Higher Education as American Counterculture
The author of the best book ever written on America, and the best book ever written on democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville, claimed to see almost no higher…
Are Americans Too Busy?
From a certain view, the most probing question Alexis de Tocqueville had to answer in Democracy in America is “Why are the Americans so restless in the…
Tocqueville on Keeping Our Countercultural Churches
To begin with a simple point, one basic insight of Tocqueville is that things are always getting better and worse. Thus, it is hardly surprising that Tocqueville…
Conservative Postmodernism, Postmodern Conservatism
Astute thinkers from Hegel onward have claimed that we live at the end of the modern world. That does not mean the modern world is about to…
Niklas Luhmann’s Love: A Sketch
Love: A Sketch. Niklas Luhmann. Polity, 2010. In 1969, a German sociologist named Niklas Luhmann delivered a lecture at Bielefeld University in the year of its…
Plato’s Cave
Plato’s allegory of the cave appears in Book VII of Plato’s most famous and longest dialog, The Republic. Plato’s dialogs frequently star Plato’s teacher Socrates as a…
Nietzsche – The Diabolical Saint of Acceptance: Explaining Why He Appeals to Both Right and Left
Philosophers have a choice between originality and truth. When it comes to the human condition nearly every true thing that can be said about it has probably…
John Locke – Quantifying Reality
The modern division between the words “objective,” and “subjective” can be traced back to certain thoughts of John Locke, and Galileo before him, at the start of…
John Locke and the Dark Side of Toleration
It seems likely that most Americans would find John Locke’s definition of a church non-controversial, perhaps even obvious. This shows both how relevant the seventeenth century philosopher…
John Locke on “The Reasonableness of Christianity”
The question this essay posits might seem somewhat straightforward: What is meant by the term “reasonable” when Locke described Christianity by this term in his 1695 work,…
Understanding Voegelin’s Critique of Locke
No matter how conservative intellectuals try, they just do not seem able to escape John Locke. Jonah Goldberg’s well-received Suicide of the West proudly called America’s Declaration of…
Truth and Lies: Reflections on Roger Scruton’s Notes From Underground, An Anti-Totalitarian Novel Par Excellence
Notes from Underground. Roger Scruton. Beaufort Books, 2014. Through the publication of Gentle Regrets (2005) and Conversations with Roger Scruton (2016), we have learned a great…
A Popular Defense of Our Undemocratic Constitution
Amid the outrages surrounding the confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh, progressive commentator Chris Hayes noted the growing tension between our popular notions about democracy and the undemocratic character…
Truth as a Democratic Project
I During the Presidential Campaign of 1996, in California, President Bill Clinton said that democracy is “government of the people, by the people, and for the people”…
Why Do We Have an Electoral College?
During the debates over the ratification of the Constitution, Alexander Hamilton remarked in Federalist 68 that the method of presidential selection was “almost the only part of the…