Last week David Deaval, Visiting Professor at the University of St. Thomas and 2013 Novak Award winner, wrote a very thoughtful essay on Fredrich Hayek, the question of social justice, and Catholic social teaching at the Imaginative Conservative. Deaval begins by noting the increasing tendency among some in the American conservative movement to devalue and dismiss free market ideas: One of the places this e out most strongly lately is in the hostility directed at “libertarians,” “libertarianism,” and indeed “free...

Sir Roger Scruton, whom Acton Institute co-founder Rev. Robert Sirico once described as “perhaps the world’s leading conservative philosopher,” passed away from cancer Sunday at the age of 75. His profound intelligence probed every subject from aesthetics and sexuality to religion and the minutiae of governing. Below are 10 quotations that encapsulate his view of conservatism, culture, and the meaning of life. What is culture? A civilization is a social entity that manifests religious, political, legal, and customary uniformity over...

“Real grief,” wrote Sir Roger Scruton in Culture Counts, “focuses on the object, the person lost and mourned for, while sentimental grief focuses on the subject, the person who grieves.” Bona fide grief attends the death of Roger Scruton, 75, from cancer on Sunday. The noted philosopher, expert on aesthetics, and intellectual architect of modern conservatism – who wrote more than 50 books – leaves behind his wife, Sophie, and two children, Sam and Lucy. Scruton, who had been fighting...

In 1949, half-a-dozen ex-Communists wrote a book about their former faith, dubbing socialism The God that Failed. As the UK’s revered National Health Service enters its worst spiral on record, it seems to have earned that title. News broke Thursday morning the NHS had its worst month in history in December 2019. The number of people who waited more than four hours for treatment in its Accident & Emergency (A&E) rooms broke all previous records. In 2010, the UK government...

A senior official in the UK’s single-payer healthcare system says that patients should stop selfishly putting their own health and well-being first in order to improve the funding and “morale” of the NHS. Jessica Arnold, who “has held a number of senior roles in the NHS,” argues in the Guardian that the National Health Service would be in fine shape if citizens were willing to suffer in silence until the service can tend to them. Arnold makes an impassioned plea...

China’s social credit system seeks to tie each individual’s credit rating and privileges to his support for the Communist regime. Venezuela’s socialist dictator, Nicolás Maduro, has moved to import “perhaps the creepiest tool of repression” to his own country, writes Doug Bandow in this week’s Acton Commentary. Bandow, a senior rellow at the Cato Institute and former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan, writes that the metastasizing Big Brother program proves that government surveillance is an integral feature of socialism:...

On this week’s episode, we pay tribute to Gertrude Himmelfarb who passed away last Monday, December 30th, at the age of 97. Gertrude Himmelfarb was a historian and leading intellectual voice in conservatism. Throughout her career, she wrote many books about Victorian history, morality and contemporary culture. The New York Post named her one of America’s greatest minds, and the National Review called her the “paragon of intellectual plishment.” What did her work contribute to the conservative movement and how...

There’s more depressing news from China. Its Religious Affairs Office has announced that, not only must all religious organizations get state approval for any activity they undertake, they are also expected to “spread the principles and policies of the Chinese Communist Party.” Given the basic irreconcilabilities between, say, small “o” orthodox Christianity and the philosophy of Chinese Communism – which, after all, includes a mitment to atheism – this can only be seen as an escalation in the Chinese regime’s...

Capitalism is routinely castigated as an enemy of the arts, with much of the criticism pointed toward monsters of profit and efficiency. Others fret over more systemic features, worried mercialization and consumerism will inevitably detach artists from healthy creative contexts. Among progressives, such arguments are quickly paired with vague denunciations of “corporate greed” and advocacy for “corrective” or “protective” policies, from cultural subsidies to wage controls to “artist lofts” and beyond. The irony, of course, is that such solutions have...

Since the passing of Gertrude Himmelfarb I have been reflecting on just how much she taught me through her voluminous historical scholarship. In this week’s Acton Line Podcast I interviewed Yuval Levin, Resident Scholar and Director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at AEI, who was also her student. Levin’s recent essay in the National Review, “The Historian as Moralist,” is the best introduction I have ever read to Himmelfarb’s intellectual project, her major works, and her lasting influence. My...