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The Portable Conservative Reader
Gathers writings by Edmund Burke, John Adams, and other conservative authors and novelists, and discusses the history and nature of conservatism
723 pages, Paperback
First published March 25, 1982
7 people are currently reading
362 people want to read
About the author
Russell Kirk
185 books304 followersFor more than forty years, Russell Kirk was in the thick of the intellectual controversies of his time. He is the author of some thirty-two books, hundreds of periodical essays, and many short stories. Both Time and Newsweek have described him as one of America’s leading thinkers, and The New York Times acknowledged the scale of his influence when in 1998 it wrote that Kirk’s 1953 book The Conservative Mind “gave American conservatives an identity and a genealogy and catalyzed the postwar movement.”
Dr. Kirk wrote and spoke on modern culture, political thought and practice, educational theory, literary criticism, ethical questions, and social themes. He addressed audiences on hundreds of American campuses and appeared often on television and radio.
He edited the educational quarterly journal The University Bookman and was founder and first editor of the quarterly Modern Age. He contributed articles to numerous serious periodicals on either side of the Atlantic. For a quarter of a century he wrote a page on education for National Review, and for thirteen years published, through the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, a nationally syndicated newspaper column. Over the years he contributed to more than a hundred serious periodicals in the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, Austria, Germany, Italy, Spain, Bulgaria, and Poland, among them Sewanee Review, Yale Review, Fortune, Humanitas, The Contemporary Review, The Journal of the History of Ideas, World Review, Crisis, History Today, Policy Review, Commonweal, Kenyon Review, The Review of Politics, and The World and I.
He is the only American to hold the highest arts degree (earned) of the senior Scottish university—doctor of letters of St. Andrews. He received his bachelor’s degree from Michigan State University and his master’s degree from Duke University. He received honorary doctorates from twelve American universities and colleges.
He was a Guggenheim Fellow, a senior fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, a Constitutional Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a Fulbright Lecturer in Scotland. The Christopher Award was conferred upon him for his book Eliot and His Age, and he received the Ann Radcliffe Award of the Count Dracula Society for his Gothic Fiction. The Third World Fantasy Convention gave him its award for best short fiction for his short story, “There’s a Long, Long Trail a-Winding.” In 1984 he received the Weaver Award of the Ingersoll Prizes for his scholarly writing. For several years he was a Distinguished Scholar of the Heritage Foundation. In 1989, President Reagan conferred on him the Presidential Citizens Medal. In 1991, he was awarded the Salvatori Prize for historical writing.
More than a million copies of Kirk’s books have been sold, and several have been translated in German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Korean, and other languages. His second book, The Conservative Mind (1953), is one of the most widely reviewed and discussed studies of political ideas in this century and has gone through seven editions. Seventeen of his books are in print at present, and he has written prefaces to many other books, contributed essays to them, or edited them.
Dr. Kirk debated with such well-known speakers as Norman Thomas, Frank Mankiewicz, Carey McWilliams, John Roche, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Michael Harrington, Max Lerner, Michael Novak, Sidney Lens, William Kunstler, Hubert Humphrey, F. A. Hayek, Karl Hess, Clifford Case, Ayn Rand, Eugene McCarthy, Leonard Weinglass, Louis Lomax, Harold Taylor, Clark Kerr, Saul Alinsky, Staughton Lynd, Malcolm X, Dick Gregory, and Tom Hayden. Several of his public lectures have been broadcast nationally on C-SPAN.
Among Kirk’s literary and scholarly friends were T. S. Eliot, Roy Campbell, Wyndham Lewis, Donald Davidson, George Scott-Moncrieff, Richard Weaver, Max Picard, Ray Bradbury, Bernard Iddings Bell, Paul Roche, James McAuley, Thomas Howard, Wilhem Roepke, Robert Speaight
Dr. Kirk wrote and spoke on modern culture, political thought and practice, educational theory, literary criticism, ethical questions, and social themes. He addressed audiences on hundreds of American campuses and appeared often on television and radio.
