Reading Antigone in the age of coronavirus.
Greg Lukianoff
The filibuster may have some costs, but it makes our polity more stable, promotes bipartisan compromise, tamps down polarization, and protects federalism.
The text and Hamilton’s commentary are sufficiently clear: those in office are subject to impeachment and trial; those out of office are not.
A history of French aristocrats before 1789 offers some eerie echoes of our own decadence.
Religious liberty is not a trump card that wins every time, but interference with clergy-penitent privilege will do no good and may produce real harm.
To defend itself morally, liberalism depends on a conception of natural rights, but it also needs natural law.
What information and what warnings should government disclose to the public, and why?
We’re increasingly getting more of the same from Pope Francis.
The idea that education should be an engine of social change has been a hallmark of progressivism for years, so we can’t say we weren’t warned.
The rash of Covid rule-breaking among our leadership class makes me wonder if our leadership class still believe in the democratic standard.
Some advocates of public education have made no secret of their desire to impose particular beliefs and values on students.
We quickly need to get our world reopened as a way to repair the fractures, disarm the demagogues, and join back together again.
The public does not want to consider the question of what price we are, or ought to be, willing to pay to save one life, a hundred lives, a thousand lives.
Many of the problems that liberalism’s critics attribute to a political philosophy are actually the outgrowth of otherwise salutary scientific development.
The Fourteenth Amendment's terms constitutionalize certain pieces of legislation, solving the antebellum and postbellum constitutional struggles.
Ilan Wurman leaves the stars of the Fourteenth Amendment standing in the wings.
The UK and EU have achieved their shared ambition to remove tariffs and quotas on all goods, but the deal will have larger consequences.
Classical education offers a way back from the cliff we’re dangling over.
Legutko’s incisive short chapters on the problem of freedom aim to recover its hierarchical nature.
Washington understood that martial strength secured independence, but republican government would require moral fortitude.
The use of "big data" threatens to erode the presumption of innocence in the name of crime prevention.
There is good reason to think that impeachment remains on the table, even after politicians leave office.
If we truly want to promote America’s common good, even more government intervention than we already have is probably not the way to do it.
In his new memoir, former President Barack Obama waxes eloquent on the topic that interests him the most: himself.
In Lost Illusions and Lost Souls, Balzac proves himself an acolyte of ambition, immersing us in addled souls who can’t let go until it is too late.
It is magical thinking to believe that the United States can run large deficits indefinitely.
A shared, underlying agreement about the dignity of the person is the gravitational center around which our polity and politics orbit.
The bureaucrats that enforce "diversity and inclusion" are often all too happy to maximize ideological objectives at the expense of academic freedom.
What looks like the beginning of a golden age in education may be a blip on the radar.
The representational theory of capital offers a more nuanced understanding of what capital is, and what role it plays in economic life.
The marketplace likely will move much faster than the court system, particularly in as dynamic an industry as technology.
To write about music, commentators must say something about what a piece seems to be evoking and how it does so.
Marc Stears' new book examines how a cluster of writers and thinkers altered the language of English culture and prized the everyday.
Hofstadter was too much a partisan to notice his own blinders, and too little a philosopher to see the permanent things.
Ars Vitae seeks to break out of our modern, therapeutic prison, where the life of man is solitary, poor, dreary, pampered, and much too long.
In an age of demagoguery, judges and justices—members of a highly credentialed elite dealing with complex questions—are perfect targets.
Rome and Caesar are unknown to modern elites who refuse to believe in the existence of great men.
Morrisey provides us with a more nuanced view of Melville’s politics and rich and instructive new way of understanding Moby-Dick.
The progressive push for groups to be engaged in political activism makes them little more than proxies for their members’ political associations.
Even the errors of anti-liberal Catholics now have rights.
Trying to eliminate antipathy, ridicule, and insult from the human heart and mind is a task to make that of Sisyphus seem like an afternoon stroll.
Whereas ideology demands that we manipulate reality to fit theory, true art subordinates theory to reality.
