“Multiply Your Associations and Be Free”
Robert Nisbet’s The Quest for Community, published in 1953, was a vital component in the resurgence of an intelligent conservatism in America. When Nisbet wrote, the world was seemingly divided into...
View ArticleLoving the Democratic State Moderately
Ralph Hancock begins his interesting essay[i] be reminding us that, despite its internal contradictions and failures, the modern state has become the only conceivable political form in our post-modern...
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Redeeming Liberty: Tocqueville on the Omnipresent Threat of Democratic Pantheism
“I have only one passion, the love of liberty and human dignity.” ~Alexis de Tocqueville Democracy in America had a great ambition: to offer the blueprint for a new science of politics in the service...
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Welfare Rights as Socialist Manqué
Christianity, Democracy, Socialism: Reconsidering Alexis de Tocqueville’s 1848 “Speech on the Right to Work.” On September 12,...
View ArticleUnderstanding the Best Book Ever Written About American Democracy
This new edition of Liberty Law Talk is a conversation with Daniel J. Mahoney of Assumption College regarding Alexis de Tocqueville’s counsel in Democracy in America on how Americans can best combat an...
View ArticleThe Tale of Two Revolutions and Two Constitutions
The closing of the XXX Olympic Games, in both French and English, reminds me of Charles Dickens who in the nineteenth century wrote famously about the Tale of Two Cities—Paris and London–separated by a...
View ArticleWhere is Puritan, Middle-Class America When We Need It?
TOCQUEVILLE 2012: Quick Thoughts on the 175th Anniversary of What’s Still the Best Book on Who We Americans Are. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote the best book ever written on America and the best book...
View ArticleTocqueville, the Chicago Way
The title recalls the Chicago schools of political science and of economics. Both critics (and friends) of President Obama make ominous reference to his Chicago style of politics. So what is the...
View ArticlePRISM’s Conquest of the Private Sphere
Joseph Schumpeter wrote that one cause of the demise of capitalism would be the steady conquest of the private by the public sphere. To judge by the most recent revelations about PRISM, that may be...
View ArticleA Fistful of Federalism, Part II
In my previous post on this theme, I attempted to provide a friendly critique of Greve’s competitive federalism thesis by way of James Madison and his arguments in both Federalist 39 and the Virginia...
View ArticleThe Standardized Test as Tocquevillian Device
This is a cliché by now, but the public schools where I live are producing test-takers: pretty good ones, as far as the numbers show. At parent night at the beginning of the school year, we were...
View ArticleGod, Political Science, and Werner Dannhauser
Anyone who takes higher education seriously attends to the words of legendary teachers. They are likely to be undisciplined, witty, and unfashionable; about great books; ironic about the careerism of...
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The American: Not Ugly, Not Quiet
George Nash, the dean of Herbert Hoover scholars, wrote about our 31st President most recently in the Wall Street Journal, commemorating the centenary of Hoover’s heroic World War I disaster-relief...
View ArticleLibertarianism and Social Interaction
Via David Henderson, I came upon this essay by John Edward Terrell in the New York Times criticizing libertarians and Tea Party types for favoring individualism. What a morass of confusion! To begin...
View ArticleA Jurisprudence to Grow the State
There are striking parallels in how the left-liberals treat constitutional liberty in political and religious expression. First, their positions in both areas are premised on a kind of faux neutrality...
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Softly and Tenderly Democratic Shepherds Are Calling
General elections in modern democracies bore much of the population—perhaps most of it. They even seem to many a form of slow torture by means of constant and inescapable publicity and propaganda in...
View ArticleThe Sharing Economy versus the Centralized State
Taxi drivers in France rioted yesterday to prevent Uber from competing with them. They attacked vehicles on the mere suspicion that they were working for that company. They broke windows on cars...
View ArticleThe Constitution’s Design for Creating Civic Virtue: Part II
This is the second part of a three-part summary of a speech that I gave last weekend at the 2015 National Lawyers Convention of the Federalist Society. The first part focuses on how commerce encourages...
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Thanksgiving with Tocqueville
Food, football, and another uncomfortable conversation with the family boor are what many Americans have in store for them this (and every) Thanksgiving. For the few and the proud who can look forward...
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What Do We Hold in Common?
In Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, Gil Pender vacations in Paris with his fiancée and her parents. One night Pender takes a walk to escape the insufferable egotists who surround him and stumbles upon...
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