, Liberty, Philosophy
A colleague is trying out the Kindle, which has inevitably made me want one, despite my skepticism. But I’m not sold yet: its browser capabilities have received bad reviews, and the function I would chiefly use an e-book reader for, reading free PDF books, is only available with the $489 Kindle DX. (Yes, I know [...]
Filed under: Books, Technology, academia
In his introduction to Oakeshott’s The Voice of Liberal Learning, Timothy Fuller elaborates upon MO’s symbol of education as a conversation:
The word ‘conversation’ evokes the manner of the ‘conversationalist,’ taken by Oakeshott as one who is the agent of a flow of sympathy, not the utterer of a truth. The conversationalist is neither a lawgiver [...]
A friend asks me if I can nominate a list of five liberal classics parallel to the five conservative classics covered below. It’s a much harder task since postwar liberalism has been more diffuse and specialized. But in terms of bedrock Cold War liberalism — without branching off into the New Left and various identity [...]
A little over a decade ago as an undergraduate at Washington University in St. Louis I started a campus conservative paper called the Washington Witness. It’s still going, at least intermittently. I’ve continued to contribute the occasional piece, such as this one, since beginning to make a living out of what I used to do [...]
Filed under: Books, Conservatism, academia
Last weekend while browsing the philosophy section of the Georgetown Barnes and Nobles I was startled — and pleased — to see a familiar logo attached to some classic works. Regnery’s Gateway imprint is apparently still alive and doing quality work, putting out editions of Rousseau’s The Social Contract, Hobbes’s Leviathan, Marx’s Das Kapital and [...]
Filed under: Books, Philosophy