American politics has reached the point where merely establishing the basic facts that frame our political debate takes us to the brink of crisis.
For Manent, action is never an end in itself but must always be guided by the virtues.
Our media, our legislation, and our culture continue to popularize a stilted image of who the modern veteran is.
The operative question is not “how should corporations be managed?” but “who decides?”
For entirely too long, advocates have sought revolutionary change that touches all corners of the land.
The great drama of Frederick’s life is the inner tension between philosopher and king.
Anglo-American cooperation in World War II offered a foundation for "the American Century" by making US policy global rather than hemispheric.
A Journal of the Plague Year is equal parts historical fiction, sermon, and horror story. But it is also a carefully constructed work of art.
Underlying trends cloud the future of classical liberalism, even as it now has gained a redoubt in our judiciary and retained a perch in our politics.
The editors present the five most-read Law & Liberty essays of 2020.
J.K. Rowling believes the same things most people do, and this is the source of her strength as a writer.
The editors present the five most-read Law & Liberty book reviews of 2020.
When it comes to immigration, the fundamental question is: how can we help people find a home? Contra Somin, the answer is not no borders, but humane ones.
Looking beyond electoral advantage and narrow policy questions suggests that people make progress when they face the future while looking to the past.
I am pleased to share with you the top 5 Law & Liberty podcasts of 2020.
Koestler's classic book on totalitarianism, written in 1941, anticipates the woke script of the last four years.
The editors present the five most-read Law & Liberty forum discussions of 2020.
It is high time to focus on what China does right rather than what it does wrong—and undertake to do it better.
Walter Eucken presented an ethical and economic objective for which economists could strive in an imperfect world.
We find some rest in Christmas, in the giving and receiving of gifts—because, as in fairy tales, the beautiful and the good are one.
Joseph Bottum on the almost sacramentality of everything real.
Dickens’ tale is so effective because, in the words of Chesterton, it is targeted not at institutions but “an expression of the human face.”
Pieter Bruegel’s "Hunters in the Snow" is one of the masterpieces of western art.
What was the purpose and the effect of the Marshall Court’s decision in McCulloch v. Maryland?
Christians owe respect to both their civil and ecclesiastical governments, but our deference to authority has gone too far.
It’s far easier to acquire data than wisdom.
Faulkner transports his readers through time, sometimes alternating narrators, with repeated attention to the same families and figures.
Texas’s innovative injury would allow any state to sue any other state, directly in the Supreme Court, for breach of its election laws.
Should energy become a luxury good?
A basic premise of modern Western liberties is that persons reasoning in good faith will inevitably disagree about matters of importance.
Republican presidential candidates will likely use nominee lists to demonstrate their commitments to originalism and constitutional government.
Law & Liberty's friends, contributors, and staff offer their ideas for readings this pandemic holiday.
The Queen’s Gambit is a feminist fantasy, with a chess prodigy forcing Cold War America to become woke sooner than it is ready.
How is it possible after all this to wake up in December of 2020 and not believe that it’s actually twilight in America?
Two films underscore the peril posed by a world of illusion made possible by our media, and the ideological mirages that such illusions can create.
Jacques Necker mounted a defense of limited government characterized by separation of powers between a powerful executive and a bicameral legislature.
Lockdowns, mask mandates, and social distancing rules that apply to everyone are not effective tools against Covid, but what are they really for?
When we stop looking at the past with seriousness, we make it more difficult to understand and contextualise our own commitments.
The dispute over in-person congregational worship in light of COVID is a dispute between two governments that share power over their citizens.
Three cases have brought attention to the racial weighting used by the most elite universities.
BLM's intellectual makeup owes more to Marx and Machiavelli than the civil rights movement.
Genuine association is hard work, but we have found an easier way: we have fallen into a dependence on politics as spectacle.
Peeples helps us to see that Poe’s imagination was stoked by his external surroundings as well as by his interior life.
