The Essential John Derbyshire collects more than two decades of sometimes controversial and always incisive essays from one of the Right’s most independent voices. This anthology charts the evolution of a writer who, like many of his generation, moved steadily away from mainstream conservatism toward a franker, more empirically grounded assessment of America and The West’s most pressing questions around race, immigration, cultural decay, and the durability of our civilization. Derbyshire’s...

To his fellow conservatives, John Derbyshire makes a plea: Don't be seduced by this nonsense about "the politics of hope." Skepticism, pessimism, and suspicion of happy talk are the true characteristics of an authentically conservative temperament. And from Hobbes and Burke through Lord Salisbury and Calvin Coolidge, up to Pat Buchanan and Mark Steyn in our own time, these beliefs have kept the human race from blindly chasing its utopian dreams right off a cliff.Recently, though, v...

Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, the tension between civil rights and public safety has dominated public discourse. On issues ranging from racial profiling to military tribunals, Americans have had to ask whether it is possible for the United States to defend itself against terrorism without violating the values and principles that lie at the heart of its democratic order. In Rights vs. Public Safety after 9/11, some of the nation's leading legal experts and social critics...