Democracy, Language, and Rhetoric
Democracy, Language, And Rhetoric1 “Democracy, Language, and Rhetoric” is a legitimate and important topic. However, upon confronting it, one initially encounters at least three formidable complexes of…
Democracy is Anarchy in The Republic
Our systems are at the breaking point now. We need more roads, more hospitals, more schools, more nurses, more teachers, more police, more fire, more water, more…
“Schooling for ‘the Democracy of the Dead”: How the Liberal Arts Connect Us with the Legacy of the Past
In seeking to explain the evolution of the American democracy, historians typically give great emphasis to the step-by-step enlargement of the franchise to vote. Thus, the expansion…
The Death of Liberal Education: Its Implications for the University, Democracy and the American Polity
By “liberal education” I refer to two competing things which have been in tension since the ancient world, both of which have traveled under the label “liberal…
Mormon Authority and Identity in America
Settlers of Jackson County, Missouri imposed their will on the contiguous landscape with arbitrary survey lines. With possessive place names like Sibley and descriptive ones like Independence,…
Mad Men: The Death and Redemption of American Democracy
In the first season of AMC’s Mad Men, advertising executive Don Draper gives a presentation to some prospective clients from Kodak. The clients are looking for a…
Sinclair Lewis and American Democracy
Sinclair Lewis had an ambivalent relationship with America. His Midwestern upbringing perfectly situated him to understand the American experiment, but he found it wanting in many ways. His take on…
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…
Between Wisdom and Knowledge: The Politics of Creativity in a Post-Communist World
The Statement of the Problem The key to understanding the nature of government is to be found in the old debate between realists and political utopians of…
Tocqueville, Weber, and Democracy: The Condition of Equality and the Possibility of Charisma in America
Both Tocqueville and Weber confronted the injection of mass suffrage into the liberal democratic polity with trepidation and caution but for different reasons: for Tocqueville, democracy produced…
Mob Rule and Moral Language
What explains Donald Trump’s appeal, especially among the white working class? The various theories that have been offered – being economically left behind in a globalized, knowledge-based…
The Preservation of Democracy
According to the popular idea, [democracy] is a form of government where the government does what the people want; and the people secure a government which acts…
Why Democracy Requires God
[Through seeking] the divine, the loving reaching out beyond ourselves toward the divine in the philosophical experience and the loving encounter through the Word in the pneumatic…
Democracy: A Society of Patricians
One can do nothing at all with a textbook definition of democracy, which again is only a cliche. It is no use to you to know that…
Democracy and Industrial Society
It surprises me as a newcomer to this circle that entrepreneurs have been apparently forced onto the defensive by an image of the entrepreneur whose characteristics come…