thoughts in and out of season
Contemporary liberalism honors diversity and tolerance above all, but what it calls by those names is different from what has been so called in the past. Its diversity denigrates and excludes ordinary people, and its tolerance requires speech codes, quotas, and compulsory training in correct opinions and attitudes. Nor do current liberal totems and tabus … More ...
Today I will present a very general perspective on liberalism: what it is, where it comes from, where it might go.
I’m a lawyer, and after preparing my remarks I realized that they took a lawyer’s point of view. What I had … More ...
The following review was published in the September 2003 issue of American Renaissance.
The Scorpion is the leading publication in English about the thinkers and themes of the European New Right (ENR). It is edited by Michael Walker, an Englishman living in Germany who is well-connected in Nationalist circles in Europe. American Renaissance readers … More ...
James Kalb
Yale Law School
Supervised Analytic Writing — Charles Gray, supervisor
January 10, 1978
In the course of this draft I refer to a number of books and articles on the benefit of clergy and the privilege of sanctuary. While helpful to anyone wanting to understand these institutions, these sources tend to … More ...
The Patriot is a popular entertainment about the American war for independence that tells the story of Benjamin Martin, a South Carolina planter and widower, and his struggles on behalf of his large family and against the British. The film is a Hollywood entertainment, and as such … More ...
Long a major figure in cyber-culture, the executive editor of Wired, turns in this book to futurology. The wisdom of contemporary oracles, like that of their predecessors, emerges from dark sayings and plays on words. Although Kelly admits the future is unforeseeable, he … More ...
Shortly before dawn on April 19, 1993, FBI tanks equipped to dispense tear gas crashed through the walls of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. Over the course of the next six hours the tanks repeatedly rammed the ramshackle frame building inside the compound occupied by members of the sect, pumping in tear gas … More ...
A slightly edited version of the preceding essay, originally entitled “Liberalism, the Transcendent, and Restoration,” appeared in the Summer 2000 issue of Modern Age. It is also available in German and Czech.
The disappearance of the radical left is a sign that in principle it has reached its attainable goals. While no one … More ...
A slightly edited version of the following essay appeared in the Winter 2002 issue of Telos.
Why does liberalism—the tradition that makes equal freedom the political touchstone—combine such strength with such incoherence? The attempt to make freedom dominant leads to contradiction. Liberalism is triumphant almost everywhere, but its victory reverses the meaning of its … More ...
A slightly edited version of the following essay appeared in issue 20 of The Scorpion.
Political thinkers engage our attention by their presentation of the particular features of their own time and place as well as the permanent qualities of man in society. We can read Aristotle and Hobbes for general lessons, or for … More ...