The terms “global economy” and “New World Order” have become part of the common litany that frames foreign policy discussions. Though the second term is often used in a mocking or ironic tone, the first has attained the status of a paradigm. Yet Hazel J. Johnson, a professor of finance at the University of Louisville,...

“I never had the opportunity of searching out God. He sought me out. He stalked me like a redskin, took careful aim and fired.” —C.S. Lewis The disgruntled professor who equates academic integrity with paucity of book sales and who is thereby convinced that the masses who follow the writings of C.S. Lewis must be...

At the age of 83, Wallace Stegner is the éminence grise of Western American literature, a man responsible for shaping the writing not only of the region but also that of points eastward, thanks to the scores of graduates from the Stanford writing program that bears his name. Stegner’s work, regrettably, sells far less than...

“Democracy is Lovelace and the people is Clarissa.” —John Adams I was born in 1946, right in the middle of Harry Truman’s accidental and tumultuous first term as President. I have no memory of the man until one early November morning in 1952, when my mother and grandmother were discussing the election of Dwight Eisenhower....

This beautiful little book—one that does much credit to its publisher— appears as a blessing amid the clutter and noise and ugliness that characterize the publishing industry as well as literary discourse today. A pleasure to hold and to behold, this volume is also the vehicle for rendering words, thoughts, and values that seem new...

Gerald N. Rosenberg, an assistant professor of political science and an instructor in law at the University of Chicago, has some simple advice for activists who think a United States Supreme Court ruling is an end-all: not only are you wrong, but your money is better spent out of court than in court. In The...

For us to love our country, Burke somewhere wrote, our country must be beautiful. The sheer aesthetic ugliness of modern capitalistic civilization has been as much a reason for the revulsion against it on the part of poets, artists, and social critics as have its various injustices and inequities, real or alleged. We are inclined...

“I am against the prophets, saith the Lord, that steal my words every one from his neighbour.” —Jeremiah 23:30 After seven years on public and private payrolls as senior editor of the King Papers Project, Clayborne Carson has finally produced the first volume of MLK’s papers. The project began in 1984, and since 1986 has...

“In fourteen-hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean nude.” —Chronicles, 1992 The profusion of the anti-Western virus released by the quincentenary of Columbus’ landfall on the Caribbean island of San Salvador has become the mental equivalent of the AIDS epidemic, fatally infecting millions of promiscuous and incautious intellectuals and subintellectuals. For the literary ghetto, Kirkpatrick...

Richard Posner has a complaint against many of his fellow judges. Owing to their lack of up-to-date information and their conservative backgrounds, his colleagues often decide cases that touch on sex in an ignorant and benighted manner. Judge Posner aims to remedy matters with this comprehensive treatise, which offers both a theory of how sexual...

A few months ago I went out into the Arizona desert to take photographs for a book of natural history I am writing. I had with me an expensive, late-model Japanese camera that might be advertised as “idiot-proof,” had the manufacturer been less guarded in the tone of its publicity. In fact, the camera turned...

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once mentioned the self-punishing limitations of his projected but never written autobiography: “I cannot write my biography on a higher plane than I exist on. And by the very fact of writing it I do not necessarily enhance myself; I may therefore even make myself dirtier than I was in the...

John Lukacs has observed that our century’s two most significant revolutionaries were Lenin and Wilson. Of the two, according to Lukacs, the internationalist Lenin had less destructive influence in the long run than the democratic moralist but fervent nationalist Wilson; today it may be said that the Wilsonians have outlasted the Commies. Democracy and national...

“Has anyone ever seen a clean cow?” —Anonymous It’s hard to know where to begin to respond to Jeremy Rifkin’s apocalyptic new book, Beyond Beef. You could start with Chesterton’s famous remark on “believing anything,” or some of the paleoconservative ruminations on “Gnosticism.” Perhaps in a time when Oliver Stone’s paranoid (and lucrative) fantasies pass...

It is common in liberal and neoconservative circles to argue that the United States should foster democracy around the world to enhance its own security because “democracies don’t fight each other.” At the same time, more traditional conservative critics call for a return to classical republicanism, which they believe will produce, among other things, peace...

Larry Woiwode, the North Dakota novelist (I do not mean that in a diminishing way), has described his fiction as “a continuing spiritual exercise that any reader may join in on.” His fifth novel, Indian Affairs, is a fitfully satisfying workout.  Indian Affairs reintroduces us to Chris Van Eananam, a graduate student, and his wife Ellen;...

