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Matthew J. Franck

Matthew J. Franck is Contributing Editor of Public Discourse. He is also a retired Lecturer in Politics at Princeton University, Senior Fellow at the Witherspoon Institute, and Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Radford University, where he chaired the department and taught courses in political philosophy, constitutional law, and American politics.

Franck has written, edited, or contributed to books published by the University Press of Kansas, Lexington Books, Oxford University Press, and Cambridge University Press, and has published articles and reviews in American Political Thought, the Review of Politics, the Journal of Church and State, the Catholic Social Science Review, National Affairs, The New Atlantis, First Things, the Weekly Standard, Touchstone, the Claremont Review of Books, National Review, and Public Discourse. On Twitter he is @MatthewJFranck.

Benjamin Franklin

The Bookshelf: Writing in the Mirror

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Whether it is an account of one’s whole life, or a memoir focused on a certain period or aspect of one’s life, or a published journal or diary, the author of an autobiography is too deeply interested (in both senses of that word) to achieve a really critical distance. Can the autobiographer, the memoirist, or the diarist be trusted?
Photo of GK Chesterton

The Bookshelf: Enter 2023 Laughing

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There is a lot of mileage to be gained out of mockery, and nowhere more than in satire and parody. But successful parody depends on close study, intimate familiarity with the target, and that can often produce a certain gentleness and sympathy in the result.
Photo of books of Russian literature

The Bookshelf: Lost (and Found) in Translations

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Is literalness the true criterion of a good translation? It may be that for study, the literalness to which Allan Bloom and Harvey Mansfield aspire in their translations of Plato and Machiavelli is the thing needful. But a good case can be made that for readers of English translations to get a sense of a story’s power, small departures from literalness, and perhaps even large ones, will be necessary on the translator’s part.
Photo of William F. Buckley

Where Does National Review Stand Today? A Conversation with Ramesh Ponnuru and Matt Franck

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National Review midwifed and nurtured the modern conservative movement into being. Conservatism today is in a very different situation from the one that Bill Buckley confronted in 1955. There is this vast conservative enterprise now; it’s kind of hydra-headed. But the basic need is, first, to think about the circumstances in which we find ourselves and how to apply conservative principles to them—or a conservative disposition, if one prefers—and second, how to build a coalition that is large enough to take these ideas off of the shelf.
Photo of book with pages ripped out

The Bookshelf: Dangers of the Siloed Life

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A temptation today is that we will “silo” ourselves, choosing to listen only to voices congenial to our own views, and walling off our access to other points of view. This temptation to live in a cozy silo can afflict our book reading habits as well, which is too bad. You won’t know how to shore up the weaknesses in your own arguments unless you encounter critics of them, and you won’t know even what is mistaken in others’ perspectives until you grant their strongest form a patient hearing.
Photo of Kindle on top of books

The Bookshelf: Books in the Hand, Books in the Ether

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For all their convenience, e-books just can’t do for us what physical books do. Something about the physical act of reading a book—the intertwined visual and tactile experience—stamps these things on our memory. An ebook is just too ephemeral—too disembodied, literally.
xenophon, parliament, statue

The Bookshelf: Exploring Great Lives

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We mere mortals may have more in common with history’s unknown shoemakers and privates. But to understand our history, it is more often necessary to look up to the heights occupied by the most visible human beings—those whose thoughts, words, and actions have had the most far-reaching effects.
Photos of Encyclopedia Britannica

The Bookshelf: You Could Look It Up

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From the whimsical to the obscure to the most dry-as-dust earnestness, reference books represent our impulse—perhaps our need—to organize the world around us, and even the worlds inside our heads, into some form of order and sharper understanding.
books, shelves, study

The Bookshelf: A Reader’s Discrimination

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No reader can read all there is, but there is more to the reading life than a duty to edify ourselves. Even the ephemera of our reading will give us something of value if we experience the pleasure of a well-told tale.
flag, constitution

Calvinball Constitutionalism

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Adrian Vermeule’s new book, an attempt to rescue American constitutional law by recurring to the “classical legal tradition,” is undone by the author’s unreasonable attack on originalism and his inattention to the Constitution and its history.
Three crosses at sunset

The Bookshelf: Classic Hollywood’s Religious Uplift Project

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The Hollywood “religious epic” movie genre of the postwar period was all about uplift, toleration, and offending exactly no one. Though entertaining at its best and an important part of the story of America’s rising pluralism, this genre proved finally to be too anodyne and unable to do justice to Scripture or the life of the early Church.
library, books