He edited the educational quarterly journal The University Bookman and was founder and first editor of the quarterly Modern Age. He contributed articles to numerous serious periodicals on either side of the Atlantic. For a quarter of a century he wrote a page on education for National Review, and for thirteen years published, through the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, a nationally syndicated newspaper column. Over the years he contributed to more than a hundred serious periodicals in the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, Austria, Germany, Italy, Spain, Bulgaria, and Poland, among them Sewanee Review, Yale Review, Fortune, Humanitas, The Contemporary Review, The Journal of the History of Ideas, World Review, Crisis, History Today, Policy Review, Commonweal, Kenyon Review, The Review of Politics, and The World and I.
He is the only American to hold the highest arts degree (earned) of the senior Scottish university—doctor of letters of St. Andrews. He received his bachelor’s degree from Michigan State University and his master’s degree from Duke University. He received honorary doctorates from twelve American universities and colleges.
He was a Guggenheim Fellow, a senior fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, a Constitutional Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a Fulbright Lecturer in Scotland. The Christopher Award was conferred upon him for his book Eliot and His Age, and he received the Ann Radcliffe Award of the Count Dracula Society for his Gothic Fiction. The Third World Fantasy Convention gave him its award for best short fiction for his short story, “There’s a Long, Long Trail a-Winding.” In 1984 he received the Weaver Award of the Ingersoll Prizes for his scholarly writing. For several years he was a Distinguished Scholar of the Heritage Foundation. In 1989, President Reagan conferred on him the Presidential Citizens Medal. In 1991, he was awarded the Salvatori Prize for historical writing.
More than a million copies of Kirk’s books have been sold, and several have been translated in German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Korean, and other languages. His second book, The Conservative Mind (1953), is one of the most widely reviewed and discussed studies of political ideas in this century and has gone through seven editions. Seventeen of his books are in print at present, and he has written prefaces to many other books, contributed essays to them, or edited them.
Dr. Kirk debated with such well-known speakers as Norman Thomas, Frank Mankiewicz, Carey McWilliams, John Roche, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Michael Harrington, Max Lerner, Michael Novak, Sidney Lens, William Kunstler, Hubert Humphrey, F. A. Hayek, Karl Hess, Clifford Case, Ayn Rand, Eugene McCarthy, Leonard Weinglass, Louis Lomax, Harold Taylor, Clark Kerr, Saul Alinsky, Staughton Lynd, Malcolm X, Dick Gregory, and Tom Hayden. Several of his public lectures have been broadcast nationally on C-SPAN.
Among Kirk’s literary and scholarly friends were T. S. Eliot, Roy Campbell, Wyndham Lewis, Donald Davidson, George Scott-Moncrieff, Richard Weaver, Max Picard, Ray Bradbury, Bernard Iddings Bell, Paul Roche, James McAuley, Thomas Howard, Wilhem Roepke, Robert Speaight
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
March 7, 2021
Maybe you'll be amazed when I say that I procured this little volume at one of the then many bookstores in New York City almost 40 years ago. I say amazed because most of them shutdown long ago to be replaced by chic shops and boutiques favored by wealthy Sybarites who have swarmed over the city in recent years. They are definitely not the New Yorkers of what Kenneth Clarke called Heroic Capitalism nor are they the richly ethnic Eastern European, Italian and Irish immigrants of the last century whom one could see leaning out of their brownstone windows on hot summer days. They ran fragrant and modestly priced delis, restaurants and bakeries. There were sidewalk vendors. They had large numbers of kids playing Double Dutch jump rope and stickball on the streets. (And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in the streets thereof. Zechariah 8:5.)
The opulent establishments that have replaced them are banal by comparison and one no longer has the sense of inclusion conferred by common experience and means. Their patrons do not read, they gaze at screens, take selfies and strike a pose, as we used to say. Most of all they simply consume. But I have digressed!
In the 1980s I was drifting away from the Left, not sure where I would come to shore. (Partly because it was destroying the Old New York I just described.) I tried to read the various contemporary philosophers: Adorno, Foucault, Heidegger, phenomenologists generally, the analytic school, the Frankfurt School, etc. Each wrote as if they had the answer but it was muddled and such truth as was to be found was a kind of elephantiasis of a limb--bloated beyond usefulness and hideous, if not outright evil.
