Russell Kirk: American Conservative
Russell Kirk: American Conservative. Brad Birzer. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. In the past decade and a half, a slew of biographies have been written about…
Transformative Love and The Recovery of Tradition in Mr. Sammler’s Planet
A controversial novel when it was first published, Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970) remains worth revisiting, even though the social and political conflicts of the 1960s…
The Search to Be Human in Dangling Man
Bellow’s first novel, Dangling Man (1944), is about a man named Joseph who does not know how to integrate himself in American life without losing the spiritual…
Father and Sons: Saul Bellow’s Politics and Political Thought
In my recently released co-edited volume, A Political Companion to Saul Bellow, the contributors explore the politics and political thought of one of the seminal fiction writers…
What Can Philip Roth Tell Us About Politics Today
What can Philip Roth tell us about politics today? What can the author of The Human Stain, American Pastoral, and The Plot Against America tell us about…
Hawthorne’s Counterfeiting History in The Scarlet Letter
In the first half of the nineteenth-century, the question of history – its origins, its continuing burden, and the possibility of transcending it – preoccupied American thinkers,…
The Need for Renewal: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Conservatism
In a chapter in The Conservative Mind titled “Transitional Conservatism: New England Sketches,” Russell Kirk cited John Quincy Adams, Orestes Brownson, and Nathaniel Hawthorne as figures in…
A Witness and Prophet for History: Solzhenitsyn’s March 1917
March 1917: The Red Wheel. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2017. Historians like Eric Hobsbawn had argued that the Russian Revolution was…
Walker Percy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the Search for Influence
Walker Percy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the Search for Influence. Jessica Hooten Wilson. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2017. When suffering from tuberculosis and confined to…
Contract, Friendship, and Love in The Merchant of Venice
Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice has been interpreted in numerous ways that range from focusing on the roles of women and marriage to examining questions of justice…
For Love of Democracy: Eros, Reverence, and Ritual in Plato’s Laws
Both deontological and classical liberalism have been criticized by communitarian thinkers who contend that liberalism is rooted in an incoherent conception of the self because it fails…
The Laws Most Beautiful and Best
The Law Most Beautiful and Best: Medical Arguments and Magical Rhetoric in Plato's Laws. Randall Baldwin Clark. Lexington Books, 2003. The analogy of politics and medicine…
Knowing Persons
Knowing Persons: A Study in Plato. Lloyd P. Gerson, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. On the debate whether in antiquity the concept of the person is…
Plato, Metaphysics, and the Forms
Plato, Metaphysics and the Forms. Francis A. Grabowski III. New York/London: Continuum, 2008. Grabowski approaches the Platonic theory of the Forms as an epistemological problem where…
Why Plato Wrote
Why Plato Wrote. Danielle S. Allen. Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. As part of the Blackwell Bristol Lectures Series on Greece, Rome, and the Classical Tradition, Danielle S. Allen has…