The Bookshelf: The Joys of Used Bookstores

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At used bookstores, I’ve discovered lesser-known titles from celebrated authors—Waugh, Koestler, and Cather. These works represent this most precious impulse of twentieth-century literature: that every life that comes within our reach has its claim on us, and is not to be wasted or sacrificed to any cause, program, or system on which we have the conceit to place a higher value.
Two open books stacked

The Bookshelf: A Little Help from My Friends

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Anyone who has spent his life in the academy, as I have, has reason to keep his mind open and his interests broad—namely, friends who write. My professional association over the last dozen years with the Witherspoon Institute and Princeton’s James Madison Program has introduced me to a dazzling array of brilliant and productive minds. No, I don’t want my writing friends to stop. They have given me much to ponder, and I look forward to what they will all write next.
Books stacked in a library

The Bookshelf: Reading in the Faith

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My ignorance of many important things gnaws at me, as does the consciousness that the rest of my life is not time enough to learn what I want to know. Lately my thoughts have turned to authors with whom I have some acquaintance but want to know better—specifically those philosophers and theologians who have shaped and transmitted the Catholic faith through the ages.
Stack of four books

The Bookshelf: The Comfort Food of Series Fiction

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When the hits keep on coming, it’s difficult for series writers to resist the market demand. Success builds the writer’s treadmill, and it can lack an “Off” switch. Perhaps “keep them coming back for more” should be replaced as the series writer’s motto by “make them wish there had been more.”
UCLA campus

The Bookshelf: The Undiscipline of Political Science

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The ideas that the truth about the human condition is radically contingent on history (historicism) and that we can speak rationally only about facts and not at all about “values” or moral principles (positivism) lead inexorably to a failure of all conviction, and ultimately to nihilism. What results is fanaticism: the impulse to bend others to one’s will, despite—or precisely because of—the lack of any rational foundation for one’s preferences.
Bookshelves

The Bookshelf: Who Is in the American Canon?

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Moving books home has turned my mind toward publishers that seem to be of high value because of the enduring importance of their books. One such is Liberty Fund, which specializes in classic conservative and libertarian texts in politics and economics. Another is the Library of America, which has a broad mission to publish (in its own words) “America’s greatest writing.”
Man and woman at book shop

The Bookshelf: Literature and Identity—Especially Sexual Identity

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There may indeed be a case for distinguishing the “female voice” and the “male voice” in literature. But don’t let anyone sell you on the false essentialism of a necessary “identity” of a writer with his or her principal subject, whether it be an identity of sex, or race, or culture.
Pile of books

The Bookshelf: Books That Stick

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Some of the best perspective-altering reading experiences I’ve had in recent years have come from books that I read well outside the bounds of my own research. Nonetheless they made their way into my thinking and writing in various ways—they “stuck.” And books that “stick” in this way we are apt to recommend whenever an opportunity arises.
Reading in a hammock

The Bookshelf: Summer Experiments and Attempts

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Summer—a time of lounging in a shaded hammock between two trees, or under a beach umbrella—is a great time for bite-sized nonfiction. With Public Discourse taking a publishing hiatus for the week following Independence Day, now is a perfect time to stretch out with some small provocation of thought.
book and American flag

The Bookshelf: Essential Reading on Religious Freedom

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Every “no” to the state in the name of religious conscience is predicated on a greater “yes” to a power higher than the state.
Paul McHugh

A Rosy-Cheeked Irish Boy Who Has Come Very Far: An Interview with Dr. Paul McHugh

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“Medicine is a humanistic discipline that uses science to accomplish what all human beings would like to see for themselves, in their capacity to sustain themselves. Ultimately it is to aim for a person who could be what God intended him to be.”
Friends eating outside

The Bookshelf: The Pleasures of the Table

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One of the vital experiences of which the current pandemic robbed us for too long is the dinner party with friends. Reading about food, too, can be a pleasure in its own right, whether one tries out daring new recipes or not. My small kitchen library has a few notable classics that are as interesting for their authors’ voices as for their instruction in preparing dishes.
two open books, one on top of the other, with a television remote control on the top

The Bookshelf: Good Books into Better Movies

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Many of the books behind our favorite films are very much worth reading. But the medium of cinema does not necessarily translate great literature effectively.
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