Charles R. Kesler

The Claremont Institute

Kesler is a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute and an editor of the Claremont Review of Books. Kesler describes the purpose of the Institute as follows:

Some conservatives start, as it were, from Edmund Burke; others from Friedrich Hayek. While we respect both thinkers and their schools of thought, we begin instead from America, the American political tradition in all its genius and profundity, and the relation of our tradition to revealed wisdom and to what the elderly Jefferson once called, rather insouciantly, "the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, etc." We think conservatism should take its bearings from the founders' statesmanship, our citizens' loyalty to the Declaration and Constitution, and the scenes, both tender and proud, of our national history. This kind of approach clears the air. It concentrates the mind. It engages and informs the ordinary citizen's patriotism. And it introduces a new, sharper view of liberalism as descended not from the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, nor (God forbid) Abraham Lincoln, but from that movement which, a century ago, criticized George Washington's and Lincoln's Constitution as outmoded and, as we'd say today, racist, sexist, and antidemocratic. The Progressives broke with the old Constitution and its postulates, and set out to make a new, living constitution and a new, unlimited state, and the Obama Administration's programs are merely the latest, and worst, installment of that purported evolution.^[3]

On Lincoln

Kesler is known for taking his scholarship of former President Lincoln very seriously. In a review of David Herbert Donald's book Lincoln he claimed that Donald tried to make Lincoln far more pragmatic, moderate, and generally inept than he really was. He claims that Lincoln's mission to reinstate the Declaration of Independence to its rightful place as a guide to constitutional jurisprudence and the soul of the American experiment is overlooked by Donald. Kesler notes that Donald had spent considerable time under the tutelage of historian James G. Randall. Randall argued that no great difference existed between the philosophies of Lincoln and political rival Stephen Douglas. Although Mr. Donald did not go as far as his teacher he leaves much to be desired because he shows us, as Kesler concludes, "Lincoln the politician but misses Lincoln the statesman".^[4]