One reason I can’t buy the claim that conservative intellectual has become an oxymoron is that on our campuses it’s so often the conservatives who defend “liberal education.” I’m going...
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The State of American Liberal Education These Days
By Peter Lawler / July 16, 2019
What are the ends of education? We mean, of course, the ends for us, for us democratic Americans. So we begin with the best book ever written on democracy and...
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Interdisciplinary Notes Toward a Definition of “Crisis Leadership”
By Nathan Harter / July 15, 2019
Every leadership episode is unique, and we would do well to appreciate each contingent, concrete feature (Wren, 2012). We do have to notice, for example, the prevailing contexts (Wren &...
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Ya ne vernus’: Toward a Kazakhstani Lake Kitëzh
By Matthew Cooper / July 14, 2019
The next film on my docket of Kazakh movies was actually a joint venture between Estonian, Finnish, Belorussian, Russian and Kazakhstani studios: the 2014 drama Ya ne vernus’ (Я не...
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We Can Measure Educational Value in Words
By Peter Lawler / July 13, 2019
E.D. Hirsch (the cultural literacy guy) has, I think, written the most important article on educational “outcomes” in a long time. The great benefit of education, “the key to increasingly...
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35th International Meeting of THE ERIC VOEGELIN SOCIETY, 2019
By David Walsh / June 9, 2019
35th International Meeting of THE ERIC VOEGELIN SOCIETY, 2019 American Political Science Association Meeting, August 29-September 1 Washington, DC David Walsh, Meeting Director [email protected] Dear Friends, I...
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One reason I can’t buy the claim that conservative intellectual has become an oxymoron is that on our campuses it’s so often the conservatives who defend “liberal education.” I’m going to sketch out the understanding of “liberal education” or “general education” shared by me and many of my fellow professorial conservatives (a tiny and shrinking minority oppressed from all sides…
What are the ends of education? We mean, of course, the ends for us, for us democratic Americans.
So we begin with the best book ever written on democracy and the best book ever written on America—Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.
America, Tocqueville noticed, is an overwhelmingly middle-class country. To be middle class, of course, is to be stuck in the…
So we begin with the best book ever written on democracy and the best book ever written on America—Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.
America, Tocqueville noticed, is an overwhelmingly middle-class country. To be middle class, of course, is to be stuck in the…
Every leadership episode is unique, and we would do well to appreciate each contingent, concrete feature (Wren, 2012). We do have to notice, for example, the prevailing contexts (Wren & Swatez, 1995). Nevertheless, if we are to make any headway in leadership studies, we also have to detect and describe regularities and patterns, such that we derive lessons of general…
The next film on my docket of Kazakh movies was actually a joint venture between Estonian, Finnish, Belorussian, Russian and Kazakhstani studios: the 2014 drama Ya ne vernus’ (Я не вернусь, I Won’t Come Back) directed by Ilmar Raag. The film itself is somewhat hard to classify: there are elements in it of both Thelma & Louise and Bridge to…
E.D. Hirsch (the cultural literacy guy) has, I think, written the most important article on educational “outcomes” in a long time. The great benefit of education, “the key to increasingly upward mobility,” is expanding the vocabulary of students. Why is that?
Hirsch observes that “vocabulary size is a convenient proxy for a whole range of educational attainments and abilities—not just…
Hirsch observes that “vocabulary size is a convenient proxy for a whole range of educational attainments and abilities—not just…
So it is characteristic of us professors of political philosophy to neglect what is really going in the “hard” sciences. I remember, for example, being astonished that Allan Bloom, in The Closing of the American Mind, came close to saying that the one real thing in American universities otherwise deformed by relativism was natural science. And then he said virtually…
So here’s my contribution to a symposium on “originalism” as the mode of interpreting the Constitution that facilitates the maximization of the libertarian value of “negative liberty.” Everyone else in the symposium operates on a higher pay grade than I do when it comes to really knowing all about the controversies in the field of constitutional law right now. There’s…
There’s a distinguished political scientist—Jacqueline Stevens—who agrees with me that the National Science Foundation (NSF) ought to cut the funding for political science. The Republicans in Congress think that these “scientists” are covertly pushing an ideological agenda that lurks behinds all their jargon and “methods.” That’s somewhat true. When applied to the lives of human beings, everyone knows that the…
The first Sergei Bodrov film I ever saw was his delightfully-hammy and gloriously-terrible 2005 historical epic Kóshpendiler, a highly-fictionalized account of the early life and career of the military and diplomatic genius Kazakh prince Abylaı Han, which I absolutely will revisit sometime in the near future. Later, as part of the Russian language class I took at Rhode Island College,…
Maladies of Modernity: Scientism and the Deformation of Political Order. David Whitney. South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2019.
David Whitney’s Maladies of Modernity: Scientism and the Deformation of Political Order is a thoughtful, timely examination of the origins of scientism, and its continued impact on contemporary political science. Whitney traces the origins of scientism to the time of the emergence…
David Whitney’s Maladies of Modernity: Scientism and the Deformation of Political Order is a thoughtful, timely examination of the origins of scientism, and its continued impact on contemporary political science. Whitney traces the origins of scientism to the time of the emergence…
Inaugural Message from Ellis Sandoz 
God is Not Just the Good, as Plato Claimed But Love 
What Enlightenment, Exactly? 
What is a Miracle? 
New Political Religions, or An Analysis of Modern Terrorism 
Eric Voegelin as Master Teacher 
The Irish Dialogue with Eric Voegelin 
The Collected Works: The Drama of Humanity (Volume 33) 
“A Cow Is Just a Cow”: George Grant and Eric Voegelin on the United States 
The Life of the Scholar 
Conservative Liberal Education? 
The State of American Liberal Education These Days 
Interdisciplinary Notes Toward a Definition of “Crisis Leadership” 
Ya ne vernus’: Toward a Kazakhstani Lake Kitëzh 
We Can Measure Educational Value in Words 
Scientific Higher Education in America 
Should a Liberal Education Include the Study of Law? 
Funding the Forecasting Failures of Political Science 
Eric Voegelin’s “On Classical Studies” 
Tilo Schabert’s Lecture “The Biggest Challenge of Our Time?”