Civil Liberty, Communal Safety
Disease and Democracy: The Industrialized World Faces AIDS. Peter Baldwin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Although seemingly a historical account of European and American public…
Trust in Society
Trust in Society. Karen S. Cook, ed. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2001. Trust in Society is the second volume on trust sponsored by the Russell…
Egalitarianism
Egalitarianism is movements within social and political philosophy that can be either foundational or distributional in nature. Foundational egalitarianism describes people as equal beings by nature; distributional…
Hayek and Oakeshott on Rationalism
"Rationalism," in the sense meant in this essay, might be understood as the idea that abstract thought, deducing answers to questions from first principles, is always superior…
Faith, Philosophy, and Postmodernism in Voegelin
Faith and Political Philosophy the Correspondence between Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, 1934-1964. Peter Emberley and Barry Cooper, ed. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2004. Eric…
On Voegelin: Modernity and Gnosticism
Eric Voegelin (1901-85) is often portrayed as one of the severest critics of modernity–its belief in human reason’s ability to understand and convey the fundamental structures of…
The Charter Revolution and the Efficient Part of Canada’s Constitution
Ted Morton and Rainer Knopff’s 2000 Charter Revolution and the Court Party[1] was an academic blockbuster when it was published and stands today as one of the…
The Critique of Scientism: Ryle and Oakeshott on Tacit Knowledge
For the past two hundred years or so, philosophers, sociologists, and political theorists who have been skeptical about the claims of modern scientistic or rationalistic epistemology have…
The Primary of the Persons in Politics
The Primary of the Persons in Politics: Empiricism and Political Philosophy. John von Heyking and Thomas Heilke, eds. Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2013.…
Liking Ike: Eisenhower, Advertising, and the Rise of Celebrity Politics
Liking Ike: Eisenhower, Advertising, and the Rise of Celebrity Politics. David Haven Blake. Oxford University Press, 2016. The relationship between celebrity and the presidency is a…
Leadership as a Political Process
There is a common implication, in scholarly as well as popular literature, that although the leadership process may sometimes be political in nature the best leadership is…
Eric Voegelin’s Critique of Ideology
The motivations of my work . . . arise from the political situation. Anybody with an informed and reflective mind who lives in the twentieth century since…
The Way Back
The Way Back. F. H. Buckley. Encounter Books, 2016. The cover of F.H. Buckley’s most recent book depicts the Empire State Building enshrouded in clouds. With…
Hunting and Weaving: Empiricism and Political Philosophy
Hunting and Weaving: Empiricism and Political Philosophy. Thomas Heilke and John von Heyking, eds. South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2013. Thomas Heilke’s and John von…
How to Think About Human Origins
Since Voegelin has said that the reality of experience is self-interpretive, let’s turn this question around and ask, how did the earliest humans think about origins. I’ll…