Melville House Books

Reflecting on a deceased friend who was a Conservative, Scott McLemee (“a portrait of Lenin . . . looks down on me now, here in my study at home”) considers a notion raised by Wesley McDonald in his book, Russell Kirk and the Age of Ideology: the idea of an “inner check,” which is “that factor in the soul that can subdue the more vicious parts of one’s nature — in the interest of the common good, and of the higher human potentialities.” In his newest column for Inside Higher Ed, McLemee discusses his nurturing of this notion through reading, explaining that “my reading diet now includes a certain amount of right-wing intellectual output — journals like The Modern Age and The Claremont Review of Books, for example, and books by Russell Kirk, Michael Oakeshott, and Willmoore Kendall. It’s not necessary to enjoy this stuff, or to agree with it. But it does seem important as part of the process of thinking outside one’s familiar ruts.”

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.