These and like readings were not the result of natural inquisitiveness on my part; though they were partly motivated by a seemingly fruitless struggle to find meaning. I was part of the academic community, so I read them out of conformity to what was then the fashion of the time, sometimes called the canon (it has since been altered further in directions Lewis feared). In my day all knowledge was swaddled in positivism, materialism and, ultimately, subjectivism. Even works of the past were viewed and when necessary, perverted by its influence. One could not look even at a work of art without being informed by the modern critique. It affected the sciences, as Lewis points out when he says:
So I thought I'd take a look and see what these erstwhile conservative fellows were about. I figured their scribbles would be so much priggish humbug, full of superstition, laced with nostalgia. To my surprise many rang out with clarity, that I later would come to call common sense. One stood out as an Arkenstone among the rest: C. S. Lewis The Poison of Subjectivism. The book contains many other worthy contributions but this one resonated with me the most and so I will take it the flagship writing for the whole book.
In this essay, Lewis argues that subjectivism is not only at the root of all the dangerous ideologies making totalitarianism but undermines a free society's ability to oppose them. It is the byproduct that results when reason turns on reason. The opening paragraph is as follows,
I found this to be the general case when I was studying the natural sciences and mathematics. Lewis felt that while this is a bad sign the scientists would find this an "unwelcome yokefellow" that would be continually counteracted. Yet, what are we to make of the recent appearance of the concepts of diversity and identity politics entering fields once thought to be impervious by their very nature--to possess strong counteracting forces? For example this from the American Mathematical Society (AMS) where the author states,
Perhaps one can say that such as expressed in this quote is what mathematics will increasingly look like if mathematicians no longer retain truth and reality in their vocabulary--which appears to be the case? Until just recently it would have been unthinkable that the AMS would have allowed something like this in their publications or, if it had existed, on their website. Nor would this have been due to the inherent white supremacy or patriarchal character of mathematicians. As a group they have always tended towards liberalism and the Left; the fact that this sorry state of affairs has actually been attained being proof of my contention.
What if instead of understanding the Pythagorean Theorem and how it fits into the great edifice of geometry, more and more effort and investment will be expended to determine its "true source" in some hitherto neglected woman or person of color? Now I am starting to digress.
This essay was where I first learned the relationship between the indicative and the imperative. Lewis said this,
In our own time it is widely believed that such a scientific morality can be based on genetics, or DNA. Hence the discovery of a gay gene is supposed to have established the new, scientific, moral principle that homosexuality is not the perversion it was once thought to be; but instead one of the many modes of human behavior that deserves to be as freely expressed as the others. On going efforts are attempting to justify applying a non binary spectrum of gender to human beings. Per Lewis, such efforts are bound to be as fruitless as weighing the soul.
I am running up against a character limit so I will close were with the essay's startling and absolutely timely conclusion. At the closing Lewis says this,
Lewis gives us two columns of qualities. I call the first affective and the second effective:
Affective <========================> Effective
>> Vision <=========================> Virtue
>> Dynamism <======================> Diligence
>> Creativity <=======================> Knowledge
********* =========================> Skill
The first column contains those qualities that are affective. They basically excite the emotions, and can be faked. They can even be the opposite of what they claim. Vision in leadership can be dissipation and depravity even brutality. And it claims to be "for sale" everywhere. Dynamism can be indolence. As for creativity the whole modern movement has been dogged by suspicions that it is an imposture.
The effective qualities are objective, they are self-revealing. They are known by their fruits. Diligence is measured by one's posture and position. Knowledge, again speaks for itself--I know this as a former math teacher. And most recently as a watchmaker, I can immediately see skill--there is not way it can be put on. Nor does my emotional predisposition affect my assessment.
But give me a man who will do a day's work for a day's pay, who will refuse bribes, who will not make up his facts, and who has learned his job. Are not the very opposites of these the hallmarks of our time? Politicians taking bribes is now so common we hardly notice. Indeed we consider it impertinence to call it what it is and the ranks close against any man who does. And who hasn't observed young people in various capacities lolling about, eyes fixed on their smartphones; who don't know their business, stock or trade; who think the only reason for their presence is to get paid? Need we say much about making up facts? Incompetence is legion what with the introduction of spurious criteria, unrelated to knowledge and skill as qualifications for being hired. Indeed, EQ has, as a bland matter of fact, replaced IQ as the most desirable quality of all. Being an a**hole is damning, no matter how much skill, ability and honesty one might have.
