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The Founders’ Natural Rights Philosophy Does Not Entail Radical Autonomy

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It’s an error for conservatives to see the American Founding’s emphasis on natural rights as necessarily fostering extreme individualism in contemporary America. Eighteenth-century Americans would have viewed the notion that rights could be exercised contrary to natural law as ridiculous.

Vindicating the Founders . . . Again

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The political theory of the American founding is not quite the “cure for what ails us,” but, as Thomas G. West’s books demonstrate, it can serve as a kind of preventive medicine against the psychological sickness of radical individualism.

Don’t Blame the Founders for Our Civic Disintegration

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Leslie Rubin’s brilliant study argues that the fault, dear America, lies not in our stars but in ourselves—our repudiation in the past century of the moderate liberal philosophy of Federalists and Anti-Federalists alike, which was steeped in Aristotelian wisdom about favoring the decent republican virtues of a middle class.

Locke and the Founders Agree: The President Can Pardon Himself

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The pardon power is the most significant and strongest power of the president, and the Constitution places almost no limits on it. In using it, the president can unilaterally nullify the legitimate authority of the legislative and judicial branches.

The Founders on Lifelong Marriage and the Limits of Reason: Reply to Muñoz

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If there is one truth that the entire philosophic tradition—including America’s Founders—may be said to embrace, in spite of all its disagreements, it is this: reason teaches that it is unreasonable to expect people to act by reason alone.

The Urgency of Restoring the Biblical Values of America’s Founders

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Our nation was founded on biblical principles as a haven for devoutly religious dissidents. We forget our Judeo-Christian origins and the founders’ commitment to freedom of religion at our peril.

Making Sense of the Founders: Politics, Natural Rights, and the Laws of Nature

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It is often alleged that the American founders lacked a unified and coherent political theory. To the contrary, a recent book by Thomas West shows that the founders broadly agreed on a philosophy of natural rights, calling for both the protection of liberty and the promotion of virtue.

We Must Preserve the Founders’ Classical Vision for Our Nation’s Capital

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The plan of our nation’s capital and the architecture of its core buildings and monuments must carry on the classical vision the Founders intended as the physical manifestation of America’s form of government and political ideals.

Constitutional Disorder in the Era of Judicial Supremacy: The Founders’ Understanding of the Court

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Judicial supremacy is inimical to the separation of powers, to republicanism, and even to constitutionalism and the rule of law. The upcoming confirmation hearings for Sonia Sotomayor should force citizens to reconsider the place of the Court in our political life. The first in a two-part series.
Classical education

Classical Education’s Remedy for America’s Loneliness Epidemic

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Classical schools embrace an older understanding of education, one that prepares students for festivity and friendship, rather than socially handicapping them. Like their ancient and medieval predecessors, classical educators maintain that a crucial purpose of education is to liberate students from a calculative, utilitarian mindset by teaching them how to enjoy intrinsically worthwhile activities for their own sake.
desert

The Hidden Riches of the Desert

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In her new book A Philosopher Looks at the Religious Life, Zena Hitz situates her philosophical ponderings within the context of her own life, here spotlighting a crisis precipitated by her conversion to the Catholic faith. Like Abraham about to sacrifice his son Isaac at the Lord’s behest, Hitz realizes that unconditional love of God, “wholehearted commitment without compromise,” might demand the renunciation even of what she has held most dear.
Summer camp

Summer Camp: An Ailing American Institution

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The original rationale for summer camp is more valid than ever. Young people are struggling with mental health, addiction to technology, disconnection from the body, isolation, and many other painful realities. Summer camps cannot fix these problems. But for many adolescents, the experience of traditional summer camps might help them see that life is about more than accomplishment, and that is a start.
Christianity in America

If You Like America, Thank Christianity

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Mark David Hall’s Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land represents a landmark contribution to the debate over the impact of Christian faith on American law and culture. It is high time for Christians to reframe this debate, asking not “How much do we have to apologize for?” but “How much can we take credit for?”
Clear circular glasses on the table with blurry background

Is Bias Actually Bad?

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If we take seriously Thomas Kelly’s ideas about bias blind spots, then we should seek public universities composed of a high degree of biased parts. Such universities would intentionally hire faculty members and administrators who harbor contrary views on divisive cultural issues. This would probably create campuses that can boast of having teaching and scholarship that have much less pejorative bias than their peer institutions.
Karyatides statues, Erehtheio, on the Acropolis in Athens, Greece

The Past As Enemy Country: Why Teachers of Great Books Should Be Teaching History, Too

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We need to study history as a subject in its own right, acquiring a deep appreciation for the story of Western civilization, with all its abysses of failure and all its deservedly celebrated achievements. We need to help our students understand old texts at a deeper level, in less anachronistic ways. Above all, we need to arm them against the hostility to their own tradition that has become such a destructive force in our culture.
Hand of a person casting a vote into the ballot box during elections

There’s No Easy Fix to Our Broken Presidential Nominating System

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For the foreseeable future, there will be no institutional barrier to demagoguery, viciousness, or incompetence to be found within the nominating processes. The only barrier will be the voters themselves.
Robert A. Nisbet

Robert Nisbet and the Non-Libertarian Case for Decentralization

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Conservatives are defenders of traditional communities, not atomized individuals fending for themselves. We do not oppose the growth of the federal government merely because it is dangerous to individual liberty, but because the bureaucratization of American society violates our conception of the human good.

The Patriotism We Need: Principled and Spirited

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A timely book on the thought of Harry Jaffa and Walter Berns reminds us that patriotism needs to be about ideas and principles, but it cannot only be about ideas and principles. To win—and deserve to win—elections, conservatism must also inspire love of country and serve the immediate interests of the ordinary man.
Eugene Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People, 1830, oil on canvas, Louvre Museum, Paris, France.

The Religion of Democracy

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In her 2022 book The Ideology of Democratism, Emily Finley contends that democracy, or democratism, has become “perhaps the dominant political belief system in modern Western society.” In other words, democracy has become more than a regime type; it has become a secular religion, complete with its own dogmas, practices, clerics, and eschatology.
President George Washington home at Mount Vernon in Virginia, USA

Reclaiming Museums’ Civic Duty

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Museums assume, both for the country and the individual, a special trust of preservation and civic encouragement. That encouragement need not involve glossing over the failings of our past. We distort our history both when we whitewash it and when we overemphasize our shortcomings.

Juneteenth: A Conversation on Freedom

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Juneteenth, coming as it does just weeks before July Fourth, provides a perfect opportunity for us—both individually and collectively—to engage in a season of contemplating and celebrating the complexities and nuances, highs and lows, of this American experiment that has at its core the achievement of freedom.
Ancient Roman ruins of temple in Jerash, Jordan

After Postliberalism

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What would happen if we dropped that charged word “liberalism” from the conversation and got down to specifics? I suspect much of Patrick Deneen’s postliberal magic would disappear.

A Culture of Life Starts with Turning the Other Cheek

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Advocates must remain clear about the moral stakes of abortion. But the non-violent ethic of life will reinforce the witness of conscience that drives objections to killing innocent human beings. By refusing to retaliate with violence or indignant rhetoric, pro-lifers will enhance their moral witness.
Reflection of architecture on modern office building

America’s Commercial Republic, and Its Detractors: An Interview with Samuel Gregg

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Key Founders believed that America’s future was to be a polity in which free and dynamic commerce would play a powerful role in defining society, as opposed to, say, the priorities of aristocratic or feudal societies. The “republic” side of this political economy equation is that this commercial society would operate within the context of institutions and sets of virtues that draw upon classical, religious, and moderate Enlightenment sources.
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