Grant N. Havers

Written by Grant N. Havers

Grant Havers is an Associate Editor of VoegelinView and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Trinity Western University in Canada. He is the author of Lincoln and the Politics of Christian Love (Missouri, 2009) and Leo Strauss and Anglo-American Democracy: A Conservative Critique (Northern Illinois, 2013).

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I want to commend Professor John von Heyking for writing a truly refreshing and original analysis of Churchill’s understanding and practice of friendship as the “key to politics” (vii).[1]  Although it is not easy to add anything new or compelling to the crowded literature on Churchill, von Heyking certainly achieves this feat. This work of “empirical political philosophy” (viii) confirms…

Eric Voegelin published his essay “The Oxford Political Philosophers” in 1953, a time of prosperity in Britain, which had gradually recovered from the ravages of the Second World War.[1]  Even the tense atmosphere of the Cold War was relaxing for the moment, as the hot war in Korea was ending with an armistice, albeit one that fell short of an…

Making Sense of the Alt-Right.  George Hawley.  New York: Columbia University Press, 2017.
 
In a 1969 interview with Playboy magazine, the Canadian philosopher of media Marshall McLuhan offered some piercing observations on the “television-conditioned young” who search for an identity in a fractious world.  “From Tokyo to Paris to Columbia, youth mindlessly acts out its identity quest in the theater of…

The Conservative Rebellion. Richard Bishirjian. South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2015.
 
In The Conservative Rebellion, Richard Bishirjian warns that a “visionary politics” which extols a vision of America bringing liberty to all corners of the world will lead to the rejection of politics altogether in the United States:
". . . the failure of the symbolism of such policies leads to a…

Professor Glenn Moots concludes his review on the critical note that my study of Lincoln’s usage of Christian charity will be valued only by readers who need an introduction “to important questions already considered.” In turn, he predicts that my book will not be “an enduring study of Lincoln or his political religion.” I assume that Professor Moots confidently makes…

They said, some men are too ignorant, and vicious, to share in government. Possibly so, said we; and, by your system, you would always keep them ignorant and vicious.

-Abraham Lincoln, "Fragments on Slavery," July 1, 1854


 
A Crisis of the People
Lincoln's trust in the judgment of the American people presupposed a stern condition: "We, the People" must act charitably.…

Churchill. Paul Johnson. New York: Viking, 2009.
 
Anyone in search of a short yet useful introduction to the life of Sir Winston Churchill will find it in Paul Johnson’s biography.  Johnson, a long-established historian of the modern age, has penned a readable and informative account of the life, personality, thought, and actions of a political leader who is aptly described as…