Charles R. Kesler


Charles R. Kesler is professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College and Claremont Graduate University. He is editor of the Claremont Review of Books, and the author of several books.

Early life

Kesler graduated from Harvard University, where he earned a bachelor of arts degree in 1978, followed by a Ph.D in Government in 1985.

Career

Kesler is a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and the graduate faculty at Claremont Graduate University. He has published many peer-reviewed articles and political articles and reviews in publications of the Claremont Institute and elsewhere.
Kesler was a delegate to the International Youth Year Conference in Jamaica in 1985. He was director of the Henry Salvatori Center for the Study of Individual Freedom in the Modern World from 1989 to 2008. At Claremont, he is a senior fellow of the conservative Claremont Institute, and teaches at their Publius Fellows Program, a summer institute. Additionally, he is the editor of the Claremont Review of Books, a quarterly political magazine. He was the Director of Henry Salvatori Center at Claremont McKenna College.

The Claremont Institute

Kesler is a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute and an editor of the Claremont Review of Books. Kesler describes the purpose of the Institute as follows:
Some conservatives start, as it were, from Edmund Burke; others from Friedrich Hayek. 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, etc." 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. This kind of approach clears the air. It concentrates the mind. It 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 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. 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.

Selected works