Cormac McCarthy is so fine a writer-for my money the best novelist in America today-that he and his work must be accepted pretty much on their own terms. Criticism therefore, in the case of Mr. McCarthy, is reducible largely to questions of taste. He has published now six novels, all of them distinguished for reality...

If you’re white in the United States, you, says Professor Andrew Hacker, have at least that much going for you. “No matter how degraded their lives, white people are still allowed to believe that they possess the blood, the genes, the patrimony of superiority,” Hacker, a political scientist, writes of white Americans. “No matter what happens, they...

“In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad.”  —F.W. Nietzsche After a decade of “reform,” the public schools are at best stagnant. The College Board reports that SAT scores for college-hound 12th-graders have dropped for the fourth consecutive year, with the...

“A republic, if you can keep it.” —Benjamin Franklin More often than not, historians of antebellum American politics lose their perspective, and perhaps their good sense, when they encounter John C. Calhoun. The other great men in the political history of the United States during that era-John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, Daniel Webster and Henry...

In the early 50’s, Philip Graham of the Washington Post tried to hire James  Reston away from the New York Times at twice the coins the Sulzbergers were dispensing. Thanks, but no thanks, Reston said-and kept saying whenever his friend Graham sought to renew the discussion. The Times family was James Reston’s family, professionally speaking....

“A Conservative is only a Tory who is ashamed of himself.” —J. Hookham Frere On page 62 of this book, the author recalls with irritation having once been accused by Murray Kempton of dishonoring the “legacy” of His Master’s Voice, H. L. Mencken, by “conformism.” How, Tyrrell demanded incredulously, was it possible for him to...

The old man has done a bit of everything that a journalist can do. He has been an opera critic, a war correspondent, a sportswriter. He prides himself most on the years he spent covering the bullfights of his native Sevilla. For some time now he has been mumbling to his American visitor, Bruce Schoenfeld,...

From the time of their discovery in 1947, the “scrolls from the Dead Sea” have been a source of fascination, speculation, consternation, confusion, and, in the view of these two authors, a far-reaching religious conspiracy. Deception reads like a thriller, or the best of the many books on the assassination of President Kennedy. It is...

Like Richard A. Epstein’s earlier book Takings, dealing with the defense of property in the Fifth Amendment, his latest one combines legal study and economic analysis with megadoses of political and social theory. Though Epstein explores, for the most part, civil rights legislation aimed at the removal of job discrimination, he devotes the opening section...

While M. Revel’s critique of Western leftists and fellow travelers is fully shared by me, I part company with him when it comes to the issue of the durability of communist systems. Both he and I were among the vast number of observers and critics of such regimes who did not anticipate their spectacular and...

Florence’s La Nazione, a sober conservative daily with a national circulation and founded at the time of the American Civil War, stated on November 2, 1991, that more than 10 percent of Italians today are fully occupied in “organized crime” (not counting politicians and the legal profession). “Organized crime,” in Italy, doesn’t mean independent “self-employed”...

To anyone old enough to recall the early 1960’s, the names Kennedy and Khrushchev will provoke a wealth of emotional associations far stronger than those evoked by the names of most later Presidents, or of the colorless characters who followed Khrushchev as rulers of the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, both men have been much misunderstood during...

The typical animal rights activist is a female agnostic or atheist, unmarried with no children and six “companion animals,” “educated,” and living a resolutely urban life in the company of other activists on behalf of all sorts of causes, most of them left-wing. This bizarre specimen of contemporary humanity aspires to echo one day over...

The wide-eyed declamations of Shirley MacLaine to the contrary, there is nothing particularly new about the so-called New Age, that hodgepodge of religious borrowings from diverse sources ranging from the genuine (Buddhism, cybernetics) to the quackish (L. Ron Hubbard, Ignatius Donnelly). What is new—and surprising, in a creepy sort of way—is the number of Americans...

I’ve been trying to figure out what somebody could do with the thirty bucks (plus tax) that they’re asking for Harold Brodkey’s word-processing product. My copy was no bargain for free. You could buy two pizzas and two sixpacks and have quite a party for that sum. You could wire your sweetie pie a nice...

