Education
Harvard University.
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Charles Kesler
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He holds a Doctor of Philosophy in Government from Harvard University, from which he received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1978. He was Director of the Henry Salvatori Center for the Study of Individual Freedom in the Modern World and Claremont Institute"s Publius Fellows Program. At Claremont, he is a senior fellow of the conservative Claremont Institute, and directs their Publius Fellows Program, a summer institute.
Additionally, he is the editor of the Claremont Review of, a quarterly political magazine.
He was the Director of Henry Salvatori Center at Claremont McKenna College. 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 revisionist historian J.G. Randall.
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". The Claremont Institute Kesler describes the purpose of the Institute as follows: Some conservatives start, as it were, from Edmund Burke.
Others from Friedrich Hayek.
This kind of approach clears the air. lieutenant concentrates the mind. 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.
Politics
He is editor of the Claremont Review of, and the author of Keeping the Tablets: Readings in American Conservatism. Randall argued that no great difference existed between the philosophies of Lincoln and political rival Stephen Douglas. Kesler is a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute and an editor of the Claremont Review of 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, et cetera" 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.
lieutenant 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.
