Roger Kimball: Before the Culture Fades

http://www.city-journal.org/2012/bc0803bt.html

BRUCE S. THORNTON

Before the Culture Fades

Roger Kimball’s ongoing work of preservation

3 August 2012

The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia, by Roger Kimball (St. Augustine’s Press, 360 pp., $35)

"Roger Kimball has long been one of America’s most learned commentators on intellectual history, contemporary politics, fine art, and architecture. Longtime editor of The New Criterion and more recently publisher of Encounter Books, Kimball authored two of the best exposés of the left-wing corruption of the American university:Tenured Radicals and The Long March. The 21 essays in Kimball’s new book, The Fortunes of Permanence, cover a remarkable range of topics: relativism, multiculturalism, radical egalitarianism, the enduring importance of tradition, the delusions of socialism, “democratic despotism,” the dangers of sentimental “benevolence,” and the cultural significance of the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The essays also discuss a wide variety of individual writers: those unfairly demonized, like Rudyard Kipling; those insufficiently well known, like Leszek Kołakowski, Richard Weaver, and James Burnham; and those familiar yet still worthy of explication and reconsideration, like G. K. Chesterton and Friedrich Hayek."