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Family Man: Christopher Lasch and the Populist Imperative |
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Written by Andrew Bacevich
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Hope in a Scattering Time: A Life of Christopher Lasch
by Eric Miller (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010)
BOOK REVIEW: It is a recurring story of American politics: From the heartland, anger erupts, directed at Wall Street for fattening itself at the people’s expense and at Washington for endemic corruption and endless shenanigans. Moneychangers have occupied the temple, comes the charge, and no alternative exists but to sweep the place clean.
Yet no sooner do the plain folk raise their pitchforks than a great tut-tutting is heard from on high. The problem, it turns out, lies not with Wall Street or Washington but with the people themselves. Populism—synonymous with bigotry and ignorance—has once again raised its ugly head. The good of the Republic requires that order be restored. The people must return to their places. If they have complaints to make, they should express them quietly and respectfully. Suggestions that the whole game is rigged against them are inappropriate and not to be entertained.
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“One more chance for the conservative solution”: Richard Weaver’s Traditionalist Conservative Critique of Modern Warfare |
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Written by Jay Langdale
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An earlier version of this essay was produced for and presented at the Abbeville Institute's 2010 Scholars Conference.
January of 2011 marked the fiftieth anniversary of Dwight Eisenhower’s sobering farewell address which counseled vigilance against the “military industrial complex.” In his criticism of science and the industrialization of war, Eisenhower, who upon leaving office retired to a working farm near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, spoke as an Agrarian in his final speech. During the address, Eisenhower reminded the nation that, prior to the Second World War, the country had no defense industry, but instead had relied upon “American makers of plowshares” to make “swords” as well. At the same time, Eisenhower, in his insistence that American foreign policy ought to “foster progress in human achievement,” spoke as a Wilsonian idealist.1 In the end, Eisenhower’s sober-minded realism was chastened by a faith in progress and American exceptionalism. Nevertheless, Ike’s warning serves as a reminder that, during the decades following World War II, there was, to reprise Clinton Rossiter, what might be described as a second “great train robbery of American intellectual history.” Whereas the first, as Rossiter noted, concerned the ascendance of unfettered acquisitiveness as a conservative tenet in America during the late nineteenth century, the second, it might be said, witnessed the nefarious merging of American conservatism with unfettered warfare during the second half of the twentieth century.2 In the aftermath of the First World War, the Nashville Agrarians had striven to elaborate a traditionalist conservative response to the first of these intellectual heists while, as this essay will argue, their lineal intellectual descendant Richard Weaver, in the aftermath of World War II, endeavored to respond in kind to the second.
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The Contraception Mandate and Secular Discourse |
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Written by R. J. Snell
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In his very interesting book, The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse, Steven D. Smith explains the enormous task facing those of us worried about governmental over-reach in the HHS contraception mandate.1This was never Smith’s intention, I think, as the book was written well before the mandate, and has as its main concern to articulate why contemporary political and legal discourse is shallow, incoherent, and irrational, not only in the stump speeches but also in the land’s highest courts.
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Recovering Moses: The Contribution of Eric Voegelin and Contemporary Political Science |
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Written by H. Lee Cheek, Jr.
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Abstract: This article takes a new look at Moses as a political thinker. Among students of political science, Moses is certainly deserving of serious academic study. Four important contemporary assessments of Moses as a political thinker will be examined. It is argued that these recent studies allow for a more accurate presentation of Moses and his contribution to political thought. The works of Aaron Wildavsky, Michael Walzer, Paul Eidelberg, and Eric Voegelin are critiqued. While all advance existing knowledge, Voegelin’s analysis is more central to a restoration of the importance of Moses for political scientists.
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Derrida’s Hope and Despair for Globalization |
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Written by Lee Trepanier
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In this age of globalization, interest in ideas like global justice and cosmopolitan citizenship has been on the rise.1 Although cosmopolitanism is not a new idea, it is easy to see how it has gripped our imagination: an enlightened individual who believes he or she belongs to a common humanity rather than to a set of particular customs or traditions. As a result of their allegiance to a single world order, cosmopolitans believe that peace among nations is possible only if we were to transcend our parochial identities and interests in the name of global citizenship. Concerns such as tradition or place are dismissed as relics of an age when tribal violence and ethnocentric imperialism dominated the world and held the progress of humanity back from its eventual state of peace, prosperity, and global solidarity.
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