More than twenty years ago a maverick political scientist named Willmoore Kendall predicted the triumph of conservatism. Upon the 1963 publication of Kendall's The Conservative Affirmation, his former Yale student William F. Buckley, Jr. called him "one of the most superb and original political analysts of the 20th century," but even Buckley shook his head at what appeared to be Kendall's "baffling optimism." During the 60's, Kendall stood apart from the mainstream conservative movement which he accused of being anti-populist and of "storming American public opinion from without" by wrongly assuming that the American people were essentially corrupt and "always ready to sell thier votes to the highest bidder." Kendall believed that Americans would come to actively realize the conservatism which they had always actually lived. Seventeen years after his death in 1967, Kendall's predictions come to fruition.

The Conservative Affirmation in America

History

Kendall, Willmoore

Americas

Intercollegiate Studies Institute

We Still Hold These Truths: Rediscovering Our Principles, Reclaiming Our Future

Politics & Social Sciences

Spalding, Matthew

Politics & Government

A striking contribution to the conversation that is conservatism
Wendell Berry—poet, novelist, essayist, critic, farmer—has won the admiration of Americans from all walks of life and from across the political spectrum. His writings treat an extraordinary range of subjects, including politics, economics, ecology, farming, work, marriage, religion, and education. But as this enlightening new book shows, such diverse writings are united by a humane vision that finds its inspiration in the great moral and literary tradition of the West.
In The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry, Mark T. Mitchell and Nathan Schlueter bring together a distinguished roster of writers to critically engage Berry’s ideas. The volume features original contributions from Rod Dreher, Anthony Esolen, Allan Carlson, Richard Gamble, Jason Peters, Anne Husted Burleigh, Patrick J. Deneen, Caleb Stegall, Luke Schlueter, Matt Bonzo, Michael Stevens, D. G. Hart, Mark Shiffman, and William Edmund Fahey, as well as a classic piece by Wallace Stegner.
Together, these authors situation Berry’s ideas within the larger context of conservative thought. His vision stands for reality in all its facets and against all reductive “isms”—for intellect against intellectualism, individuality against individualism, community against communitarianism, liberty against libertarianism. Wendell Berry calls his readers to live lives of gratitude, responsibility, friendship, and love—notions that, as this important new book makes clear, should be at the heart of a thoughtful and coherent conservatism.

The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

"Practically every aspect of university life that a potential student would want to investigate can be found within these pages.”——THOMAS E. WOODS JR., Ph.D., bestselling author of Meltdown
“Easily the best of the college guides” (American Spectator) . . . “Indispensable” (First Things,/i&gt;) . . . “An excellent guide” (National Review) . . . “Of great value” (New York Post) . . . “A godsend” (National Catholic Register) . . . “An essential reference” (Homeschool Magazine) . . . “A must for parents” (Dr. Laura Schlessinger) . . . “Unmatched” (Christina Hoff Sommers) . . .
That’s just a sampling of the overwhelming praise for Choosing the Right College, the most in-depth, independently researched college guide on the market, and the only source for students and parents who want the unvarnished truth about America’s top colleges and universities.
Updated and expanded, Choosing the Right College 2012-13 features incisive essays, telling statistics, and revealing sidebars on 140 schools—Ivy League institutions, state universities, liberal arts colleges, religious schools, military academies, and lesser-known schools worth a careful look.
Here you’ll discover information you can’t get anywhere else about the intellectual, political, and social conditions at each institution, including: Insider tips on the best—and worst—departments, courses, and professors The statistics that colleges don’t want you to know A unique “traffic light” feature—red, yellow, or green—that reveals the state of intellectual freedom and the extent of political correctness on campus The truth about day-to-day student life: the social scene, living arrangements, campus safety, clubs, sports, traditions, and much more A roadmap for getting a real education at any school, whether a huge state university or a tiny liberal arts college Essential financial information, including the extent of need-based financial aid and the average student-debt load of graduates The most overpriced colleges—and the good values you don’t know about Plus, you’ll get a FREE one-year subscription to the companion website , which profiles dozens more schools and offers special “top five” lists, expert tips on handling the admissions process, an “Ask the Editors” feature, guides to navigating the college experience, videos featuring students and recent alumni, and much more.
Choosing the Right College provides all the answers you’ll need to make one of life’s crucial decisions. Visit www.CollegeGuide.org

