About Bruce Frohnen

Bruce P. Frohnen is Professor of Law at Ohio Northern University College of Law and the author of Virtue and the Promise of Conservatism: The Legacy of Burke and Tocqueville, The New Communitarians and The Crisis of Modern Liberalism and editor (with George Carey) of Community and Tradition: Conservative Perspectives on the American Experience. His latest book is Constitutional Morality and the Rise of Quasi-Law (written with the late George Carey).

Buying Liberty or Empire? The Problem of the Louisiana Purchase

By |2024-03-09T21:02:12-06:00March 9th, 2024|Categories: Bruce Frohnen, Ordered Liberty, Timeless Essays|

The Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the size of the United States in one fell swoop, may sound of little relevance to ordered liberty today. But as we face a national government of ever-increasing power and hostility toward the institutions, beliefs, and practices undergirding ordered liberty and local affection, we should consider whether the price of [...]

Why “Celebrate” Christmas and the Epiphany?

By |2023-12-27T12:23:44-06:00December 27th, 2023|Categories: Bruce Frohnen, Christianity, Christmas, Epiphany, Timeless Essays|

Why celebrate Christmas? Why throw a party, instead of going to church, in the first place? Is not this religious holiday, by nature calling us to quiet contemplation? Did you know that Christmas celebrations were banned in Scotland until 1958?  I certainly did not, not until my son started working on his sixth-grade “Christmas around [...]

Declarations, Compacts, & the American Constitutional Tradition

By |2023-11-20T23:20:12-06:00November 20th, 2023|Categories: Bruce Frohnen, Constitution, Declaration of Independence, Featured, Mayflower Compact, Politics, Timeless Essays|

The American constitutional tradition stretches back beyond our shores to England. It is a tradition shaped on this continent by experience and the character of the people. In this vision, local communities play the primary role in government, protecting the fundamental institutions in which good character is formed. We hold these truths to be self-evident, [...]

Westward Expansion: How the West was Won?

By |2023-09-26T17:40:19-05:00September 26th, 2023|Categories: American Founding, American Republic, Bruce Frohnen, Foreign Affairs, Timeless Essays|

Most westward expansion was morally ambiguous, with blame and praise earned on both sides, but expansion was almost always made worse by a progressive drive on the part of the government. Our friend Brad Birzer’s musings on his trip to the West (God’s country, the home of all good men, etc.) raise some important issues. [...]

Finding and Losing Train Culture

By |2023-07-06T19:44:37-05:00July 6th, 2023|Categories: American West, Bruce Frohnen, Culture, Timeless Essays|

Train culture itself helped integrate communities into the larger, state, and national society in a way that left local autonomy intact. The nice thing about trains is that they bring people and things to your community and take them from your community to the wider world without erasing your actual community. My family and I [...]

Why Our Legal System Is Failing Us

By |2023-06-09T16:43:29-05:00June 6th, 2023|Categories: Bruce Frohnen, Culture, Ethics, Featured, Justice, Politics, Rule of Law, Timeless Essays|

The slow disintegration of our legal system will continue apace until and unless judges, in particular, cease acting as if the legal system they serve either does not need or does not deserve their active support. Americans’ attitudes toward lawyers and the legal system are filled with ironies. We complain that lawyers are money-grubbing sophists [...]

The Limits of Liberty

By |2023-01-22T21:00:13-06:00January 22nd, 2023|Categories: Bruce Frohnen, Civil Society, Freedom, Government, Liberty, Rule of Law, Senior Contributors, Social Order, Timeless Essays|

While the rule of law is an essential public good, the actual number and extent of laws also are important factors in determining whether there will be liberty—and, indeed, the rule of law itself. Moreover, as too much law undermines freedom and its own proper character, it also tears apart the very fabric of the [...]

Is America Hopelessly Divided?

By |2022-11-21T14:16:23-06:00November 21st, 2022|Categories: Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Featured, Politics, Progressivism, Timeless Essays|

No society can survive if its people cannot achieve general consensus on certain fundamental understandings regarding the nature of the person and of society itself. It may seem too much to say that our country has never been as divided as it is today. Anti-war protests, race riots, and especially a bloody Civil War would [...]

Should Everyone Go to College?

By |2022-10-13T16:32:01-05:00October 13th, 2022|Categories: Bruce Frohnen, Capitalism, Economics, Education, Politics, Timeless Essays|

True educational reform must re-establish the secondary school as a place for broad learning, vocational training as a highly respected route to respectable work, and college as a place for higher learning. The call for college to be made “free” to all who want it rests on a number of assumptions, most of them self-serving, [...]

What Is This Thing Called Virtue?

By |2022-10-02T14:03:00-05:00October 2nd, 2022|Categories: Bruce Frohnen, Conservatism, Featured, Timeless Essays, Virtue|Tags: |

Today, conceptions of virtue are at open war, with Christian virtue being termed “bigoted” on account of its failure to abandon the family, the unborn, and our duty to serve our God, in the face of an alternate vision of virtue as autonomous action circumscribed by an all-encompassing toleration that equates indifference with caring. Believe [...]

A Restless Tocqueville

By |2023-07-28T15:45:34-05:00July 28th, 2022|Categories: Alexis de Tocqueville, Books, Bruce Frohnen, Liberalism, Peter A. Lawler, Philosophy, Politics, Timeless Essays|

At the heart of Alexis de Tocqueville’s thought lies the “restless mind”—a mind that sees the essence of humanity in the realization that each of us “dies alone” and that life is but a fleeting moment hedged in between the abysses of the pre-born and the dead. The Restless Mind: Alexis de Tocqueville on the [...]

Statesmanship & the Dangers of Civil Religion

By |2022-06-27T17:35:55-05:00June 27th, 2022|Categories: Abraham Lincoln, Bruce Frohnen, Equality, Government, Politics, Timeless Essays|

Demands for statesmanship tend to hold up a model of greatness in political leadership that is profoundly dangerous. The desire to be “great” by upholding the interests of the nation as a political whole promotes a massive increase in the extent and centralization of political power. I recently attended a conference on statesmanship. Truth be [...]

The Patriotism of a Conservative

By |2022-06-13T15:38:55-05:00June 13th, 2022|Categories: Bruce Frohnen, Conservatism, Patriotism, Politics, Timeless Essays|Tags: |

Particularly in dangerous times, the true patriot has a duty to resist the call to blind nationalist obedience so that he may serve his nation’s true interests, and help it to live up to its duty to obey a law higher than itself. Perhaps the most famous quotation from the great Tory lexicographer Samuel Johnson [...]

Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, & the Birth of Right and Left

By |2022-01-09T15:55:37-06:00January 9th, 2022|Categories: Books, Bruce Frohnen, Edmund Burke, Featured, Timeless Essays|

Do you wish to understand the birth of right and left? Examine the debate between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine occasioned by the French Revolution. The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left by Yuval Levin, (304 pages, Basic Books, 2014) Those seeking a deeper understanding of the roots of contemporary [...]

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