The Common Mind

This book traces the theme of the sensus communis, inherited from the medievals, through the lives and writings of twelve literary figures in the modern age, ranging from Thomas More and Jonathan Swift to C. S. Lewis and Russell Kirk. It is this quality, argues the author, which, like natural law, serves as the bedrock of orthodoxy, of social and political order, and which, by its presence or absence, determines the nature of every society. The book is an altogether uncommon achievement: a rich, multivalent reading of our present cultural condition through a brilliant procession of literary portraits; and a critical work in the ongoing effort to recover a unity of life, of understanding, of principles--in short, a common mind.