Choosing the Right College 2012-13: The Whole Truth about America’s Top Schools

Business & Money

Job Hunting & Careers

A book for educating citizens
This wonderfully rich anthology uses the soul-shaping power of story, speech, and song to help Americans realize more deeply—and appreciate more fully—who they are as citizens of the United States.
At once inspiring and thought-provoking, What So Proudly We Hail features dozens of selections on American identity, character, and civic life by our country’s greatest writers and leaders—from Mark Twain to John Updike, from George Washington to Theodore Roosevelt, from Willa Cather to Flannery O’Connor, from Benjamin Franklin to Martin Luther King Jr., from Francis Scott Key to Irving Berlin.
Developing robust American citizens involves educating the heart as well as the mind. It is not enough to understand our nation’s lofty principles or know our history; thoughtful and engaged citizens require cultivated moral imaginations and fitting sentiments and attitudes—matters both displayed in and nurtured by our great works of imaginative literature and rhetoric.
Featuring the editors’ insightful and instructive commentary, What So Proudly We Hail illuminates our national identity, the American creed, the American character, and the virtues and aspirations of active citizenship. This marvelous book will not only be a fixture on bedside tables; it will also spark conversations in homes, schools, colleges, and reading groups everywhere.

What So Proudly We Hail: The American Soul in Story, Speech, and Song

Literature & Fiction

United States

The End of Democracy?
The fall of the Berlin Wall. The collapse of the Iron Curtain. The Orange Revolution. The Arab Spring.
The rush of events in recent decades seems to confirm that Alexis de Tocqueville was right: the future belongs to democracy. But take a closer look. The history of democracy since the 1830s, when Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America, reveals a far more complicated picture. And the future, author Chilton Williamson Jr. demonstrates, appears rather unpromising for democratic institutions around the world.
The fall of communism sparked the popular notion that the spread of democracy was inevitable. After Tocqueville challenges this sunny notion. Various aspects of twenty-first-century life that Tocqueville could scarcely have imagined—political, economic, social, religious, intellectual, technological, environmental—militate against democracy, both in developing societies and in the supposedly democratic West.
This piercing, elegantly written book raises crucial questions about the future of democracy, including: •Just what is democracy? As Williamson shows, definitions and concepts have become so varied that the term is effectively meaningless. •How does a system whose institutions and habits arose in small-scale societies adapt to a postmodern, globalized world? •After two centuries of democratization, are Western countries really more free? •How can democracy endure when people care more about procuring what they want than about securing liberty? •How does a political system survive when it is beset by problems that cannot be solved by political means? Two decades ago, Francis Fukuyama famously pronounced the “end of history.” History, it turns out, is still very much with us. Democracy (whatever it is) may not be in the decades and centuries to come.

