"Sometimes Brands needs only a sentence to show why Brown and Lincoln belong together: 'Brown aimed at slavery and shattered the Union; Lincoln defended the Union and destroyed slavery.' That kind of parallel structure reminds me of Samuel Johnson." https://t.co/faEvHH5Gtt pic.twitter.com/RvTuDVYaNs
— Russell Kirk Center (@KirkCenter) November 21, 2020
In Romania, a TV interview program entitled “Russell Kirk: moral imagination and moral order” was recently broadcast on Trinitas TV, the channel of the Romanian Orthodox Church. For any Romanian speakers out there, watch here: https://t.co/oqRZGsqT8h. pic.twitter.com/nLr7CUDhxs
— Russell Kirk Center (@KirkCenter) September 25, 2020
Babbitt is one of the most influential yet neglected conservative intellectuals of the 20th century, a missing link between Edmund Burke and Russell Kirk. Now William S. Smith, a Catholic University contemporary of Ryn’s, has written a new study of him. https://t.co/efSNbgmeZs
— The American Conservative (@amconmag) September 19, 2020
Riveting conversation between @JeffOttoNelson and @CorneliusEcon on Edmund #Burke and Russell #Kirk and their type of #conservatism as well as the work of the @KirkCenter and @ubookman. Link ⬇️ https://t.co/SDgemEXKXV
— Dan Pitt (@DanJTPitt) August 5, 2020
The claim that the United States is now in a “post-Constitutional age,” requires even less explanation than just a few months ago. https://t.co/aJg8HeU9Ux
— Richard Reinsch (@Reinsch84) July 15, 2020
In this way, the book exemplifies a tradition of “moral realism” and resistance to abstract moral idealism. This realism requires, as one might expect, a sufficient attunement to reality in the broadest sense. That attunement takes place in the interplay between will, reason, and especially “imagination,” a word emphasized by nearly every author in the book.
“Imagination” as understood by Ryn and Babbitt, drawing on Burke, Benedetto Croce, S.T. Coleridge and others, is a pre-rational intuition of the good, the true, and the beautiful. “The imagination,” the editors explain, “always gives a unity, but it does not always give one that is real, which is to say, it is not always commensurate with the concrete, historical experience of human life.” Put simply, then, an imagination rooted in reality is what Ryn and Babbitt see as the Burkean “moral imagination,” while an imagination disconnected from reality is termed the “Romantic” or “idyllic” imagination of Rousseau.
By focusing on the imagination, the contributors emphasize the centrality of ethical character and culture which can be nourished or corrupted by experience and works of philosophy, history, theology, literature, art, and film.
As a set of ideas, they’re not particularly systematic, particularly when compared with more radical philosophies like Marxism and its innumerable offshoots, or at the other extreme, the Objectivism of Ayn Rand. They are arguably more a set of generalized assertions and attitudes rather than principles per se. Even so, they do represent a particular worldview, though it is not the worldview of the Founding Fathers or of the early American political generations. Notice as well that several of these principles are primarily defined by that which they opposed: the dominant left-liberal worldview of the mid-20th century. From their very beginning the principles of conservatism were subordinate and defensive in nature, or less charitably, they were submissive and passive-aggressive in their relation to the left.
Having access to personal correspondence and other private papers is every biographer’s dream, a potential difference...
Posted by Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture on Monday, January 25, 2016
