The Warm Liberalism of Erik Gustaf Geijer
Freedom in Sweden: Selected Works of Erik Gustaf Geijer. Björn Hasselgren, ed. Timbro, 2017. The name Erik Gustaf Geijer (1783–1847) is little known outside of Sweden.…
George Santayana and the Ironies of Liberalism
The question—is liberalism a self-defeating enterprise?—has gained traction over the last couple of years. Even as far back as 1921, the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana dedicated time…
The Right, the Left and Localism and Traditionalism: An Overview of Recent Scholarship on the North American Right
Books Discussed in this Essay: Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2018. Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin, National Populism: The…
Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange
“Liberalism has failed—not because it fell short, but because it was true to itself. It has failed because it has succeeded,” writes Notre Dame political philosopher Patrick…
Progressive History and the American Founders
Progressivism: The Strange History of a Radical Idea. Bradley C. S. Watson. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020. Bradley Watson, professor of political…
Pathologizing Ideology, Epistemic Modesty and Instrumental Rationality
I: Preamble Epistemic conservatism in its most generic form is the idea that a belief has some presumption of rationality merely because it is held (Quine). Cognitive…
Leo Strauss and the Crisis of Modernity (II): the Necessity of Virtue
One of Leo Strauss’ most famous contributions to the study of modern political theory is his known idea of the “three waves of modernity”, in which Strauss…
Leo Strauss and the Crisis of Modernity (I): Liberal Relativism
Few words seem to be as familiar to us in the Western world as the nebulous term “crisis.” We hear it incessantly and for many years. Of…
“Hamlet with a Happy Ending: The Lion King(s), Neoliberalism, and Simba’s Three Kingdoms”
Disney’s Lion King was initially, and continues to be in its latest iteration, a rewriting of Hamlet, one that rewrites Shakespeare’s dark tragedy into a myth of…
Did You Ever Wonder What the World Would be Like without You in It? An Introduction
Questions, Stories, and Possibility Coming from a nine-year-old “did you ever wonder what the world would be like without you in it?” was an eye-popping question. [1]…
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…