After Tocqueville: The Promise and Failure of Democracy

Williamson, Jr. Chilton

How did liberals get to be the way they are today?
That’s the question many Americans have been asking—particularly after the ascent of Barack Obama, the most left-wing president in American history. At last, historians Donald T. Critchlow and W. J. Rorabaugh supply the answer.
The authors show that it is a mistake to see the Obama administration’s sweeping agenda as a single man’s vision. Equally flawed, they reveal, is the now-common argument that today’s liberalism is simply a continuation of the progressivism that Woodrow Wilson embodied a century ago. Today’s Left has embraced a more radical vision for transformative change: to remake nearly every aspect of American life.
Takeover completely reshapes our understanding of America’s current political situation. This bold revisionist history delineates the sharp break in the history of modern liberalism that began in the 1960s, when new-style progressive activists left behind their protest rallies to infiltrate the establishment.
Critchlow and Rorabaugh reveal: •How Obama almost certainly could not have become president if 1970s progressive activists had not rewritten the Democratic Party’s presidential nominating rules •How radical leaders pioneered the use of the courts to impose their agenda •From Roe v. Wade to Dr. Kevorkian: how partial-birth abortion became “the right to choose” and euthanasia became “the right to die with dignity” •The inside story of liberals’ decades-long struggle to nationalize health care •How today’s environmentalism reflects the Left’s anticorporate, anticonsumption ethos •The progressive paradox: how elites gain more control even as they employ the rhetoric of “choice” and “power to the people” Critchlow and Rorabaugh masterfully connect the dots in America’s recent history, showing the close links among such seemingly unrelated causes as radical environmentalism, nationalized health care, class warfare, abortion rights, feminism, caps on energy use, assisted suicide, and sex education. Takeover will forever change how you view liberalism and the political debate in America.

Takeover: How the Left's Quest for Social Justice Corrupted Liberalism

Critchlow, Donald T.

Rorabaugh, W.J.

Did Muhammad Exist?: An Inquiry into Islam's Obscure Origins

Are jihadists dying for a fiction? Everything you thought you knew about Islam is about to change.
Did Muhammad exist?
It is a question that few have thought—or dared—to ask. Virtually everyone, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, takes for granted that the prophet of Islam lived and led in seventh-century Arabia.
But this widely accepted story begins to crumble on close examination, as Robert Spencer shows in his eye-opening new book.
In his blockbuster bestseller The Truth about Muhammad, Spencer revealed the shocking contents of the earliest Islamic biographical material about the prophet of Islam. Now, in Did Muhammad Exist?, he uncovers that material’s surprisingly shaky historical foundations. Spencer meticulously examines historical records, archaeological findings, and pioneering new scholarship to reconstruct what we can know about Muhammad, the Qur’an, and the early days of Islam. The evidence he presents challenges the most fundamental assumptions about Islam’s origins.
Did Muhammad Exist? reveals: How the earliest biographical material about Muhammad dates from at least 125 years after his reported death How six decades passed before the Arabian conquerors—or the people they conquered—even mentioned Muhammad, the Qur’an, or Islam The startling evidence that the Qur’an was constructed from existing materials—including pre-Islamic Christian texts How even Muslim scholars acknowledge that countless reports of Muhammad’s deeds were fabricated Why a famous mosque inscription may refer not to Muhammad but, astonishingly, to Jesus How the oldest records referring to a man named Muhammad bear little resemblance to the now-standard Islamic account of the life of the prophet The many indications that Arabian leaders fashioned Islam for political reasons Far from an anti-Islamic polemic, Did Muhammad Exist? is a sober but unflinching look at the origins of one of the world’s major religions. While Judaism and Christianity have been subjected to searching historical criticism for more than two centuries, Islam has never received the same treatment on any significant scale.
The real story of Muhammad and early Islam has long remained in the shadows. Robert Spencer brings it into the light at long last.