The Constitution’s original meaning provides a judicially manageable line between constitutional and unconstitutional delegations.
A pilgrim’s journey is his own, and Justice Clarence Thomas has the confidence and self-awareness not to doubt his choices.
When people have the freedom to conceptualize different kinds of liberty, the nature of liberty will be a perpetual source of contention.
When Jane Jacobs analyzed the great Chicago heat wave, she saw conditions were ripe for sliding into a cultural dead end.
There is a ruling class in France and Britain that is indifferent, or even hostile, to the concerns and feelings of the rest of the population.
Burns might not be able to provide easy answers to the problems that bedevil our polity, but she has insights to offer that are worthy of reflection.
Christakis's hurried book sheds little new light on the pandemic, and ends up repeating the shibboleths of intervention when humility is what we need.
The 2020 election did not decide once and for all the future of liberty in America.
Social media mobs and “woke” bureaucrats do not take orders from a single leader, but the denunciations and demands of CRT are totalitarian nonetheless.
Liberty is primarily a way of life—not theory. We will defend it, or cease being who we are.
McDowell makes a remarkable contribution to Milton scholarship by showing how choice and political circumstance shaped the rise of the epic poet.
Justice Samuel Alito's speech shows that originalism will be the parole of the Court going forward, and that Alito will be the originalist of tradition.
Freedom likely does increase the amount of scholarship in the world. Whether that scholarship is valuable is a different question.
Demography is only destiny if we allow it to be, by accepting the left’s transformation of culture.
Is cynicism a powerful support for freedom, or a sign of terminal cultural illness?
The most fashionable ideas on the intellectual right—populism, nationalism, integralism—challenge the emphasis on freedom.
The Social Dilemma's conclusion that we are all helpless consumers, hoodwinked by big tech, is a depressing misunderstanding of humanity.
While enduring the tribulations of sectarian Liberalism, Catholics must have an alternative vision that prioritizes liberty on natural law grounds.
There are no dictionaries of sustainability's Newspeak. Its mavens rely less on new words than on perverting or reversing the meaning of old ones.
Capacious liberalism is the prerequisite for successful, empirically based social reform and the rule of law.
Let 2020 be the year America rediscovers the reverent art of Thanksgiving in the midst of troubled times.
The authority to proclaim a Thanksgiving might seem trivial to us. But it is, in fact, fraught with meaning.
Is money something to be thankful for or something to be mourned? In short, Morrow answers, it depends.
Without a realistic sense of the possibilities, it is impossible to chart a prudent course.
Henrich joins a chorus of others who have asked, what sets the West apart?
In laying claim to an older, and more radical, ecclesial political philosophy, Crean and Fimister elide the fullness of the Catholic legal tradition.
After Hamilton took on the state's debts, it was Gallatin who put plans in motion to pay it off.
If intersectionality is not defeated, Americans will learn the truth that power, not freedom, is truly irresistible.
Pirates are still piratical. And just reprisals are still a lawful way to bring them to justice.
We Hold These Truths was, as it were, false from the moment it was printed.
Must we now embrace unreformed education as an article of faith? Some may prefer to practice their liturgy elsewhere.
Section 230 has not kept pace with the times and now presides over a very different internet from the one it was designed to govern.
Although Len Downie’s tenure at the Post was fairly recent, All About the Story reads like an artifact from a distant era of journalism.
Previously unnoticed evidence provides new support for the proposition that the Second Amendment articulates an individual right to personal safety.
The American Founding's realism about the fallen world might be something St. Thomas would recognize.
Political realism requires a theoretical inquiry into the ethical obligations that result from taking politics seriously on its own terms.
The 1619 Project is more than a national charter of grievances and despair.
Policy inertia means that the Republican Party of 2024 will share more with the Republican Party of 1924 than that of more recent decades.
Three contributors discuss Joshua Mitchell's new book and the trajectory of identity politics.
Identity politics unwittingly prepares the way for a resurgence of fully pagan thought.
