Leisure with Dignity

Essays in Celebration Essays in Celebration of Charles R. Kesler

Glenn Ellmers, Michael Anton, Glenn Ellmers, Michael Anton

• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Year: 2024
• eBook ISBN: 9781641773508
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: History

Charles R. Kesler, an eminent scholar and prodigious editor, has exerted a profound influence on the study of American politics and the practice of American conservatism.

A precocious high-school student, he impressed a visiting William F. Buckley Jr. who, before becoming a life-long friend, wrote him a recommendation letter to Yale. Kesler asked for another—to Harvard, where he completed his undergraduate degree and earned a PhD under the legendary professor Harvey C. Mansfield. An early passion for political journalism, played out largely on the pages of National Review, led Kesler to author an NR cover story on his third great influence, Harry V. Jaffa.

Kesler became a faculty colleague of Jaffa's at Claremont McKenna College and Claremont Graduate University and is perhaps best known as the editorial helmsman of the Claremont Review of Books. The author of I Am the Change: Barack Obama and the Crisis of Liberalism and Crisis of the Two Constitutions: The Rise, Decline, and Recovery of American Greatness, Kesler also co-edited (with William F. Buckley Jr.) Keeping the Tablets: Modern American Conservative Thought. His edited volume of The Federalist Papers is the best-selling edition version in the country.

In this volume, Kesler's students, friends, and colleagues commemorate his four-decade career as a teacher, mentor, and scholar.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• On First Looking into Plato’s Laws
• Cicero: Statesman and Teacher of Statesmen
• The Messiah of the Machiavellian Moment: The Reluctant Tyranny of the Good Man in the Corrupt Republic
• “Wind up the untuned and jarring senses”: Shakespeare’s
• The Founders and Classical Prudence
• The Federalist and the Ancients
• The Federalist on Enterprise, War, and Empire
• Defending American Natural-Rights Republicanism
• How Natural Right Fell Out of Favor in American Thought: Preparing the Ground for Progressivism in the Post–Civil War Era
• Progressivism, Conservatism, and the Work of Charles R. Kesler
• About the Authors
• Notes