I consider myself a “social ecologist,” concerned with man’s man-made environment the way the natural ecologist studies the biological environment. The term “social ecology” is my own coinage. But the discipline itself boasts an old and distinguished lineage. Its greatest document is Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. But no one is as close to me in [...]
The centuries ebb and flow on a cosmic tide between faithfulness and depravity as men commit their lives to a seemingly infinite range of virtuous and vicious acts. Though man tears himself away from the face of God in pursuit of idols, God never abandons His creation. The glorious age of the Ancient Greek pagans has [...]
The financial crisis and lingering economic malaise have resulted in an extended debate as to the proper sphere of markets and government in society. Unsurprisingly, a large number of social critics have ignored the degree of government intervention that existed in financial markets on the eve of the crisis, falsely caricaturing the financial panic as [...]
During World War II, philosopher Arthur Lovejoy tried to explain the reasons for the international crisis and the totalitarianism in Germany. According to his view, the roots of the trouble could be found in the German Romantic period which ranged approximately between the years 1780 to 1830. During this time certain relatively new ideas took [...]
We begin with the proposition that capitalism is not chiefly an incentive system but an information system. We continue with the recognition, explained by the most powerful science of the epoch, that information itself is best defined as surprise—what we cannot predict rather than what we can. The key to economic growth is not acquisition [...]
The bedrock principle of all Liberalism, whether of the Right or the Left, is Locke’s assertion that “every man has a Property in his own Person.” It is from this principle that Murray Rothbard can assert, “The right to self-ownership asserts the absolute right of each man, by virtue of his (or her) being a [...]
The most successful leader of the 20th century was Winston Churchill. But for twelve years, from 1928 until Dunkirk in 1940, he was totally on the sidelines, almost discredited—because there was no need for a Churchill. Things were routine or, at any rate, looked routine. When the catastrophe came, thank goodness, he was available. Fortunately [...]
Chapter Three in The Young Man’s Guide to Building a House The words love and economy rarely find their ways into the same sentence. Economics has been called the dismal science but people write songs about love. You don’t write songs about economics unless you’re writing a parody. When most people hear the word economy they think about money. That is dismal. [...]
In educating for democracy, we must also educate for economy. This follows from the fundamental truth that government and economy have an indivisible relationship. We are not free to mix any form of government with any economic form. In the present context, we will apply this truth to three possible visions of economy: the globalist, [...]
Dr. James Otteson In the world of ideas, things can move rapidly. On August 19, 2013, one of the single best minds of our era, James R. Otteson II, announced his move to North Carolina to become the Executive Director of the BB&T Center for the Study of Capitalism and a full professor [...]
Around the turn of the century, England lost its only Catholic college dedicated to the exploration of social thought, economics, and politics (Plater College in Oxford). It seems remarkable not only that it was allowed to close, but that it had been the only institution of its kind. In the U.S., fortunately, there are several [...]
Remember when people were saying that the old Republican ideas, the venerable supply-side reforms that first made their mark in the Ronald Reagan era of the 1980s, were no longer relevant in terms of getting us out of our rut today, on account of their already having been made policy? It was only yesterday that [...]
David Mamet is the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, film and television director, and author of many books of essays, most recently, in 2011, of the crackling libertarian manifesto, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture. The target of Mamet’s book is an updated version of Rousseau’s noble savage: a 21st-century peace-loving tribesman whose Eden it [...]
R.R. Reno, quite an astute conservative public intellectual, claims that those with eyes to see know that the big news these days is the global victory of capitalism. I’m not following Reno in every respect here, but going with what I would say in support of his position. The good news is that productivity has [...]