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Last weekend I got around to reading The Intellectual Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy by Douglass Adair. The book began as his doctoral dissertation in 1943 and went unpublished until 2000, 32 years after Adair took his own life. Not many Ph.D. papers are of wide interest so long after they were written, but Adair’s was [...]
Filed under: Books, Conservatism, Liberty, Philosophy
My article in the current Young American Revolution mag is now online here; it’s a look at Frank Chodorov, his 50-year project, and the young Right. You can get a subscription to YAR by donating $50 or more to Young Americans for Liberty — a very good cause.
Filed under: Conservatism, Liberty, magazines
M.E. Bradford on John Dickinson’s Letters From a Farmer in Pennsylvania:
The manner of Dickinson’s twelve letters is well suited to their matter. In form they belong to the “high” or “sober” tradition of English political pamphleteering — as does Common Sense to its “rough and ready” but popular counterpart. In the one company we find [...]
Filed under: Books, Conservatism, Philosophy
The forthcoming issue of TAC includes my review of one of my favorite books of the past year — Peter Richardson’s A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America. Get it by subscribing to TAC here (or give a friend a gift subscription).
Meanwhile, my review of Gregory Schneider’s [...]
Filed under: Books, Conservatism
It doesn’t limit the scope of state power at all; it expands it. This isn’t just because rulers can get away with a lot more so long as they keep up the myth that they aren’t really imposing anything on anyone else but are merely the conduit by which people govern themselves. It’s also [...]
Filed under: Conservatism, Philosophy
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
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 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