Spencer, Robert

Middle East

“The solution for the modern GOP . . . This book provides plenty of intellectual ammunition for the modern conservative movement.” ―SENATOR RAND PAUL
 How can America recover from economic stagnation, moral exhaustion, and looming bankruptcy? Donald J. Devine shows the way.
 Devine, a longtime adviser to Ronald Reagan, lays out a powerful case for the philosophical synthesis of freedom and tradition that Reagan said was the essence of modern conservatism. The secret of America’s success, he shows, has been the Constitution’s capacity to harmonize the twin ideals of freedom and tradition. But today, progressivism has so corrupted modern political thinking―in both parties―that leaders keep calling for the same failed tactics: more money poured into more big-government programs.
 In America’s Way Back, Devine not only reveals where things went wrong, and why, but also points the way to reclaiming America’s freedom, prosperity, and creativity. The solution lies in a new “fusion” of traditional and libertarian thought.
 Devine debunks the common view that marrying the two is nothing more than political calculation. He shows that without a deep philosophical commitment to harmonizing freedom and tradition, neither of these ideals can long survive.
 In making the case for twenty-first-century fusionism, America’s Way Back updates the insights of Frank Meyer, the theorist Reagan specifically credited with “fashioning a vigorous synthesis of traditional and libertarian thought.“ Devine shows that, just as the fusionism of Meyer and William F. Buckley Jr. led to the conservative revival in the 1960s, a new harmony between freedom and tradition will revive America today. “Prepare for enlightenment. . . . The [story] that Mr. Devine narrates aptly, informatively, is engaging as a summons to look around, look back, ask the vital question: Are conservatives doing the very, very best they can?” ―Washington Times
 “Intellectual yet highly readable . . . Devine has plenty of such instructive analysis and anecdotes to bolster his points. . . . You will learn about concepts your university should have introduced to you, only now via Devine’s graceful writing, incisive analysis, instructive anecdotes, and a plan to restore America’s greatness.” ―Human Events
 “The timing is right for [Devine’s] new book America’s Way Back. It lays out the course for a conservative intellectual renewal, to renew the nation by renewing her best traditions. . . . Reagan had a heckuva lieutenant in Don Devine. It is good to see him now mentoring the next generation of conservative leaders.” ―L. Brent Bozell III, syndicated columnist, president of the Media Research Center
 “A tour-de-force critique . . . We need to listen to people like Devine who are calling us back to a simpler, less complicated system of governance that allows decisions to be made at the local and state levels. If we don’t listen, if we just doggedly insist that the solution is to re-order, reform and re-imagine our failed programs, then we’ll end up going the way of the Titanic.” ―Floyd Brown, Capitol Hill Daily
 “A brilliant analysis of the major factors that have contributed to our nation’s decline. A very timely effort on perhaps the most critical issue of our time.” ―George W. Carey, professor of government, Georgetown University
 “A marvelous book. Read America’s Way Back if you fear ignorance and celebrate righteous, moral, intellectual knowledge.” ―Craig Shirley, author of Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign That Changed America

America's Way Back: Reclaiming Freedom, Tradition, and Constitution

Devine, Donald J.

History and the Human Condition: A Historian's Pursuit of Knowledge

“This is the best introduction to the historical craft of John Lukacs . . . one of the true creative geniuses of his profession.” ―The American Conservative
 In a career spanning more than sixty-five years, John Lukacs has established himself as one of our most accomplished historians. Now, in the stimulating book History and the Human Condition, Lukacs offers his profound reflections on the very nature of history, the role of the historian, the limits of knowledge, and more.
 Guiding us on a quest for knowledge, Lukacs ranges far and wide over the past two centuries. The pursuit takes us from Alexis de Tocqueville to the atomic bomb, from American “exceptionalism” to Nazi expansionism, from the closing of the American frontier to the passing of the modern age.
 Lukacs’s insights about the past have important implications for the present and future. In chronicling the twentieth-century decline of liberalism and rise of conservatism, for example, he forces us to rethink the terms of the liberal-versus-conservative debate. In particular, he shows that what passes for “conservative” in the twenty-first century often bears little connection to true conservatism.
 Lukacs concludes by shifting his gaze from the broad currents of history to the world immediately around him. His reflections on his home, his town, his career, and his experiences as an immigrant to the United States illuminate deeper truths about America, the unique challenges of modernity, the sense of displacement and atomization that increasingly characterizes twenty-first-century life, and much more. Moving and insightful, this closing section focuses on the human in history, masterfully displaying how right Lukacs is in his contention that history, at its best, is personal and participatory.
History and the Human Condition is a fascinating work by one of the finest historians of our time. More than that, it is perhaps John Lukacs’s final word on the great themes that have defined him as a historian and a writer.

Lukacs, John

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