Those who seek to rein in our woke madness need to develop targeted strategies, create new political frames, and build workable coalitions.
Narratives of guilt and innocence have been a driving force in politics from ancient times—but has anything changed?.
A gathering at George Mason University to remember the late, great judge.
Our health experts seek perfect safety when it comes to Covid mitigation without careful consideration of the harm their policies may inflict.
Williams’ argument runs counter to how many today understand the Enlightenment movements which reshaped the European world from the late 17th century on.
If the Court decides rightly in Uzuegbunam v. Preczewski, mootness will no longer serve as a shield for the erosion of constitutional rights.
Contrary to the numbers games of today's majoritarians, America's federal republic reflects not a trace of national, numerical democracy.
In the computer age, personalized trust has finally become scalable. It is now a fearsome competitor to the traditional mechanisms for fostering trust.
Murray knew that the reduction of idea of democracy to a set of functions and institutions would be the death of democracy.
Thompson's book rises to what Nietzsche called “monumental history,” but it requires a certain intellectual and historical counterbalance.
The more integration there is in Europe, the greater will be the tensions, both between and within countries.
Emma’s remarkable virtue is revealed all the more through her quite serious vices.
The review of Big Tech’s business practices will do better in deliberate judicial proceedings rather than frenzied, politicized congressional hearings.
Cyclical predictions only carry us so far. And so, therefore, do predictions of a second Progressive era.
While Congress can add justices to the Court, it can only do so if its act is “necessary and proper.”
The case of Kujtim Fejzulai shows just how easily those who devote their whole professional lives to the “assessment” of such people may be deceived.
Rather than being opposites, markets are a superlative form of regulation.
Though Brown and Lincoln never knew one another, Brands presents them as the representatives of a much deeper struggle to shape the future of antislavery.
The Williams Russia Period was not a detour, as Steve’s books, whatever their initial motivations, spoke to America as well as to Russia.
What we can learn from Sir Sean Connery as elder statesman in film.
Schapiro and college presidents everywhere need to reverse the trend of political and intellectual conformity if they want to address student radicalism.
People will not stand to see their cathedrals burned, their teachers beheaded, and their journalists massacred.
One way or another, we must order our common life in accord with a consensus about what makes men happy.
Training sessions based on critical race theory run contrary to an employer’s responsibility to avoid creating a hostile work environment.
We can hardly entrust the outcome of presidential elections to the comparative skills of rival lawyers, even if it’s only once every twenty years.
New forces have been set loose, not unlike those that were unleashed in Italy and Russia a century ago. Will we reap the whirlwind?
This year, the candidate leading on election night may not ultimately be declared the winner. That’s where the problems started in 1876.
It is those men and women who prefer to be virtuous, rather than merely to seem that way, who we need right now.
Safeguard shows that the Electoral College's critics are right about one thing: it is not simple majority rule—and thank goodness for that.
Assessing Fr. John Courtney Murray's We Hold These Truths at 60.
We laugh at images of evil and make them sexy, and Carpenter's Halloween shows us the error of our ways.
While acerbic criticism may rally the troops, it probably does more harm than good in pursuance of civil peace.
Not all constitutional cases of enduring consequence make the front page.
Today we have two civil religions that are shaping citizens’ souls with opposing understandings of justice. Will it last?
LawMacro, as it is currently practiced, has unmeasured confidence in the ability of government to steer the economy.
The Karabakh war is a civilizational clash between democracy and dictatorship, and Americans should be paying attention.
Even in these contentious times, it is possible to approach scientific claims judiciously, with a real desire to uncover the truth.
Protection of even the most radical, pseudoscientific, and irrational ideas is necessary to prevent the distortion of truth.
Despite careful readings of his chosen thinkers, Beiner doesn’t offer deeper analysis of either the alt-right or the several -isms he views as problematic.
The myth of America’s stateless past can be entertained only by ignoring the experience of the U.S. states and the exercise of their vast police powers.
