Wednesday, May 11, 2005

A book & a review worth reading

The book is Prospects for Conservatives by Russell Kirk (conservative giant); you can get it through your public library.

The review is of that book, and it's by Maclin Horton. Here's the opening 'graph:
    When someone tells me that he is a conservative, I want to know what it is that he wishes to conserve. And I ask the question with a certain intention to harass, for I have always had trouble understanding how the beliefs which most Americans understand to be implied by the word “conservative” could reasonably merit that term. I was therefore delighted to discover, seven or eight years ago, the existence of the traditionalist conservative movement, of which Russell Kirk is a well-known spokesman, and to find it at war, at least part of the time, with those for whom the word “conservatism” means an ideology composed of free-market economics, nearly idolatrous nationalism, and a very 19th-century notion of “progress”—a definition which makes necessary the clumsy and somewhat redundant term “traditionalist conservative.”
Read the rest of it here.

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