About Ted McAllister

Dr. Ted V. McAllister was the Edward L. Gaylord Chair and Professor of Public Policy at Pepperdine School of Public Policy from 1998 until his death in 2023. He was the author of Character in the American Experience: An Unruly People (with Bruce Frohnen); Coming Home: Reclaiming America’s Conservative Soul (also with Bruce Frohnen); Why Place Matters: Geography, Identity, and Civic Life in Modern America (with Bill McClay); Revolt Against Modernity: Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, and the Search for a Post-Liberal Order; and numerous book chapters and reviews. He received a PhDin American intellectual and cultural history from Vanderbilt University, an MA with a concentration in American intellectual history from Claremont Graduate School, and a BA in history from Oklahoma Christian College.

Andrew Carnegie, Equality, & American Progress

By |2023-05-29T19:52:04-05:00May 29th, 2023|Categories: Alexis de Tocqueville, American Republic, Equality, History, Ted McAllister, Timeless Essays|

To Andrew Carnegie, equality meant a way of being, a condition that shaped the soul of the individual and thereby the soul of a people or nation. Equality not only unleashed the energy of the American people so that they would become the most prosperous in the world, but it shaped their moral condition, it [...]

Russell Kirk on the Variety and Mystery of Human Existence

By |2022-06-20T20:06:12-05:00May 10th, 2017|Categories: Alexis de Tocqueville, American Founding, Edmund Burke, John Adams, Russell Kirk, Ted McAllister, The Conservative Mind, Tradition|Tags: |

Too often the public conversation about universal truths divides along rather sterile ideological lines. Russell Kirk’s great warning is that this is not really a battle of ideas, understood abstractly, but a battle of sentiments or affections… Since the nation’s founding, a salutary tension has informed American political thought—a tension between the abstract, universal truths [...]

Reclaiming Our Constitutional Heritage

By |2023-02-07T21:07:41-06:00January 10th, 2017|Categories: Alexis de Tocqueville, American Founding, Books, Featured, Ordered Liberty, Ted McAllister|

The so-called American Revolution was a rebellion to preserve and reinstitute long-established liberties and to develop a system of governance that put those liberties on a more secure foundation. We might even think of the “Revolution” as a rebellion that prevented or postponed a revolution… By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission by Charles Murray (Crown [...]

“The Conservative Mind”: An Act of Recovery?

By |2023-05-11T10:39:15-05:00July 10th, 2016|Categories: Conservatism, Democracy in America, Edmund Burke, Featured, Russell Kirk, Ted McAllister, The Conservative Mind, Timeless Essays|

Russell Kirk’s greatest gift to American political thought is his brilliant articulation and cultivation of a rich cultural patrimony that helps define the meaning of our most cherished ideals from within a context that is both historically textured and open to the transcendental. Since the nation’s founding, a salutary tension has informed American political thought—a [...]

Understanding the Bohemian Conservative

By |2019-06-06T11:29:43-05:00June 14th, 2016|Categories: Conservation, Conservatism, Featured, Language, Natural Rights Tradition, Ted McAllister, Western Tradition|

Half-knowledge is more victorious than whole knowledge: it understands things as being more simple than they are and this renders its opinions more easily intelligible and more convincing. –Nietzsche Several years ago, I heard a scientist being interviewed on NPR declare that humans are “just sacks of rapidly degenerating amino acids,” or something similar. I [...]

Can a Southerner Ever Escape the South?

By |2016-06-11T09:25:39-05:00June 3rd, 2016|Categories: Agrarianism, Conservatism, Featured, History, Modernity, South, Ted McAllister, Wendell Berry|

In October of 1997, I attended the Southern Historical Association’s convention in Atlanta because I wanted to hear Paul Conkin’s presidential address, “Hot, Humid, and Sad.” What I heard was largely a history of the South in which climate and geography shaped a complex skein of human choices. Mostly a dense and almost perversely analytical [...]

Global Citizenship: When Words Turn into Semantic Quicksand

By |2016-05-25T23:40:28-05:00May 25th, 2016|Categories: Alexis de Tocqueville, Civil Society, Community, Freedom, Modernity, Social Institutions, Ted McAllister, Western Civilization|

We are told to be careful with our words, to be aware of how our words might make other people feel, or of how we might be misunderstood. However important is this advice (and it is both important and grossly overused), these are not the primary reasons we should be thoughtful about our language. Words [...]

Conservatism: Past & Future?

By |2014-05-03T16:25:28-05:00May 3rd, 2014|Categories: Books, George Nash, History, Ted McAllister|Tags: |

The historiography of American conser­vatism (often rendered the “conservative movement”) remains immature. For decades, the academic historical establishment largely ignored American conservatives or dealt with them as a sort of fringe group, recurrent expressions of a pathology. Only after the surprising and enduring appeal of Ronald Reagan did most historians begin to take se­rious scholarly [...]

Of Ideas and Politics

By |2014-04-17T10:34:30-05:00April 15th, 2014|Categories: Books, Conservatism, Ted McAllister|Tags: |

Perhaps contemporary conservatives misunderstand their own movement because conservative philosophy distorts conservative history. Ideas, not material conditions, drive history, conservatives aver. Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences (an editor’s title much disliked by Weaver) established a powerful model for tracing moral and civilizational change— often decline—to rather small alterations in beliefs, such as medieval nominalism. Importantly, most of [...]

The Romance of Conservatism

By |2019-10-16T12:06:04-05:00October 31st, 2011|Categories: Christianity, Conservatism, G.K. Chesterton, Russell Kirk, Ted McAllister|Tags: , , , , , , |

In one of the great works of imagination, Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton declared that faith is romantic, that materialism is not only dull but produces a boredom that leads to madness. Humans are born romantics and they can never fulfill their better natures without cultivating an imagination that accepts and embraces mystery. The romantic lives in [...]

The Conservative Mind-An Act of Recovery?

By |2023-02-07T21:10:28-06:00October 1st, 2011|Categories: Books, Conservatism, Russell Kirk, Ted McAllister, The Conservative Mind|

Since the nation’s founding a salutary tension has informed American political thought—a tension between the abstract, universal truths expressed in the first part of the Declaration of Independence and the particular, experience-based prudence of the Constitution. The one establishes moral imperatives (and defines a just government) while the other establishes a new order out of [...]

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