“Too much liberty leads both men and nations to slavery.” —Cicero In a recent and provocative essay, Paul Gottfried described Eugene D. Genovese as a “hero of paleoconservative intellectuals.” No doubt this declaration qualified as news in some circles, for the distinguished historian of the American South has always worked within the Marxist tradition. Or...

In the May 1991 issue of the Atlantic poet and critic Dana Gioia asked “Can Poetry Matter?” Gioia, who has spent most of his working life outside of the academy, warns of a species in danger of extinction, the vanishing general audience for poetry that existed in this country only a few decades ago. He...

“Actum est de republica.” —Latin saying The Bourgeois Age is finished, but a principal feature of Victorianism—the fullest and most developed expression of that era—still flourishes. Postmoderns consider themselves a hardheaded and realistic people, yet the average American today is probably as much a sentimentalist as the typical Dickens reader of a century ago. Sentimentality—not...

How quickly living tradition turns into history. The Great War of 1914-18.has almost entirely receded from memory. Very few of that generation are alive to tell their stories, and as for their children, they have their own war, the Second World War, to occupy and puzzle their memories. In the minds of the young people...

E.B. White described Henry David Thoreau, that thorny individualist, as a regular hair shirt of a man; and no matter how much we may like the Thoreau of Walden and his other writing, few of us could bear having him as a neighbor. Such, too, is the case of Eric Blair, who would become George...

Only the most devoted students of Henry Adams are likely to have bought and read the six-volume Complete Letters that Harvard University Press produced between 1982 and 1988. More’s the pity, since it was an excellent work of scholarship disclosing an American epistolary artist of the highest order. But the editor and biographer, Ernest Samuels,...

New York Times junkies would have noticed an August 28, 1991, story headed “Woodstock Journal.” Reading on they discovered that the story was datelined Woodstock, Vermont, and that it reported a proposal by Laurance S. and Mary Rockefeller to donate their 531-acre Woodstock estate as a National Historical Park. Although the Rockefeller family has a...

“Republics exist only on tenure of being agitated.” —Wendell Phillips As a gorgeous American call girl lies murdered on the 46th floor of Los Angeles’ Nakamoto Tower—a Japanese conglomerate’s newly erected American headquarters—a grand opening celebration with Washington and Hollywood notables is in full-swing on the floor below. Security cameras have recorded the murder, but...

To start with, the process of Americanization began at birth. Within the space of one week at the Metropolitan Hospital, I started life as a Hebrew child, with the name Yitzhak-Isaac. This apparently was too cumbersome for record-keeping purposes, so I was entered on the birth certificate as Isadore. But my sister, or at least...

“Culture, with us, ends in headache.” —R.W. Emerson While the state of American—in fact of Western—society today is probably unique in human history, it is in some ways the inverse of the situation that prevailed at the end of the Roman Empire, when the barbarians had Roman citizenship extended to them without their ever becoming...

For a long time after “modern” first came into the language, it was an innocuous little word, the simple opposite of “ancient,” and insofar as it had connotations, they were not very good ones. Shakespeare always used it to mean “commonplace,” with strong suggestions of the slipshod and the second-rate. The Enlightenment and the French...

Of the making of books there is no end, Ecclesiastes has it. Of the making of books about the making of books there is also a perennial flow. The shelves of a well-stocked bookstore are sure to include dozens of titles on freeing the trapped writer within, on finding one’s voice, on creating that winning...

Those who know anything of contemporary scholarship or the political philosophy of Edmund Burke know that Peter J. Stanlis clearly holds the title of “Dean of Burke Studies.” While Russell Kirk ushered in the return to Burke in America, it is Stanlis who has, more than any other scholar, sustained the revival of Burke scholarship....

This book is a collection of largely reprinted material (with revisions in some cases) and a couple of original essays. Its nine chapters cover (according to section titles) “the Catholic human rights revolution,” “peace and economy, again,” and “the life of the mind.” The expected repetitions are sometimes distracting if one reads the book straight...

“Canst thou draw out leviathan with a hook?” —Job 41:1 No idea is more central to the American political tradition than that of limited government. As a nation we began with our commitment to the liberty of commonwealths, of communities, and of citizens. When we collectively rejected the remote, arbitrary, and potentially hostile power that,...

When Albert Jay Nock died in 1945, American civilization had known saner times. Having just conquered the world through the Final Deal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the new colossus had a growing appetite, undaunted-by expanse or expense. It was something on the order of: Today the earth, tomorrow the universe! The author of Our Enemy,...