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Reducing Our Life Together to Interests, Fears, and Hatreds
It seems every year we have more proof that American universities are failing to engage in civic education, especially if we understand the concept as requiring meaningful reflection about the nature...
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“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...
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Loving 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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Tocqueville, 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...
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FDR as Tocquevillian?
As the ambit of modern life expands, like a gas, serious political ambition dilutes. We range more widely, but in a scattered way—a molecule of attention here, another over there. The time and care...
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Democracy According to Human Purpose
The essays collected in Tocqueville’s Voyages trace the political thought of the author of Democracy in America and probe whether Alexis de Tocqueville’s ideas have meaning to societies beyond the...
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Tocqueville Unplugged
Though intellectuals write endlessly about politics, relatively few enter the fray directly. One exception to this rule was the author of Democracy in America (1835, 1840) and The Old Regime and the...
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Walking in the Shadow of Globalism
Palais Bourbon (seat of the National Assembly) in Paris at dusk.In the wake of the rubble and death left strewn across Europe from the Atlantic to the Volga after two brutal wars in the space of 30...
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Pierre Manent: Lux Gallica ex Tenebris
Palais Bourbon (seat of the National Assembly) in Paris at dusk.Perhaps the nascent Manent fan club can meet in Paris at the Café de Flore later this summer? There we could raise un verre or two to...
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Don’t Be True to Yourself
Fantastic Mr. FoxAre you being true to yourself? Should you? Better question: What in the world is a true self, anyway? In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Polonius counsels his son: This above all: to thine...
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The Trump Administration’s Accomplishments—in Spite of the Deep State
March 17, 2017: US President Donald Trump hold a joint press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the White House. Nicole S. Glass/Shutterstock.comMike Lofgren argues that the Deep State...
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Self-Help for Crazed Democratic Souls
View of Hollywood Boulevard by night. (View Apart/Shutterstock.com)James Poulos' Art of Being Free is the kind of self-help book democratic souls really need.
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Tocqueville and the Promise of Classical Education
Statue of Plato, Academy of Athens, Greece (Shutterstock.com)In trying to offer relevance, universities have abandoned classical education and liberal learning - Tocqueville reminds us what we've lost...
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The Spontaneous Association of The Sandlot
Still from The Sandlot (Twentieth Century Fox)Lacking a sense of community, parents don't trust their neighbors enough to let their kids play alone, The Sandlot reminds us of another way to live.
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Tocqueville Was Not a Prophet of American Doom
The late Tocqueville scholar Peter Augustine Lawler used to say that Tocqueville believed things were “getting better–and worse–all the time.”
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Tocqueville and the Tragedy of the Democratic Average
Li Wa / Shutterstock.comConservatism should help us negotiate the tragic tradeoffs of life: a way between market and political liberalism versus solidarity. Tocqueville can help.
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France’s Psychodrama of 1968
"Choses vues en mai," "Things Seen in May," by Jean Helion, 1968-69 (alamy.com)Those who loathe and those who celebrate May 1968 agree it was a defining moment for Western democracy in its late modern...
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Remembering Peter Augustine Lawler
Peter Augustine Lawler in 2011 (Zac Calvert/Union University).Peter Augustine Lawler died a year ago today: here are some tributes and our favorites among his essays for Law and Liberty.
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What the Court Misses: Religion, Community, and the Bases of Ordered Liberty
Pilgrims signing the Mayflower Compact in 1620, depicted in bas relief panel on base of the Pilgrim Monument, Provincetown, Massachusetts (Lee Snider Photo Images/Shutterstock.com).We need to...
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Tocqueville, 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...
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