Most American college students have never heard even the most modest attempt to outline the science of ethics. As Alasdair MacIntyre has pointed out, moral discourse among modern persons is conducted with half-understood terms drawn from a forgotten language. This letter to a modern student unearths the basic concepts necessary for serious ethical reflection. . . . [more]

Published just over a year ago, The Crisis of Modern Times: Perspectives from The Review of Politics brings together more than twenty essays from the Review’s long history. Spanning the period between the Second World War and the Cuban Missile Crisis, this volume highlights original essays by seminal conservative writers—including Hannah Arendt, Russell Kirk, Jacques Maritain, Josef Pieper, Yves Simon, Leo Strauss, and Eric Voegelin. . . . [more]

Perhaps contemporary conservatives misunderstand their own movement because conservative philosophy distorts conservative history. Ideas, not material conditions, drive history, conservatives aver. But it is by understanding their own messy history that conservatives will better understand themselves and avoid the pitfalls of ideology. . . . [more]

In the first stanza of The English Flag, the great Rudyard Kipling defended worldliness against parochialism by asking, “And what should they know of England who only England knows?” I elect, with a small modification, to paraphrase Kipling in this farewell to a century of mixed blessings: “And what should they know of Social Science who only Social Science knows?”. . . [more]

Long ago, The Nation had a conservative editor. Paul Elmer More edited the already venerable magazine for five years just before the First World War. On joining The Nation, More was already an entrenched conservative; indeed, he preferred the term “reactionary.”. . . [more]

Orestes Brownson’s presence looms large in Russell Kirk’s celebrated 1953 tome, in large part because, for Kirk, Brownson represents a luminous thinker unjustly neglected by modern scholars. Even further, Brownson seems to be a central figure not only in the nineteenth-century development—or maintenance—of order in American society, but, for Kirk, is someone whose prose remains genuinely instructive for contemporary citizens; he is “one of those dead who give us life. . . .” [more]