Jeff Taylor (not to be confused with Jeff A. Taylor, or other Jeff Taylors) is one of the most interesting Jeffersonian-minded political scientists/philosophers around. His review of Joel Johnson’s Beyond Practical Virtue: A Defense of Liberal Democracy Through Literature furnishes some evidence to back up my claim. Johnson’s book pits what Taylor calls “the anti-liberal, [...]
I spent last week attending David Gordon’s seminar on political philosophy (from Plato to Rawls, Nozick, and Rothbard) at the Mises Institute. You can hear the lectures on-line here. Not only does Dr. Gordon marvelously integrate material appropriate for both neophytes and those already well-versed in the history of political thought, he also successfully untangles [...]
My essay on Peter Viereck is now out, in the June 18 issue of The American Conservative. It doesn’t thoroughly address the points Will Hay and Daniel Larison (among others) raised a few months back after I blogged on Viereck, but the piece gives some indication of why I find Viereck valuable, despite his flaws.
The [...]
Georgetown government professor Patrick Deneen was one of the speaker’s at last weekend’s “Liberty, Community, and Place in the American Tradition” shindig in Charlottesville. He made a very interesting case, drawing on Leo Strauss, for what he called America’s “alternative” tradition, of which the Anti-Federalists were the prophets. Deneen has a blog and has posted [...]
Steven Smith, who himself has recently published on Leo Strauss, reviews two new biographies of the “skeptical friend of democracy.” Here’s a bite:
Central to Strauss’s understanding of the Medieval Enlightenment [of Farabi and Maimonides] was the claim that revelation is the medium of the moral and political life of the community. No community, not even [...]
Gene Callahan consults Eric Voegelin for insight into the Bush administration and its ideological supporters:
Since the Gnostic is, like the Blues Brothers, “on a mission from [...]
A classic from Murray Rothbard (who also takes a well-deserved shot at economists /econometricians invading other fields):
In recent years, economists have invaded other intellectual disciplines and, in the dubious name of “science,” have employed staggeringly oversimplified assumptions in order to make sweeping and provocative conclusions about fields they know very little about. This is [...]
There’s an excellent, thought-provoking essay on Leo Strauss and Straussians in the new (Sumer 2006) issue of Modern Age by Richard Sherlock of Utah State University. He’s sympathetic to Strauss in some respects and particularly values Strauss’s close readings of ancient texts. But ultimately he finds the project of Strauss and the Straussians sterile:
At bottom [...]
Time, as always, is short, but I thought I would post a few quick additional thoughts on John Derbyshire's review of Ramesh Ponnuru's book The Party of Death. I suggested before that Derbyshire was at least partly right in his criticisms. His analysis of the "frigid and pitiless dogma" applies very well to [...]
That's Ralph Adams Cram, and I don't mean that he designed the Old Right — he was literally an architect, who happened to be on the Old Right. Alan Wall had a very good article on him on LRC a week or so back; check it out.
Cram was a late but seminal influence of [...]