Edmund Burke’s "gambit"—his contribution to the long conversation with posterity—has endured. Burke understood that true wisdom resides with the permanent things, and these he sought to commend to generations yet unborn. Gibbon admired his eloquence. Matthew Arnold likened his legacy to Shakespeare and Milton. Hazlitt judged him the greatest writer of prose in English. Coleridge [...]
America, Daniel Mahoney writes, “remains a largely if only partially free country, though markedly less so than even in the recent past.” The danger we face is a declining understanding and assumption of the classical, biblical, and Christian categories of reality that ward off the insanity of an anti-human “Second Reality." The Persistence of the [...]
Whether in her present numerous agonies of disorder, America can transcend despair and rebuild her national character is doubtful—impossible in the minds of some. But one thing is certain: It can happen only by fidelity to the American experience of a transcending Christian authority, and fidelity to the finest of her social values, customs, and [...]
Our rights as Americans can never be separated from our duties. But we must also ask, what is our liberty for? We live in an age of determinism, especially when it comes to academics and academia. There’s little choice, it seems, and everything is driven by some autonomous and often abstract forces, progressively (often) and [...]
If we reject the Christian account of liberty, the Declaration ceases to cohere. If we accept the Christian account of liberty, we can recover a Declaration that is both philosophic and poetic. The most famous sentence of the Declaration of Independence attempts to be a work of poetry and philosophy: “We hold these truths to [...]
“The Roots of Ordered Liberty: America at 250” The Academy of Philosophy and Letters is proud to announce a lineup for our annual conference featuring talks by such conservative luminaries as Nathan Pinkoski, D. C. Schindler, and Kody W. Cooper. We will host a debate over whether the Federalists or the Anti-Federalists were ultimately right, [...]
In his excellent memoir, Georgetown Law Center Professor Randy Barnett reveals what he has long maintained: “There will never come a time when our liberty is permanently secured, but there may well come a time when our liberty is permanently lost.” A Life for Liberty: The Making of an American Originalist, by Randy Barnett (635 [...]
“Forms that Fit: The Permanent Things in a Turbulent Time” In his magisterial study of the character of American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville notes that, in democratic ages, the formalities tend to be abandoned and undermined. This is because, he says, “men living in democratic ages do not readily comprehend the utility of forms: they [...]
Some observations: 1. The singular (classic) Greek contribution to liberty is freedom of the mind. That means, more or less, the freedom of Socrates. 2. Well, there’s also the freedom of the citizen. The freedom to participate in ruling and so be more than a merely material or economic or tribal or familial being. 3. [...]
John Milton’s “ancient liberty” is not the liberalism of Thomas Hobbes or John Locke, where the telos governing human liberty is dispensed with. Rather, “Paradise Lost” cultivates Christian virtues by reclaiming an ancient liberty within the traditional epic verse form and by returning to that which is first or most ancient: Divine Will. The opening [...]
The lesson of William Faulkner’s “Gold Medal” speech is both in the teaching it offers and in the method we must employ to grasp that meaning. It is a work of political imagination, drawing its rhetoric from the same fountainhead as poetry. The Summer of 1971, we Americans were removed by only half a decade from [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]