Religious freedom is at the center of liberal constitutionalism and occupies a central place in Jefferson’s and Madison’s political thinking.
As Edward Bernays saw it, a healthy democratic society required the regulation of the beliefs of the many by the work of an unseen few.
What Killed Michael Brown? is the kind of documentary our media once had the guts to produce.
Liberalism must grapple with the transcendence of human persons.
We are in a period of political polarization unprecedented since at least the New Deal, and its waves have engulfed our fundamental document.
Ludwig argues that civic friendship can fit within liberalism and help correct its blind spot(s) to important aspects of life, like civic associations.
As Francesco Boldizzoni details, reports of capitalism’s demise have, time and again, been greatly exaggerated.
While it may be a modest, middle-age virtue, civility is foundational to sustain a pluralistic liberal democracy.
Trevor Shelley succeeds in recovering a noble and humane political perspective within the horizons of modern liberty and modern politics.
We ought not talk as if COVID alone caused the recession.
Corporate directors and other institutional decision-makers should add Cynical Theories to their reading list.
Science’s successes are, in part, what make it so susceptible to the problems that plague it today.
The Trial of the Chicago 7 presents the 1960s radicals as earnest, likeable people who just want peace, man!
Hitchcock told dark stories of contemporary America because he saw dark things coming.
Eastern European leaders haven't lived out Montesquieu’s ideal of checks and balances, but their actions fall far short of Nazism.
The mantra of "follow the science" ignores the reality that no one set of facts can dictate any political result.
Revolutions involve conspiracies of a sort—suppressed intentions and a peaceable surface combined with a determined adherence to the revolutionary cause.
The anger we feel in the present moment is a hot emotion directed at our fellow citizens: it is indicative of in-house strife.
Like a frog in the proverbial pot of boiling water, we are now immersed in the suddenly-ubiquitous delusion of wokeness.
Three recent cases challenge the statutory and constitutional bases of legislative delegation to executive branches.
Tariq Ramadan has been revealed to be a hypocrite of the most repellent kind. Is he a a serious criminal too?
Radical uncertainty—whether stemming from war, disease, or love of coffee—will always prevail.
Radical progressives insist on an array of free goods and services and are showing themselves willing to employ violence and fear to obtain them.
In his new Sanditon series, Andrew Davies’ imagination did not capture the intricacies and craft of Jane Austen.
The influence of law professors like Tribe shows why it is so necessary to confirm justices who will read the Constitution according to its text.
Our claustrophobic informational environments don’t just determine what we think, but what we love.
Revolutionary violence is always an indictment of a political system’s democratic legitimacy.
Did the practice of civility, if such there was, stave off our culture wars or abet them?
Living in the “correct” cultural context, often in poverty, is apparently better for orphaned children than having loving, but white, American parents.
"One nation, under woke, with retributions and grievances for all" is a future we should steadfastly resist.
Eastern European nationalism emerged in a fusion of social and national grievances, and is essential to understanding the region’s history.
Models can provide a useful picture of what we think is happening in the world, but scientists place too much trust in them.
True progress in human government must allow expression to the popular will, but also restrain it by just laws and wise leadership.
Sowell establishes a singular principle for evaluating any proposed education reform: "How is this going to affect the education of children?"
Is America entering a period of despotism? Dreher's new book doesn't issue a conclusive verdict.
Where can thinking with Schopenhauer and Houellebecq take us?
Novelists are no longer interested in leading us into the interior lives of the character.
Civility is not much prized in our revolutionary climate because it is a deeply traditional practice.
There is a broad similarity between the way constitutional provisions and monuments are wrongly discarded.
“The Prevention of Literature” analyzes the mind of the ideologue in thrall to orthodoxies that brook no questioning. That makes it an essay for our times.
Originalists need to acknowledge the traditionalism of constitutional law and that precedential age, endurance, and connection to common practice matter.
The Greek victory at Salamis made possible a period of human flourishing that would prove foundational to Western civilization.