So that is the closing line of the essay that pushed me into a new territory; one that eventually, though not immediately, led to my becoming a Christian.
The opulent establishments that have replaced them are banal by comparison and one no longer has the sense of inclusion conferred by common experience and means. Their patrons do not read, they gaze at screens, take selfies and strike a pose, as we used to say. Most of all they simply consume. But I have digressed!
In the 1980s I was drifting away from the Left, not sure where I would come to shore. (Partly because it was destroying the Old New York I just described.) I tried to read the various contemporary philosophers: Adorno, Foucault, Heidegger, phenomenologists generally, the analytic school, the Frankfurt School, etc. Each wrote as if they had the answer but it was muddled and such truth as was to be found was a kind of elephantiasis of a limb--bloated beyond usefulness and hideous, if not outright evil.
These and like readings were not the result of natural inquisitiveness on my part; though they were partly motivated by a seemingly fruitless struggle to find meaning. I was part of the academic community, so I read them out of conformity to what was then the fashion of the time, sometimes called the canon (it has since been altered further in directions Lewis feared). In my day all knowledge was swaddled in positivism, materialism and, ultimately, subjectivism. Even works of the past were viewed and when necessary, perverted by its influence. One could not look even at a work of art without being informed by the modern critique. It affected the sciences, as Lewis points out when he says:
There are modern scientists, I am told, who have dropped the words truth and reality out of their vocabulary and who hold that the end of their work is not to know what is there but simply to get practical results.
So I thought I'd take a look and see what these erstwhile conservative fellows were about. I figured their scribbles would be so much priggish humbug, full of superstition, laced with nostalgia. To my surprise many rang out with clarity, that I later would come to call common sense. One stood out as an Arkenstone among the rest: C. S. Lewis The Poison of Subjectivism. The book contains many other worthy contributions but this one resonated with me the most and so I will take it the flagship writing for the whole book.
In this essay, Lewis argues that subjectivism is not only at the root of all the dangerous ideologies making totalitarianism but undermines a free society's ability to oppose them. It is the byproduct that results when reason turns on reason. The opening paragraph is as follows,
One cause of misery and vice is always present with us in the greed and pride of men, but at certain periods in history this is greatly increased by the temporary prevalence of some false philosophy. Correct thinking will not make good men of bad ones; but a purely theoretical error may remove ordinary checks to evil and deprive good intentions of their natural support. An error of this sort is abroad at present. I am not referring to the Power philosophies of the Totalitarian states, but to something that goes deeper and spreads wider and which, indeed, has given these Power philosophies their golden opportunity. I am referring to Subjectivism.
I found this to be the general case when I was studying the natural sciences and mathematics. Lewis felt that while this is a bad sign the scientists would find this an "unwelcome yokefellow" that would be continually counteracted. Yet, what are we to make of the recent appearance of the concepts of diversity and identity politics entering fields once thought to be impervious by their very nature--to possess strong counteracting forces? For example this from the American Mathematical Society (AMS) where the author states,
In 2017, and education professor Rochelle Gutiérrez wrote that “mathematics operates as whiteness.”
Perhaps one can say that such as expressed in this quote is what mathematics will increasingly look like if mathematicians no longer retain truth and reality in their vocabulary--which appears to be the case? Until just recently it would have been unthinkable that the AMS would have allowed something like this in their publications or, if it had existed, on their website. Nor would this have been due to the inherent white supremacy or patriarchal character of mathematicians. As a group they have always tended towards liberalism and the Left; the fact that this sorry state of affairs has actually been attained being proof of my contention.
What if instead of understanding the Pythagorean Theorem and how it fits into the great edifice of geometry, more and more effort and investment will be expended to determine its "true source" in some hitherto neglected woman or person of color? Now I am starting to digress.
This essay was where I first learned the relationship between the indicative and the imperative. Lewis said this,
All idea of "new" or "scientific" or "modern" moralities must therefore be dismissed as mere confusion of thought. We have only two alternatives. Either the maxims of traditional morality must be accepted as axioms of practical reason which neither admit nor require argument to support them and not to "see" which is to have lost human status; or else there are no values at all, what we mistook for values being "projections" of irrational emotions. It is perfectly futile, after having dismissed traditional morality with the question, 'Why should we obey it?' then to attempt the reintroduction of value at some later stage in our philosophy. Any value we reintroduce can be countered in just the same way. Every argument used to support it will be an attempt to derive from premises in the indicative mood a conclusion in the imperative. And this is impossible.
