Liberal Education: Piercing the Dome

By |2024-03-18T20:50:26-05:00March 18th, 2024|Categories: Democracy, Education, Freedom, Liberal Learning|

Three proposed ends of liberal education — career, democracy, and a free mind — do not pierce the dome of the bourgeois workaday world. Let us begin anew with a question: “How can liberal education pierce the dome that encloses the bourgeois workaday world?" This essay was originally delivered at Magdalen College on October 25, [...]

The Political Thought of Edgar Allan Poe

By |2024-01-18T15:16:50-06:00January 18th, 2024|Categories: Democracy, Edgar Allan Poe, Timeless Essays|

Edgar Allan Poe vigorously denounced the Jeffersonian ideal of democracy. He had no sympathy with abstract political notions such as those which had produced liberal republican theory in America and elsewhere. Like Edmund Burke, Poe was highly suspicious of the “well-constructed Republic.” The opinion has been often stated that Edgar Allan Poe was bizarre and [...]

Oracle of the Humanities: Charles Eliot Norton of Harvard

By |2023-11-13T20:13:35-06:00November 13th, 2023|Categories: American Republic, Democracy, Education, History, Humanities, Literature, Michael J. Connolly, Senior Contributors|

Charles Eliot Norton is unknown today outside historians of literature or education, but between Fort Sumter and Teddy Roosevelt he dominated Anglo-American literature and Harvard lecture halls. Beginning with optimism, in the years following Appomattox his perspective darkened into fears that American democracy encouraged selfishness, corruption, and the hatred of excellence. In the 1890s, Harvard [...]

Local Government: The Real Bedrock of Democracy

By |2023-09-06T19:09:48-05:00September 6th, 2023|Categories: Democracy, Politics|

Local governmental bodies, and particularly school boards, have always provided a forum for direct democracy, in which citizens can openly voice their opinions. To restrict access to or participation in these forums is not only to curtail speech and political association rights, but also to substantially restrict the very nature of democracy and federalism in [...]

Democracy Is Beautiful: Conservatism as if the People Matter

By |2023-07-02T20:55:56-05:00July 2nd, 2023|Categories: American Republic, Community, Conservatism, Democracy, Film, Populism, Willmoore Kendall|

To rebuild their movement and society, and to rebuild a viable culture, conservatives must embrace the conservative populism championed by two men: filmmaker Frank Capra and scholar Willmoore Kendall. Pursuing this path will be challenging, for populism has become a bogeyman for the powers that be. Last December, my wife and I motored a couple [...]

How Modernity Diminishes the Human Person

By |2023-06-22T17:04:34-05:00June 22nd, 2023|Categories: Adam Smith, Alexis de Tocqueville, Apple, Capitalism, Community, Democracy, Democracy in America, Featured, George Stanciu, St. John's College, Technology, Timeless Essays|

Because of the strong secular faith instilled in us by education, most of us trust that science and technology, democracy, and capitalism, the three legs of Modernity, can bring about only good ends and fail to see that these three triumphs of humankind can diminish the human person. With the publication of the book The [...]

A Backwards Civilization: Unthinking Leaders, Frenzied Citizens

By |2023-02-07T17:08:49-06:00February 7th, 2023|Categories: Civil Society, Civilization, Democracy, Featured, Meno, Modernity, Plato, Political Philosophy, Politics, Socrates, Timeless Essays|

In America today, we are living in a toxic political climate that is the product of a very dangerous combination: Our rulers lack the learning necessary to ask the kinds of deep and fundamental questions that leaders and lawgivers ought to make a habit of pondering, while our people rebelliously scrutinize all orthodoxies and impose [...]

Sweet Reason and the Spirits of Contention

By |2022-11-04T13:27:15-05:00November 4th, 2022|Categories: Catholicism, Civil Society, Democracy, Glenn Arbery, Politics, Wyoming Catholic College|

A radical polarization is going on in our own day. Knowing better, people interpret others as short-sighted and selfish, demonize their affiliations, and tar them with imputed evil. The hard question facing us is a political one: how long will we be able to sustain our constitutional forms? The still harder question, though, is what [...]

Humility, Prudence, and Other Lost Virtues

By |2022-09-12T17:33:09-05:00September 12th, 2022|Categories: Democracy, Virtue|

Democracy requires compromise, and compromise requires the two virtues lacking most in American society–prudence and humility. What hope is there, then, now that technology and social media have only deepened the virtue deficit? In October 2012, during a televised presidential debate President Barack Obama earned laughs and pleased pundits when he mocked his opponent, Governor [...]

“The People”: Sheep and Feathers

By |2022-09-07T17:08:15-05:00September 7th, 2022|Categories: Democracy, Freedom, Government, Great Books, Monarchy, Politics, Timeless Essays, William Shakespeare|

Abstract law or the worship of a document is not sufficient for guidance of a people, nor are the paltry checks of public shame and dread enough to deter criminality. We stand a far greater chance of learning wisdom from William Shakespeare’s “Henry VI” than we do from listening to the countless talking heads and [...]

Why American Democracy Is Worth Defending

By |2022-08-22T13:25:35-05:00August 22nd, 2022|Categories: American Republic, Declaration of Independence, Democracy, Government, Liberty, Politics, Timeless Essays|

What is American democracy, and why is it worth defending? The current political climate, in which democracy is increasingly (and troublingly) equated with populism, compels us to reflect on this question. Democracy is an ancient form of government, but historically, democracies that rise above mere mob rule and reflect genuine self-governance, while respecting basic rights, [...]

Why Democracy Needs Aristocracy

By |2022-07-12T14:34:56-05:00July 12th, 2022|Categories: American Founding, Aristocracy, Democracy, Marcia Christoff Reina, Politics, Timeless Essays|

The aristocratic element of democracy is its long-term quality. It has reverence for the past and it plans for the future. This is the necessary instinct democracy needs anew. Seneca, the Roman philosopher, relates the story of the murder of Callisthenes by Alexander the Great, the “everlasting crime” of the Macedonian leader. Seneca wrote: “For [...]

A Bridge to Somewhere: Willmoore Kendall’s Teaching on Democracy

By |2023-08-04T09:29:51-05:00April 7th, 2022|Categories: American Republic, Democracy, Eric Voegelin, History, Leo Strauss, Willmoore Kendall|

Complex and perceptive, Willmoore Kendall's ideas remain relevant as the most important intellectual defense of the American people’s right to rule itself rather than to submit to the tyranny of experts. He is the man who engineered the foundation, structure, and superstructure of a bridge to democracy with his own formidable intellect and tremendous erudition. [...]

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