The University Bookman

 
 

Volume 47, Number 3–4 (Fall 2010)

Editor’s Note

Transition

This issue represents the end result of a half-century of conservative reflection on the important books in our cultural conversation. When Russell Kirk founded this journal in 1960, he faced a world beset by liberal ideology, with small place, if any at all, for conservative viewpoints, let alone policy prescriptions.

In the 50 years in which the University Bookman has published, the world has changed. Conservatives, from being a political minority, grew to challenge the liberal behemoth and took power in 1980, only to see the movement fracture again in the mid-1990s over the culture wars, and again after September 11 in the wake of the rhetorical “war on terror” and the very real wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The mission of the Bookman, however, has remained the same: to provide serious reflection on serious books. As mentioned in our last issue, the Bookman will now be appearing primarily in an online form, accessible here at the Kirk Center. At the site, we expect to continue to post essays, reviews, interviews, and other contributions from our varied and learned writers. We still need your support, however. Although moving to a non-print format reduces our expenses, it does not eliminate them, and we must be able to pay for the very best contributors and reviewers that we can. In addition, we do hope to offer occasional print issues, which will not be possible without your support.

This final print issue is a distillation of many of the themes that have occupied the Bookman these past five decades. We have reviews of books covering many aspects of the Western intellectual tradition, from poets such as Robert Frost to statesman George Kennan, explorers like the great and almost forgotten Champlain to historian John Lukacs. Joseph Stuart reviews a book on Frost from Peter Stanlis, a longtime supporter of the journal, and Thomas Bertonneau contributes his reflections on the noir tradition. And we continue our more particular exploration of the conservative tradition, here and abroad, including studies of Peter Viereck and German conservative Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing.

As Russell Kirk points out in the fine, elegiac essay we reprint here, political controversy is not—and is not ever—the final purpose of thought or of action. The conservative recognizes the existence of transcendence, and that politics, though it can meliorate the harshness of life, cannot transfer that transcendence into a heaven on earth. What we can do, as Kirk says, is to “brighten the corner where you are,” by infusing our daily life with grace, culture, and tradition. Lo these many years, the Bookman has tried to do that amid the cultural wastelands of the last century, and will continue to do so in this one.

Gerald J. Russello

Posted: November 13, 2010 in Editor’s Notes.

Real progress consists in the movement of mankind toward the understanding of norms, and toward conformity to norms. Real decadence consists in the movement of mankind away from the understanding of norms, and away from obedience to norms.

Russell Kirk, Enemies of the Permanent Things, 1969

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The Kirk Center and The University Bookman regret the passing of sociologist Irving Louis Horowitz, who died in March. Recipient of many accolades, Horowitz was a sociologist of wide-ranging interests, from religion to analysis of state power and social order in assessing a society’s quality of life, an approach that has since become standard. Horowitz has a special place in the memory of the Kirk Center. It is he who made possible the Library of Conservative Thought, a collection of more than thirty volumes published by Transaction Press, with which Horowitz was long affiliated, and edited by Russell Kirk. These thirty-odd volumes constitute a basic reading list for the educated conservative, and include classics such as James Burnham’s Congress and the American Tradition, Irving Babbitt’s Rousseau and Romanticism, Orestes Brownson’s Selected Political Essays, and Kirk’s own America’s British Culture. These books brought the tradition of conservative reflection to a new generation, and rightly placed them alongside other important works of sociology, intellectual history, and politics. In his eulogy for Russell Kirk, given at Kirk’s Memorial Mass in 1994, Horowitz stated that Kirk was now “at one with the great tradition he helped articulate and recover”—words that also aptly describe the legacy of Irving Louis Horowitz. RIP. (17 Apr 2012)

Here’s a round-up of recent writings by Bookman editor Gerald Russello elsewhere on the Internet and in print. • At the Imaginative Conservative Russello responds to Claes Ryn’s argument that conservatives have failed the culture. • He reviews Gregory Wolfe’s Beauty Will Save the World in the October edition of Chronicles. • At the National Catholic Register he discusses a recent Colorado religious liberty case denying families access to funds for private education, based on an outdated reading of a bigoted “Blaine”-style amendment. • In The Wilson Quarterly, he reviews Why Trilling Matters. (15 Oct 2011)

The Imaginative Conservative blog has posted an excerpt and link to an essay by Pepperdine’s Ted McAllister on Kirk’s Conservative Mind that is worth a look: “What was then more readily an act of preservation has become today an act of recovery.” (1 Oct 2011)

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