One may find four fundamental tenets to republicanism rightly understood. First, for a society to be effective, men must behave virtuously. Second, men must use the gifts that nature or God has bestowed upon them. Typically, republican thinkers believed the best economic activity for man was agricultural. Third, republicans must be independent and armed, willing [...]
Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, by Martha C. Nussbaum Martha Nussbaum’s new book concerns “a crisis of massive proportions and grave global significance.” The silent, cancer-like crisis she means to bring to public awareness by her “call to action,” her “manifesto,” is a new specter haunting the world—an extremely utilitarian, for-profit view [...]
Alexander Hamilton provided the early republic with firm and bold leadership. In justifying and explaining his political actions he articulated a theory of politics that has served as the foundation for one of the two central varieties of American constitutionalism. Few would dispute that Alexander Hamilton influenced the development of American economic and political institutions [...]
So this astute and classy article by James Patterson explains why so many conservatives wrongly took the side of the Board of Visitors against University of Virginia President Teresa Sullivan on the matter of her removal and reinstatement. Someone might say, though, that the conservatives who support the Board aren’t really conservatives. They’re more properly called [...]
St. John’s College and the Great Books Program here at Mercer University have much in common. Both programs revolve around a set of great works of Western civilization. In both programs these works are approached through discussion rather than lecture. In both, students are encouraged to learn from one another rather than engage in one-upmanship [...]
Buckley: William F. Buckley, Jr. and the Rise of American Conservatism, by Carl T. Bogus. Bloomsbury Press, 2011. William F. Buckley, Jr. continues to stand as the representative conservative of the postwar era. Bon vivant, former CIA operative, heir to an oil fortune—not to mention best-selling writer of spy novels and founding editor of National Review, [...]
It is official. Obamacare is Constitutional. And we all know why: because Chief Justice Roberts says the individual mandate is not actually a mandate, it is a tax. The critical passage from the opinion nicely sums up Roberts’ decree: “The individual mandate cannot be upheld as an exercise of Congress’s power under the Commerce Clause. That Clause [...]
I wanted to send out an update from the border. I am doing well and learning a lot from my work in the comedor (soup kitchen) and in the women’s shelter. Here’s a glimpse into my life and the lives of the people I am working with. (The first half of this is sad, so [...]
Clergyman, educator and social critic, Bernard Iddings Bell (October 13, 1886-September 5, 1958) was born in Dayton, Ohio, and educated at the University of Chicago (B.A., 1907), Western Theological Seminary (S.T.B., 1912), The University of the South (S.T.D., 1923), and he also received numerous honorary degrees. In college Bell temporarily rejected his Episcopal Church upbringing. Under the [...]
Dogged readers of my columns will observe that I habitually quote a handful of classic writings, chiefly the Shakespeare works, Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, and The Federalist Papers. If those readers suspect that these few masterpieces pretty much exhaust my learning, they are correct. When I was young, I bought the whole set of [...]
(This is for Brad Birzer, who threatened to be cranky.) Just after the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927, the novelist John Dos Passos said, “All right we are two nations.” Dos Passos was still a socialist America hater at the time, and seemed to represent the future in a year that Calvin Coolidge, [...]
Wilhelm Roepke’s vision of economic and social order while offering us a “third way” forces us to choose between the path of pragmatism and pluralism on the one side, and that of loyalty to ideals that transcend the material and the utilitarian on the other side—between a capitalistic economy of fragmented special interests, technologism, and [...]
One of the best courses I had within my doctoral program was a study of Aesop's fables. We used the Babrius and Phaedrus edition in the Loeb series. Of all of the fables, I was struck recently on the political and moral implications of one in particular. The Ant and The Grasshopper should be carefully [...]
There is no dearth of studies on the political thought of the American founding era. Yet there is no consensus on what theories, values, or goals were uppermost in the minds of the founding generation. On the contrary, on a number of critical theoretical issues and concerns, there appears to be an inverse relationship between [...]