In our own time it is widely believed that such a scientific morality can be based on genetics, or DNA. Hence the discovery of a gay gene is supposed to have established the new, scientific, moral principle that homosexuality is not the perversion it was once thought to be; but instead one of the many modes of human behavior that deserves to be as freely expressed as the others. On going efforts are attempting to justify applying a non binary spectrum of gender to human beings. Per Lewis, such efforts are bound to be as fruitless as weighing the soul.
I am running up against a character limit so I will close were with the essay's startling and absolutely timely conclusion. At the closing Lewis says this,
Unless we return to the crude and nursery-like belief in objective values, we perish. If we do, we may live, and such a return might have one minor advantage. If we believed in the absolute reality of elementary moral platitudes, we should value those who solicit our votes by other standards than have recently been in fashion. While we believe that good is something to be invented, we demand of our rulers such qualities as "vision," "dynamism," "creativity," and the like. If we returned to the objective view we should demand qualities much rarer, and much more beneficial - virtue, knowledge, diligence and skill. 'Vision' is for sale, or claims to be for sale, everywhere. But give me a man who will do a day's work for a day's pay, who will refuse bribes, who will not make up his facts, and who has learned his job.
Lewis gives us two columns of qualities. I call the first affective and the second effective:
Affective <========================> Effective
>> Vision <=========================> Virtue
>> Dynamism <======================> Diligence
>> Creativity <=======================> Knowledge
********* =========================> Skill
The first column contains those qualities that are affective. They basically excite the emotions, and can be faked. They can even be the opposite of what they claim. Vision in leadership can be dissipation and depravity even brutality. And it claims to be "for sale" everywhere. Dynamism can be indolence. As for creativity the whole modern movement has been dogged by suspicions that it is an imposture.
The effective qualities are objective, they are self-revealing. They are known by their fruits. Diligence is measured by one's posture and position. Knowledge, again speaks for itself--I know this as a former math teacher. And most recently as a watchmaker, I can immediately see skill--there is not way it can be put on. Nor does my emotional predisposition affect my assessment.
But give me a man who will do a day's work for a day's pay, who will refuse bribes, who will not make up his facts, and who has learned his job. Are not the very opposites of these the hallmarks of our time? Politicians taking bribes is now so common we hardly notice. Indeed we consider it impertinence to call it what it is and the ranks close against any man who does. And who hasn't observed young people in various capacities lolling about, eyes fixed on their smartphones; who don't know their business, stock or trade; who think the only reason for their presence is to get paid? Need we say much about making up facts? Incompetence is legion what with the introduction of spurious criteria, unrelated to knowledge and skill as qualifications for being hired. Indeed, EQ has, as a bland matter of fact, replaced IQ as the most desirable quality of all. Being an a**hole is damning, no matter how much skill, ability and honesty one might have.
So that is the closing line of the essay that pushed me into a new territory; one that eventually, though not immediately, led to my becoming a Christian.
March 20, 2015
A great overview of some remarkable writers.
May 22, 2009
Excellent.
January 27, 2013
It was while reading this book and, oddly, Gore Vidal's Lincoln that I first discovered that I was actually conservative... though not at all of the sort that widely lays claim to that title today.
November 5, 2023
This conservative reader starts with writers from the end of the 18th Century, Edmund Burke, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and ends in the 1970s with Robert Nisbet (1975) and Irving Kristol (1978) and Russell Kirk. The excerpts are organized in seventeen thematic parts, including such themes as "The Tension of Order and Freedom", "American Liberty Under Law", "American Democratic Leveling", "Conservative Impulses and American Materialism", "A Bent World", "Women's Conservative Vision." As one might expect given that this book came out 40 years ago, nothing here is directly commenting on questions of gender identity in the classroom, de-colonization of the curriculum, cultural expropriation, or same-sex marriage. For most of these writers, perhaps all, Donald Trump would be part of the problem and a realization of their fears. For example, one of the common themes in this collection is that Christian morals and Western values inherited from Greek and Roman times are under attack today. In this regard, the thinkers here would be much more closely aligned with the apparently monogamous Joe Biden than the porn-star loving and twice-divorced Donald Trump.
