PRISM’s Conquest of the Private Sphere
Bookstore in Montevideo, Uruguay, October 8, 2014 (Kseniya Ragozina/Adobe Stock Images).Joseph Schumpeter wrote that one cause of the demise of capitalism would be the steady conquest of the private by...
View ArticleA Fistful of Federalism, Part II
Bookstore in Montevideo, Uruguay, October 8, 2014 (Kseniya Ragozina/Adobe Stock Images).In my previous post on this theme, I attempted to provide a friendly critique of Greve’s competitive federalism...
View ArticleThe Standardized Test as Tocquevillian Device
Bookstore in Montevideo, Uruguay, October 8, 2014 (Kseniya Ragozina/Adobe Stock Images).This is a cliché by now, but the public schools where I live are producing test-takers: pretty good ones, as far...
View ArticleA Jurisprudence to Grow the State
Bookstore in Montevideo, Uruguay, October 8, 2014 (Kseniya Ragozina/Adobe Stock Images).There are striking parallels in how the left-liberals treat constitutional liberty in political and religious...
View ArticleGod, Political Science, and Werner Dannhauser
Bookstore in Montevideo, Uruguay, October 8, 2014 (Kseniya Ragozina/Adobe Stock Images).Anyone who takes higher education seriously attends to the words of legendary teachers. They are likely to be...
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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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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
Bookstore in Montevideo, Uruguay, October 8, 2014 (Kseniya Ragozina/Adobe Stock Images).Via David Henderson, I came upon this essay by John Edward Terrell in the New York Times criticizing libertarians...
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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
Bookstore in Montevideo, Uruguay, October 8, 2014 (Kseniya Ragozina/Adobe Stock Images).Taxi drivers in France rioted yesterday to prevent Uber from competing with them. They attacked vehicles on the...
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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...
View ArticleThe Constitution’s Design for Creating Civic Virtue: Part II
Bookstore in Montevideo, Uruguay, October 8, 2014 (Kseniya Ragozina/Adobe Stock Images).This is the second part of a three-part summary of a speech that I gave last weekend at the 2015 National Lawyers...
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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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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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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
In response to: Pierre Manent’s Defense of the Nation-State 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...
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Pierre Manent: Lux Gallica ex Tenebris
In response to: Pierre Manent’s Defense of the Nation-State 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...
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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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