About Donald Devine

Donald Devine is senior scholar at the Fund for American Studies. He is the author of ten books, including the more recent The Enduring Tension: Capitalism and the Moral Order from Encounter Books, America’s Way Back: Reclaiming Freedom, Tradition, and Constitution, and Political Management of the Bureaucracy. He served as President Reagan’s director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.

John Locke: The Harmony of Liberty & Virtue

By |2023-08-28T18:01:13-05:00August 28th, 2023|Categories: American Republic, Civil Society, Featured, Federalist Papers, Freedom, John Locke, Leo Strauss, Liberty, Philosophy, Timeless Essays, Virtue|

Government remains limited in civil society because God gave man the ability, through work and reason, to subdue the earth and thereby improve his life by the use of pri­vate property. Understanding Locke John Locke is one of the few major philoso­phers who can be used to provide a theoret­ical and moral foundation for American [...]

Is It the End or Awakening of Philosophical Fusionism?

By |2022-06-16T11:26:57-05:00June 12th, 2022|Categories: Conservatism, George Nash, Libertarianism|

The once dominant and implicitly ecumenical philosophy of fusionism has been denounced by a chorus of right-wing critics as a "dead consensus." Fusionism, some critics assert, was perhaps a necessary contrivance during the Cold War but is now irrelevant. And so a determined quest for yet another formulation of conservatism has begun. The Fall of [...]

The Brilliant Enigma That Was Willmoore Kendall

By |2021-12-27T21:23:07-06:00December 26th, 2021|Categories: Books, Politics, Willmoore Kendall|

Willmoore Kendall's works on political science were pathbreaking and survive the test of time. Even today, it is impossible to understand the equal democratic legitimacy of the presidency and Congress without his “Two Majorities,” or the critical role of local-based political parties without his "American Party System," or how the whole Constitution works to solve [...]

America: A Progressive Coming-Together?

By |2021-06-17T18:05:36-05:00June 17th, 2021|Categories: American Republic, Books|

In his new book, "The Upswing," Harvard’s Robert Putnam argues that today’s economic, social, cultural and political cleavages mirror the Gilded Age of the 1870s, whose divisions were only healed over time through progressive reforms that re-built national unity by the 1950s. Harvard’s Robert Putnam is one of the most creative and persuasive voices of [...]

Is Natural Law Sufficient to Defend the Founding?

By |2020-07-26T00:55:31-05:00July 26th, 2020|Categories: American Founding, American Republic, Aristotle, Books, Natural Law, Philosophy, Reason|

As Robert R. Reilly explains in “America on Trial,” the United States restored the founding of government based on reason in a Constitution that produced the most successful government experiment in history. If the American Founding was a rational and social success, why has the American experiment now come under modern attack? America on Trial: [...]

Understanding Genes, Decadence, and the Decline of Empires

By |2020-06-01T13:59:14-05:00June 1st, 2020|Categories: Charles Murray, Civil Society, Civilization, Culture|

We have become victims of our very success in producing a comfortable life so that nothing new seems worth much further effort. The United States and the West might even be as decadent as was ancient Rome, which managed decline for centuries. Why not the United States too? Everyone on the right seems to have [...]

Building American Institutions During a Cultural Crisis

By |2020-03-29T18:36:22-05:00March 29th, 2020|Categories: Books, Civil Society, Conservatism, Culture War, Social Institutions|

In his latest book, Yuval Levin presents irrefutable evidence of America’s weakening attachment to its core institutions of family, community, voluntary associations, religions, and political parties. His goal, however, is to move beyond today’s ideological culture war and show how commitment to institutions puts us on an edifying path to belonging, social status, personal integrity, [...]

Impeachment, the End of an Era, and the Conservative Challenge

By |2020-01-14T14:46:46-06:00January 14th, 2020|Categories: Conservatism, Donald Trump, Government, James Madison, Liberalism, Politics|

It is difficult to know when an era has ended. The events dominating the news today—presidential impeachment, deep state subversion of secret surveillance courts, confused and prolonged wars, out-of-control debt and government spending, and a radicalized educational and media culture—suggest something quite profound is threatening American governance. But it is not so clear precisely what. [...]

The Fusionist Fight Over Everything

By |2019-11-04T06:29:37-06:00November 4th, 2019|Categories: American Republic, Conservatism, Libertarianism, Traditional Conservatives and Libertarians|

The divide between conservatism’s old elements may represent the “end” of the fusionism that built the “conservative movement” and, after a half-century, of the dominance of this thinking within one of America’s major political parties. The intellectual battle between the factions claiming the brand “conservatism” has become “the fight over, well, everything” perceives even outsider [...]

Critiquing Robert Kagan’s Enlightenment Liberalism

By |2019-10-30T12:06:44-05:00May 6th, 2019|Categories: Conservatism, Democracy, Donald Trump, Liberalism, Natural Rights Tradition, Politics, Tyranny|

While Robert Kagan basically dismisses church and community in the development of liberalism, can there be any sadder but more important concession than his own admission that “liberalism has no particular answer” for what can legitimize its rights? An essay is meant to be very, very important when it consumes four giant pages in the [...]

Science Lost in Math

By |2019-07-03T13:39:30-05:00January 29th, 2019|Categories: Beauty, Books, Mathematics, Science|

Now, when the subatomic world and the cosmological universe seem to reveal some of the inconsistencies in modern theoretical physics, could the whole idea of a world sitting on fundamental elements be in question? Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, by Sabine Hossenfelder (304 pages, Basic Books, 2018) Sabine Hossenfelder’s little book Lost in [...]

Understanding Voegelin’s Critique of Locke

By |2019-11-21T19:44:32-06:00November 30th, 2018|Categories: American Republic, Books, Democracy, Eric Voegelin, John Locke, Philosophy, Political Philosophy|

No matter how conservative intellectuals try, they just do not seem able to escape John Locke. Jonah Goldberg’s well-received Suicide of the West proudly called America’s Declaration of Independence “echoes of” the great English Enlightenment philosopher John Locke, saying U.S. history was “more Locke than anything Locke imagined.”  He inspired “a government but not a state”: a government with power [...]

The Virtue of Nationalism

By |2020-06-14T17:03:22-05:00October 29th, 2018|Categories: Books, History, Nationalism, Political Philosophy, Politics|

Yoram Hazony’s "The Virtue of Nationalism" sees the world as composed of two “antithetical” types of government: universalist empires and free nation-states. The problem is that everything in the book is forced into that all-inclusive doctrinal dichotomy. The Virtue of Nationalism, by Yoram Hazony (305 pages, Basic Books, 2018) Yoram Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism has the [...]

Is God Dead… or Is It Nietzsche?

By |2019-06-27T12:47:45-05:00August 10th, 2018|Categories: American Republic, Atheism, Christianity, Europe, Religion|

The world has been and will continue to be overwhelmingly traditionally religious, whatever intellectuals like Nietzsche might have expected to the contrary, thus confirming those philosophers who contend that all civilizations must be supported by such moral frameworks… San Diego State University recently announced what it called perhaps the largest ever study of American youth [...]

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