Political Philosophy and the Human Imagination
Possibility’s Parents: Stories at the End of Liberalism. Margaret Seyford Hrezo and Nicholas Pappas. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020. Margaret Seyford Hrezo is emeritus professor of…
Death or Tenure
Why Liberalism Failed. Patrick Deneen. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. Like Socrates in the Republic, my argument is about education or lack of education, paideia…
James Burnham’s and Daniel Bell’s Critiques of Globalization and Liberalism
We like to say that every idea, every thought, every emotion—no matter how novel—has already been conveyed by someone, somewhere; such is the nature of the “universality”…
Globalization’s Liberalism
It is not possible to separate globalization from liberalism. Without the political foundation that liberalism provides, a project of such scale would have been unfathomable. But just…
Rediscovering Liberalism: A Review of Larry Siedentop’s Inventing the Individual
Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Larry Siedentop. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014. Liberalism is rightly considered to be an ideology based primarily on…
Voegelin, Rawls, and the Persistence of Liberal Civil Theology
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…
Hobhouse and Leadership: A Consideration of Liberalism
In 1911, L. T. Hobhouse published his brief Liberalism meant for his home audience in Great Britain but it eventually came to be considered a classic treatment…
Philip Roth and the American Liberal Tradition
Scholarly efforts to situate Philip Roth’s fiction within a political or historical framework can prove arduous and difficult. Indeed, his writing is so rich in literary innovation…
Conserving America? Essays on Present Discontents
Conserving America? Essays on Present Discontents. Patrick J. Deneen. South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2016. The current political polarization in the country today can be…
A Brief Account of Liberalism
When we speak of democracy today, we really mean liberal democracy, a product of the Enlightenment and the philosophy of liberalism. The success of the modern sciences…
The Performative Contradictions of Liberalism
John P. Safranek, The Myth of Liberalism. Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2015. Can a regime function in the absence of a conception of…
What is a Liberal?
The task of sketching the history of liberalism, although modest, is for methodological reasons difficult.1 For we stand before the question of whether there is even such…
Christians as Political Animals
Christians as Political Animals: Taking the Measure of Modernity and Modern Democracy. Marc Guerra. Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2010. The book is an Augustinian-inspired critique…
John Stuart Mill and the Minimum Consensus
The Question Posed by Locke For John Locke, the foundation of the social contract was not a problem because it was identical with the moral law. The…
Utopian Forgetfulness of the Depth (Part II)
All of the critiques point toward the fundamental objection that Nietzsche was to express so powerfully. That is, that liberal politics had cut itself off from its…