If America minimizes moral calculations in foreign affairs, it will make an admittedly harsh and dangerous world far worse.
The circumstances surrounding the Supreme Court vacancy demonstrate that many have rejected "the immutable fairness of following the law."
Post-liberal proposals tend to leave the term “common good” undefined or ambiguous, and we should consider why.
Gruber’s work may be interpreted as an example of a former radical who has modified her views in light of experience.
We have to balance between the interests of individuals, the state, and associations.
Faith in the Constitution is as revolutionary today as it was in 1787.
Rolling Stone magazine called “Imagine” John Lennon’s musical gift to the world. If so, be sure to keep the receipt.
Hume's subversive radicalism and infidelity make him an unlikely target for today’s iconoclasts, but he stands accused of an unforgivable thoughtcrime.
The Senate majority’s power is accepted as legitimate, even when that majority takes highly partisan actions.
If the US got what it wanted economically, China would likely be a more wily and enduring competitor.
Any effort to restore the American legal tradition must recognize that "individual liberty" decisions have revolutionized our constitutional order.
The DeVos DoE doesn’t understand that systemic racism accusations are an elite institutional tool to both convict and remove yourself from guilt.
The most horrible autocracy is not the one that suppresses resistance, but the one that makes you feel that it is unnecessary to resist.
If we all felt about America as we did not so long ago, there could never be a breakup, but there's little in David French's book about such patriotism.
The post-Goldwater conservative movement changed America’s ideological landscape. Today, that world seems very far away.
The Protectorate paved the way for what later became known as constitutional monarchy.
The words that inspired the abolitionist movement and the words that constitutionalized abolition both came from the extraordinary mind at Monticello.
If addiction is a disease, and nothing else, then the addict is a slave of his biochemistry.
Political order stems human anxiety caused by a primary intuition that existence is out of nothing.
Younger Americans have seen their schools closed, their jobs vanish, and their graduations and transitions to living independently blocked.
A Law & Liberty essay collection on the life and legacy of Justice Antonin Scalia.
One thing is sure: Antonin Scalia is one of the greatest jurists of all time, for all the right reasons.
Scalia offered the first map of a new world, or perhaps more accurately, rediscovered an old map of the world that had been forgotten.
Children of broken and unhealthy families are vastly overrepresented in the prison population.
So long as a studied indifference to the true state of administrative law persists, Leviathan will continue to overcome the rule of law.
Without an imperative to bring precedents into alignment with original meaning, stare decisis becomes the “exception” that swallows the Constitution.
If our constitutional democracy is tolerably functional, occasions for resisting Court rulings will arise relatively infrequently.
To demand that rest and power coexist reflects an act of will, not reason, and a love of power that demands totalizing control over human life.
Is it possible that the Communists are right that economic power will, sooner or later, clothe in amiability the malefactor of great wealth?
The economic policies of the Second World War and our recovery from it present an opportunity for us to see where history rhymes.
Yoo and Posner both engage the same fundamental question: what are the best ways to promote good government and popular government simultaneously?
The prospects for a repeat of the post-World War II experience of falling debt/GDP ratios are poor.
Programs like Boys State can recreate only the game of politics. But that game must be premised on a deeper reality.
Refusing to play in reaction to a news item seems to be very different than what Owens, Robinson, and even Ali did.
Reality having ceased to provide a standard by which to evaluate statements, it is replaced by the speaker, who seeks merely to be true to himself.
A new compilation of an old British debate sheds light on what makes armies safe for liberty.
Original methods originalism embeds the Constitution in the Anglo-American tradition and militates against the abstractions of the French philosophes.
Constitutionalized "disparate impact" doctrine would give judges a universal veto by trussing up woke orthodoxies as fundamental constitutional principles.
At some point in time, the Supreme Court abandoned originalism, and prior originalist precedents, and came up with new law altogether.
Presenting socialism’s rise as the greatest issue in our political life today attributes too much societal sway to this particular "-ism."
