Roger Kimball

Kimball was educated at Cheverus High School, a Jesuit institution in Portland, Maine, and then at Bennington College, where he received a B.A. in philosophy and classical Greek. After graduating, Kimball attended Yale University, where he earned an M.A. in 1978 and an M.Phil. in 1982 in philosophy.[5]

Kimball lectures widely and is a contributor to many newspapers and journals, including The Wall Street Journal, National Review, The Spectator, The New Criterion, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Sun, Modern Painters, Literary Review, The Public Interest, Commentary, The New York Times Book Review, The Sunday Telegraph, The American Spectator, The Weekly Standard, and The National Interest. Kimball also blogs at The New Criterion's weblog Dispatch, American Greatness, and The Spectator USA (an American edition of the English weekly The Spectator) where he is a contributing editor. From the autumn of 2007 until March 2019 he wrote the Roger's Rules[6] column at PJ Media.[7]

Some of Kimball's work as a writer is polemical, directed against what he sees as the politicization and "dumbing down" of Western culture and the arts. Many of Kimball's essays in The New Criterion, and in books including Experiments Against Reality and Lives of the Mind, focus on figures from the Western canon whose work he feels has been neglected or misunderstood. These figures include G.C. Lichtenberg, Robert Musil, Walter Pater, Anthony Trollope, Milan Kundera, and P. G. Wodehouse, as well as philosophers and historians such as Plutarch, Hegel, Walter Bagehot, George Santayana, David Stove, Raymond Aron, and Leszek Kołakowski.

Kimball also writes regularly about art. He has written essays on artists including Delacroix, Vuillard, Robert Motherwell, Frank Stella, and Robert Rauschenberg. Recently, some of his essays have called for renewed attention to Classical Realism and other contemporary art movements that champion traditional values and techniques of representational art.

In 2012, Kimball edited The New Leviathan, a collection of essays that discusses a variety of conservative political topics. The book carries a preface by George Will and includes contributions from John R. Bolton, Richard Epstein, Victor Davis Hanson, Andrew C. McCarthy, Michael B. Mukasey, Glenn Reynolds, and others.

Although critical of Donald Trump through much of the 2016 Presidential primary,[8] Kimball endorsed Trump for President.[9] In July 2017, Kimball wrote an article comparing Donald Trump's 2017 speech in Warsaw[10] to the Funeral Oration of Pericles of Athens during the Peloponnesian War.[11] He has been criticized for being "determined to minimize, dispute, divert, and debunk the contention that Donald Trump is a person of bad character." [12] In the aftermath of the United States Presidential Election, 2020 Kimball has repeated the debunked and discredited claim that Joe Biden won the election because of large-scale electoral fraud.[13][14]

First published in 1990, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education was updated in 1998 and again in 2008. The most recent third edition includes a new introduction by Kimball as well as the preface to the 1998 edition. The book criticizes the ways in which humanities are taught and studied in American universities. The book argues that modern humanities have become politicized, seeking to subvert "the tradition of high culture embodied in the classics of Western art and thought".[15] Kimball maintains that yesterday's radical thinker has become today's tenured professor carrying out "ideologically motivated assaults on the intellectual and moral substance of our culture".

The book generated controversy, with the New York Times Book Review's Roger Rosenblatt noting, "Mr. Kimball names his enemies precisely...This book will breed fistfights."[16] When it was first published, some of its critics aligned Tenured Radicals with Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students and former Secretary of Education William Bennett's Report on the Humanities in Higher Education.

The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America[17] offers a critical look at the influence of the 1960s on the moral, political, and intellectual life of America. The book discusses the Beat Movement of the 1950s as a precursor the 1960s and treats signal literary and cultural figures of the period from Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, and Charles Reich through Herbert Marcuse, Norman O. Brown, Timothy Leary, Eldridge Cleaver, and Daniel Berrigan. Kimball maintains that the influence of the 1960s did not end with the passing of that decade but rather that it lives on "in our attitudes toward self and country, sex and drugs, manners and morals."

Experiments Against Reality: The Fate of Culture in the Postmodern Age[18] is a book criticizing the literary and philosophical foundations of postmodernity. Examining the work of Eliot, Auden, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault and more, Kimball critiques the ways in which these writers deal with what he views as the intellectual and moral deterioration of modernity. He also laments the state of modern culture, focusing his analysis on the realms of contemporary art and academia.

In 2003's Art's Prospect: The Challenge of Tradition in an Age of Celebrity,[19] Kimball turns a critical eye towards what he regards as an avant-garde orthodoxy in the art world that tends to drown out the generally quieter voices representing a more traditional practice of art.

Published in 2002, Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse[20] discusses the work of intellectuals and philosophers as various as Raymond Aron, Plutarch, and Walter Bagehot to Descartes, Schiller, Hegel, Santayana, and Tocqueville to illustrate Walter Bagehot's observation that "In the faculty of writing nonsense stupidity is no match for genius."

Published in 2004, The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art[21] is a critical account of contemporary academic art history and its infatuation with "theory" and the "transgressive" at the expense of aesthetic appreciation and a traditional view of the ennobling resources of art.

In The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia, published in 2012, Kimball discussed the cultivation of the mind as an explicitly religious endeavor with regard to inherited cultural instructions.[22] Writing about The Fortunes of Permanence, Michael Uhlmann wrote that "If it weren't otherwise already apparent, the publication of The Fortunes of Permanence confirms Roger Kimball's status as America's foremost cultural critic. In truth, 'cultural critic,' as that term is commonly employed, hardly does justice to the breadth and depth of an essayist whose keen observations range comfortably and gracefully across politics, history, religion, philosophy, education, literature, and art."[23]

• The New Criterion: Roger Kimball.
• Appearances on C-SPAN