The writers collected here are busy defending Western civilization and its roots in Christianity and in the classics of Greek and Roman civilization. Here we find C.S. Lewis in 1943 warning that the growth of Subjectivism will lead to Western ruin, Donald Davidson in 1957 seeing a symbol of American decline in the figure of a skimpily dressed drum majorette leading her high school band at the back of a Charleston military parade, and Irving Kristol circa 1978 sounding an alarm that Western civilization cannot be separated from Christina values and survive. These are just examples. Excerpts from Rudyard Kipling, T. S. Eliot, Joseph Conrad, Nathanial Hawthorne, Henry Adams and John Adams, Benjamin Disraeli and George Santayana, James Fennimore Cooper, Robert Nisbet, Russell Kirk, and Edmund Burke are arrayed to build a picture of conservatism that overlaps but does not completely align with Republican politics today.
One concern that does align with Republican politics today is the distrust of government as a solution to social ills and evils. Conservatives here are aligned against the progressive impulse found in Rousseau's belief in the goodness of man that was carried forward by the Marxists and Socialist utopian thinkers in their belief that a utopia on Earth was possible through progressive or revolutionary movements. Conservatives look at the bloody French Revolution and see in it proof that barbarism lies at the end of the revolutionary path. As Bob Dylan sang, its better to strengthen the things that remain. Because evil lies in the hearts of fallen man, character and a society built on religious values is the proper way to deal with corruption and evil. Social relations found in tradition and not legislation out of government power is the key. Robert Nesbit, for example, sees the bulwark against evil in well-established traditions, putting his faith in more reliance on common law and less on legislation and statutory law. In their distrust of big government the conservatives in this collection clearly do align with Republican distrust of government. Both support order and authority but both then and now, Conservatives resist and oppose governmental interference in personal affairs and business.
The writers collected here are busy defending Western civilization and its roots in Christianity and in the classics of Greek and Roman civilization. Here we find C.S. Lewis in 1943 warning that the growth of Subjectivism will lead to Western ruin, Donald Davidson in 1957 seeing a symbol of American decline in the figure of a skimpily dressed drum majorette leading her high school band at the back of a Charleston military parade, and Irving Kristol circa 1978 sounding an alarm that Western civilization cannot be separated from Christina values and survive. These are just examples. Excerpts from Rudyard Kipling, T. S. Eliot, Joseph Conrad, Nathanial Hawthorne, Henry Adams and John Adams, Benjamin Disraeli and George Santayana, James Fennimore Cooper, Robert Nisbet, Russell Kirk, and Edmund Burke are arrayed to build a picture of conservatism that overlaps but does not completely align with Republican politics today.
One concern that does align with Republican politics today is the distrust of government as a solution to social ills and evils. Conservatives here are aligned against the progressive impulse found in Rousseau's belief in the goodness of man that was carried forward by the Marxists and Socialist utopian thinkers in their belief that a utopia on Earth was possible through progressive or revolutionary movements. Conservatives look at the bloody French Revolution and see in it proof that barbarism lies at the end of the revolutionary path. As Bob Dylan sang, its better to strengthen the things that remain. Because evil lies in the hearts of fallen man, character and a society built on religious values is the proper way to deal with corruption and evil. Social relations found in tradition and not legislation out of government power is the key. Robert Nesbit, for example, sees the bulwark against evil in well-established traditions, putting his faith in more reliance on common law and less on legislation and statutory law. In their distrust of big government the conservatives in this collection clearly do align with Republican distrust of government. Both support order and authority but both then and now, Conservatives resist and oppose governmental interference in personal affairs and business.
October 5, 2022
A handsome volume of primary sources to accompany The Conservative Mind.
March 3, 2015
title is contradictio in adiecto. eponoynous oxymoron could be a good locus of interrogation, maybe a thorough deconstruction in the style of derrida's grammatology or in the 'outworks.' what means this curious aporia?
February 27, 2008
Required reading for Dr. Forde's Political Theory.
March 23, 2011
The best collection of essays one can have if they interested in the cultural and intellectual roots of the modern conservative movement
September 10, 2016
Great synthesis of ideas but he could write a lot clearer
December 20, 2015
Excellent compilation of historical conservative sources.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews