In a time of social and political radicalization, Eric Hoffer remained a free and independent thinker and identified the threat that Marxism posed for citizens. He reflects on human nature, individuality, and the responsibility and duty of thoughtful and informed citizens to upkeep open, democratic societies. Eric Hoffer The American philosopher, Eric Hoffer [...]
Just as all men recognize tyranny as the most oppressive regime, we should recognize a tyrannical soul as the most onerous. The tyrannical soul gets exactly what it wants, but this is a curse, not a blessing. Freedom from all constraint is actually the worst form of slavery. “A dream is a wish your heart [...]
William F. Buckley did not resist the ideas of collectivism as successfully as he thought. Instead, he chose to aim for winning a contemporary battle rather than defending the Permanent Things. Conservatives today would do well to guard against falling into the same trap. William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale is one of [...]
If we fail to inspire this next generation to pursue that which is True, Good, and Beautiful, I shudder to think at the consequences. Groupthink will destroy all that we hold dear. We want our students to polish their reason and to prepare to guide and navigate their chariots along the track of life. It [...]
Three proposed ends of liberal education — career, democracy, and a free mind — do not pierce the dome of the bourgeois workaday world. Let us begin anew with a question: “How can liberal education pierce the dome that encloses the bourgeois workaday world?" This essay was originally delivered at Magdalen College on October 25, [...]
What’s needed at this juncture in our cultural evolution is a rebirth of healthy modesty about human being and human fate, a realization that we are imperfect and imperfectible, particular and embodied, with all our warts and blemishes, but for that very reason valuable beyond measure. Infinitude is an appealing concept to many, not mathematically, [...]
Socialism did not kill merely the body—it sought to extinguish the soul and all belief in anything transcendent in the human person. As we celebrate the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is time to remember and reclaim man’s oldest faith, a faith in one Almighty God who make each of us [...]
Government remains limited in civil society because God gave man the ability, through work and reason, to subdue the earth and thereby improve his life by the use of private property. Understanding Locke John Locke is one of the few major philosophers who can be used to provide a theoretical and moral foundation for American [...]
Sohrab Ahmari’s book, "The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos," makes the sustained case that too much freedom—or rather, too much of the wrong sort of freedom—can be a kind of slavery. The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos by Sohrab Ahmari (320 [...]
Why is the true Fourth such a powerful image of liberty? Because the things that most deepen us and rouse us are dangerous. An appetite for the real good means being willing to face danger, and the whole point of the liberty we celebrate is that we learn to handle danger, to face it responsibly, [...]
“Lift Every Voice and Sing” is a song written as a poem by James Weldon Johnson, an American writer and civil rights activist, in 1900 and set to music by his brother J. Rosamond Johnson in 1905. A prayer of thanksgiving for faithfulness and freedom, evocative of the biblical Exodus from slavery to the freedom [...]
A history of the transformation of American liberalism over the past half-century could well be told with just a focus on free speech and censorship. But this story of changed attitudes toward censorship yields lessons far beyond just the liberal attitude toward free speech. Aside from the inevitability of death and taxes, there is another [...]
The assault on religious freedom is not occurring in a vacuum. Freedoms of speech and association have also come under siege. These attacks prove a more general truth: that freedom is interconnected; when one basic freedom is undermined, all freedoms are undermined. On the culture-and-religion front, so much has changed over the past three and [...]
While the rule of law is an essential public good, the actual number and extent of laws also are important factors in determining whether there will be liberty—and, indeed, the rule of law itself. Moreover, as too much law undermines freedom and its own proper character, it also tears apart the very fabric of the [...]