Remembering Joseph de Maistre
I have a piece in Chronicles on the Savoyard counterrevotionary that’s part of their Remembering the Right series.
History
The Old Right and the Recovery of Social Order
The following essay was written for A Paleoconservative Anthology: New Voices for an Old Tradition, edited by Paul Gottfried, but was left out (apparently due to an administrative slip-up—editorial changes, author’s bio etc. had all been agreed on). A slightly revised version will be published in the Australian journal Observer and Review.
The
… More ...Out of the wreckage
I have another piece on the Sixties up at Crisis Magazine. It orginally started with an epigraph from The Doctrine of the Mean by Confucius that got ditched because the site software couldn’t accommodate it:
… More ...“The ancients who wished to illustrate illustrious virtue throughout the empire, first ordered well their own states. Wishing to
The historical roots of 1960s radicalism
My latest piece at Crisis Magazine explains the Sixties as a stage of modernization (not necessarily a good thing).
Looking back on the Sixties
I have a new piece up at Crisis on the illusion and reality of the Sixties. What people expected to be liberation and soaring horizons turned out to be the rise to power of a severely flawed ruling class.
Escape from the antiworld
Here’s the text of a lecture I presented at the 2011 Roman Forum conference at Lake Garda in Italy:
Escape from the Antiworld
James Kalb
Presented at the Roman Forum conference in Gardone Riviera, Italy,
July 6, 2011
This conference raises a variety of questions. What is the present situation? How should we deal with … More ...
A distant mirror
Medieval history has its striking themes and incidents. Beyond that, it’s fascinating for us today, or at least for me today, because it’s the source of the modern Western world, so it’s infinitely close—our modern thoughts and institutions can all be traced back there—but it’s also infinitely far away.
Maybe something like that could be … More ...
The historical dice are loaded
Peter Brimelow begins his book Alien Nation by calling current immigration policy “Hitler’s posthumous revenge” on America. The war against the Nazis, he says, left the U.S. political elite “passionately concerned to cleanse itself from all taints of racism or xenophobia.” Now it appears, from a new book called Camelot and the … More ...
Another blog on Belloc
I just finished another of Belloc’s books, Characters of the Reformation. He published it in 1936, and his view of nationalism had shifted by that time from what it was when he wrote the two previous books I’ve read by him, Danton: A Study (1899) and The Jews (1922). In the earliest book he … More ...
Observation with extended view
I’m about half-way through Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Peru (available free online). It’s a great book from the great age of New England letters. His account is still considered quite accurate, or so it seems, and he presents it in the form of a clear, vivid and impartial narrative based on the … More ...