Modern Age articles from September 2007

Modern Age archives from September 2007

What is worth conserving?(Essay)
September 22, 2007... In 1955, in the pages of Commonweal magazine, Russell Kirk sought to explain the gradual disappearance of serious journals of opinion in the United States and Britain. He offered several possible reasons for this trend: hard economic times and...

The problem with modern art; or, why beautiful art matters.(IN DEFENSE OF BEAUTY)(Essay)
September 22, 2007... During the past fifty years, one subject, amongst all the timeless Permanent Things conservatives have so vigorously defended, remains unexamined, unreported, all but ignored. Yet, as this essay would suggest, it may hold the key to a new...

Conservatism means conservation.(IN DEFENSE OF BEAUTY)(Essay)
September 22, 2007... Environmentalism has all the hallmarks of a left-wing cause: a class of victims (future generations), an enlightened vanguard who fights for them (the eco-warriors), powerful philistines who exploit them (the capitalists), and endless...

Building more value into the world we build.(IN DEFENSE OF BEAUTY)(Essay)
September 22, 2007... Throughout history, great civilizations have left powerful imprints on the human habitat. From Angkor Wat to Yucatan, beauty and grandeur in the design of temples, palaces, memorials--even whole precincts or cities--have resulted. During the...

Beauty: an essential characteristic of civilized culture.(IN DEFENSE OF BEAUTY)(Essay)
September 22, 2007... That offbeat gothic comedy serial of the 1960s, The Addams Family, would seem to be the last place to look for an understanding of "beauty" capable of withstanding erosion by the cynically diluted materialism of our time. The impish critique of...

The "good feminism" delusion.(IN DEFENSE OF PATRIARCHY)(Essay)
September 22, 2007... Throughout the history of the U.S.S.R., both before and after Stalin's crimes were exposed, true believers and fellow travelers would insist that the monstrous oppressions committed in the name of communism were only perversions of, or...

Feminist literary criticism: from anti-patriarchy to decadence.(IN DEFENSE OF PATRIARCHY)(Essay)
September 22, 2007... The "tiny, embattled band" that launched feminist criticism thirty years ago has produced, in the words of one of its historians, "a widespread and well-known field of study." In fact, according to one Modern Language Association survey,...

The end of gender sanity in American public life.(IN DEFENSE OF PATRIARCHY)(Essay)
September 22, 2007... For decades, new cadets entering the Air Force Academy were greeted by a bold slogan spelled out on a Banner several feet tall: "Bring Me Men." Originally taken from a nineteenth-century poem by Samuel Walter Foss, this slogan invited the...

A dawsonian view of patriarchy.(IN DEFENSE OF PATRIARCHY)(Christopher Dawson)(Critical essay)
September 22, 2007... "Patriarchy" is a word that has almost ceased to communicate a definable meaning in contemporary discourse. Feminist theory deploys the term so loosely that it may be applied to any institution or instance in which men dominate women or are...

The natural family dimly seen through feminist eyes.(IN DEFENSE OF PATRIARCHY)(Essay)
September 22, 2007... Aspiring patriarchs would seem to have little to cheer about in recent decades. Equal pay statutes have destroyed the "family wage" regime that once rewarded the bread winning father as "head of household." The real hourly wages of blue collar...

American conservatism and the old republic.(IN DEFENSE OF THE OLD REPUBLIC)
September 22, 2007... As some renditions of American history would have it, the conservative pedigree in the United States begins with, or at the very least includes, Alexander Hamilton and his followers. In fact, the typical lineages are given thus:...

The problem of the imperial presidency.(IN DEFENSE OF THE OLD REPUBLIC)(Essay)
September 22, 2007... The Philadelphia Constitution may be dead, (1) but the basic problems which troubled the Framers--e.g., preserving the rule of law, preventing oppressive government--are still relevant, albeit in the new and different context. For instance, by...

The Southern tradition and limited government.(IN DEFENSE OF THE OLD REPUBLIC)(Essay)
September 22, 2007... What can we learn from the Southern tradition about limiting the disposition of the modern state to centralize power? At first glance very little. The defeat of the Confederacy meant that the principles of state sovereignty and its corollaries,...

The old republic and the sectional crisis.(IN DEFENSE OF THE OLD REPUBLIC)(Essay)
September 22, 2007... The Civil War was no simple contest between good and evil. It was, to be sure, a moral conflict--a conflict, as Eugene Genovese has long argued, between rival societies organized around rival social systems and dominated by rival social...

Harry Jaffa and the demise of the old republic.(IN DEFENSE OF THE OLD REPUBLIC)(Essay)
September 22, 2007... The writing of history, as we have learned from authors as diverse as Thucydides, Voltaire, Nietzsche, Butter-field, Collingwood, and Oakeshott can and has been done in strikingly different ways while serving radically different purposes. We...

Conservatism, Christianity, and the revitalization of Europe.(IN DEFENSE OF OLD EUROPE)(Essay)
September 22, 2007... We live in a secular, by which I do not mean a neutral, society. No society can be neutral with respect to religion, for public appeal either may or may not be made to religious principles. If--in the Western world--all discussion must be...

The tragic death of the Habsburg Empire.(IN DEFENSE OF OLD EUROPE)(Essay)
September 22, 2007... As the twentieth century recedes ever further into the past, we are able to discern its nature and its meaning with a clearer, and a deeper, understanding. And we can see that its length as defined by its meaningful substance was slightly...

Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the interwar European Right.(IN DEFENSE OF OLD EUROPE)(Essay)
September 22, 2007... In the interwar period, a movement emerged in Central Europe that formulated a particular concept of European unity. One of this movement's most prominent spokesmen was the Bohemian nobleman Karl Anton Prinz Rohan (1898-1975), a former officer...

"Rule Britannia!" all empires are not created equal.(IN DEFENSE OF OLD EUROPE)
September 22, 2007... Bread and butter pudding in Hawaii in January 2003 is a particularly pleasant memory for me of the worldwide influence of British imperialism. At present, imperialism and the British Empire are subjects that are widely discussed but generally...

Pope Leo XIII and the Catholic response to modernity.(IN DEFENSE OF OLD EUROPE)(Essay)
September 22, 2007... We often refer to the latest developments in our times as "modern," but we tend to forget that the modern age actually began five hundred years ago--back in the 1500's with the Renaissance, the Reformation, the birth of modern science, the age...

The decline of American intellectual conservatism.(CONCLUSION: CONSERVATISM IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM)(Essay)
September 22, 2007... A quarter of a century ago Modern Age asked me to assess the state of American intellectual conservatism for its 25th anniversary issue. (1) I had been a student of the subject for twenty years. In 1971, five years before George Nash published...