Claes G. Ryn

May 29, 2024 | mises.org | Claes G. Ryn

The Failure of American Conservatism and the Road Not TakenBy Claes G. RynRepublic Book Publishers, 2023; 468 pp. Claes Ryn, a leading conservative intellectual who taught politics for many years at the Catholic University of America, is by no means a libertarian, but readers of The Misesian can learn much from this book.

Mar 19, 2024 | modernagejournal.com | Claes G. Ryn

Readers of this magazine are unlikely to resist the central thesis of this book and its supporting arguments, the large majority having long ago arrived at the author’s conclusion that the American conservative movement that arose in the immediate decade after World War II and has been a presence in American political life ever since has been, broadly speaking, a failure, with results that are appallingly evident today.

Aug 16, 2023 | lawliberty.org | Theodore Dalrymple |Elizabeth Matthew |Mark Pulliam |Claes G. Ryn

Moral grandiosity seems to have infected the nomenklatura class of giant corporations. It is not enough for them to ensure that the corporations make a decent profit within the framework of the law; they must claim to also be morally improving, if not actually saving, the world. So it was with Alison Rose, the first female chief executive of the National Westminster Bank, a large British bank 39 percent owned by the British government.

Aug 14, 2023 | isi.org | Claes G. Ryn

The title of this article cries out for explanation. Who says that American conservatism needed saving? And what is meant by “conservatism” and “the humanities”? The American conservatism to which the title refers is much the same as what has been so described in numerous studies in the last half-century. The movement started to take shape in the decade after the Second World War.

Aug 9, 2023 | lawliberty.org | Claes G. Ryn |Elizabeth Matthew |Colleen A. Sheehan

Serious observers of the American political and intellectual scene can hardly doubt that American conservatism is in disarray. A number of incompatible notions of conservatism contend with each other. Why all this fragmentation and controversy? There is no simple answer, but a new book by the present author relates the disorientation to the conservative movement having failed to achieve its long-standing objectives and to its being hampered by old, by now perhaps chronic, weaknesses.