Modern Age (periodical)

History[edit]

With its founding Kirk hoped for "a dignified forum for reflective, traditionalist conservatism" and the magazine has remained one of the voices of intellectual, small-"c" conservatism to the present day.


Reflecting the ideals of its founder, in its politics it is traditionalist, localist, against most military interventions, not libertarian, anti-Straussian, and generally critical of neoconservatism. In its religious sympathies it adheres to orthodoxy, whether Roman Catholic, Jewish, Eastern Orthodox, or Protestant.


Modern Age has been described by the historian George H. Nash as "the principal quarterly of the intellectual right."


Paul Gottfried, a professor at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, has said that "Modern Age represents humanistic learning, reverence for the eternal, and the sense of human finiteness, values that (alas) have less and less to do with the academic presentation of the liberal arts."


Kirk edited the publication from 1957 to 1959. Eugene Davidson edited it from 1960 to 1969. David S. Collier was the quarterly's third editor, from 1970 to 1983. Modern Age's fourth editor was George A. Panichas who served from 1984 to 2007. The next editor was R. V. Young. Peter Lawler replaced Young in 2017.^[1] Lawler died later in 2017 and he was replaced by the current editor, Daniel McCarthy.^[2]