Lee Trepanier is Professor of Political Science at Saginaw Valley State University. He teaches political philosophy, constitutional law, American politics and is the university's pre-law advisor. He is the editor of Lexington Books series Politics, Literature, and Film and the website, VoegelinView. Dr. Trepanier is the author and editor of over sixteen books including Teaching in an Age of Ideology.
What we need is a love for both our country and our humanity, whether it be through religion, reason, or both. Such a position steers clear of the perfectionist aspirations of cosmopolitans and draws back from parochial nationalist sentiments by combining the best elements of American conservatism...
In a chapter in The Conservative Mind titled “Transitional Conservatism: New England Sketches,” Russell Kirk cited John Quincy Adams, Orestes Brownson, and Nathaniel Hawthorne as figures in whom the “conservative instinct struggled for successful...
Barry Cooper
Thomas Heilke’s and John von Heyking’s edited volume, Hunting and Weaving: Empiricism and Political Philosophy, is a festschrift to Barry Cooper, a political scientist at the University of Calgary. The themes...
Thomas Heilke’s and John von Heyking’s edited volume, The Primacy of Persons in Politics: Empiricism and Political Philosophy, explores the nature of political activity by German political scientist, Tilo Schabert. In an empirical study...
Photo by Felipe Vanancio
Eric Voegelin (1901-85) is often portrayed as one of the severest critics of modernity–its belief in human reason’s ability to understand and convey the fundamental structures of...
In my recently released co-edited volume, A Political Companion to Saul Bellow, the contributors explore the politics and political thought of one of the seminal fiction writers of America. Exploring Saul Bellow’s politics and his thought...
While our political and cultural elites debate about what to do with the millions of illegal immigrants in this country, it may be worthwhile to pause for a moment and ask what truly is at stake here....
Previously on The Imaginative Conservative I have written about some of the twentieth and twentieth-first century's greatest thinkers as teachers: Eric Voegelin, Ellis Sandoz, Gerhart Niemeyer, John H. Hallowell, Leo...
Stanley Rosen
In the past couple of essays, I have looked at Leo Strauss and Harvey Mansfield as teachers in a climate of positivism, relativism, and academic mediocrity. In this essay, I will explore Stanley...
Harvey Mansfield
In my last post, I wrote about Leo Strauss’ defense of liberal education as a possible antidote to the narrowness of specialization of knowledge and the moral aimlessness of positivist ideology. One...
Leo Strauss
So far I have examined a set of thinkers that could be classified in the same school of thought as “Voegelinian”: Eric Voegelin, Ellis Sandoz, Gerhart Niemeyer, and John H. Hallowell. In...
In my last post I wrote about Gerhart Niemeyer who sought to avoid indoctrinating his students in order for them to pursue the true, the beautiful, and the good. In this post I want to do...
Gerhart Niemeyer
In my previous essays about teaching in an age of ideology, I had looked at two teachers–Eric Voegelin and Ellis Sandoz–who sought to clear...
Ellis Sandoz In my previous post about Eric Voegelin, I wrote how Voegelin became a model of thinking devoid of ideological rant in the student’s quest for the true, the beautiful, and the good....