McClain’s blindness to the ultimate significance of ultimate truths leads her to miss something no genuine social scientist should miss.
The Unelected addresses a timely subject, and one that is vital to the future of the United States as a constitutional republic.
Good economic arguments do not make the science subordinate to this or that political goal, but help us better understand the riddles of economic life.
As confidence in the desirability of liberal order dwindles throughout much of the world, Huntington’s thesis appears to have come into its own.
Reparations arguments call for the kind of general racial classifications that have not been part of public law or finance since the Jim Crow era.
The most important goal of the leftist project is to use the twin 2020 tragedies to alter the very storyline of America.
Tenet presents the ultimate lesson of tragedy: Desire defeated returns as revenge.
If extraterrestrial sirens beckon, Daniel Deudney makes the case that we ought to tie ourselves to the mast.
The unitary executive is one place where the arguments of originalists and living constitutionalists reinforce one another.
Increasingly, social movements do not allow any neutrality with regard to the causes that they promote.
What mars the modern progressive approach to history is the ultimate hopelessness of the narratives that they are spinning.
In our age of self-righteous secularism, original sin has gone out of fashion, but social sin and political salvation are de rigueur.
Although Steve Bannon certainly played a role in the resurgence of right-wing populism in the U.S., his influence has been overstated.
Originalists must confront the value of legal stability promoted by stare decisis more squarely.
Stasavage puts his thumb on the scales in favor of democracy but misses the possible virtues of autocracy in his comparative theory.
Along with other modern thinkers, Montaigne argues that where there is no truth, there is no law.
Great power conflict is now thinkable, and in great measure because of lessons unlearned from World War II.
Perhaps Michael Moore & Co. believe that Planet of the Humans will be a call to the faithful toward a more ascetic form of eco-worship.
The rise of secularism concealed the medieval theological foundations of international order, but did not destroy them.
The Constitution is a framework to facilitate and indeed constitute ordinary popular politics, not something to be transformed by that politics.
The Court's dichotomy between the individual and the state misses much of the richness of social life. But is it a practical necessity?
Even if you produce good ideas, bad salesmen have almost limitless capacity to ensure no one is tempted to buy.
It's worth remembering that during and immediately following World War II the United States and its allies were far less liberal than they are today.
COVID-19 has been highly disruptive to the human social relations that Adam Smith identified as central to human nature.
The fact that America no longer needs to play policeman in the Persian Gulf compels the Gulf states to act responsibly as a matter of self-preservation.
We could be on the cusp of seeing just how fragile and illogical the higher-ed business model is.
The world is not going back to the 20th century, but our liberals have never really moved past those halcyon days when they had run of the world.
Washington’s objectives in cabinet management had less to do with managing diverse personalities and more to do with preserving political coherence.
Stephen Williams wrote about a man who lived in dark times and tried to build the institutions of liberal democracy on the ruins of an autocratic regime.
Why Hamilton is the musical for our time.
The purpose of cant is either to present the person who utters it as morally superior to others or to himself as he really is, or to shut other people up.
Most defenders of originalism agree with Vermeule that originalism needs a justification outside of itself.
We can judge the free society to be the best society because it most fully satisfies the social suite of our evolved human nature.
Coming Home shows that America suffers not from homesickness but homelessness—the alienation of a people from its true self.
Recovery of national purpose and renewed international commitment will require spiritual arguments and energy.
The American public’s current skepticism derives from the belief that experts are abusing the deference their expertise is due.
If Christianity has influenced thinking about law, exactly how has that influence worked?
Underpinning current arguments against the filibuster is the implicit desire to do away with politics inside the Senate altogether.
For Thomas, the Constitution facilitates personal responsibility and well-ordered families which are the conditions of a flourishing community.
The NRA has come to symbolize the Left’s hatred of guns, Donald Trump, and the “deplorables” they imagine comprise NRA members.
In a world struggling to emerge from years of conflict against fascism, readers flocked to The Plague to understand what they had been through.
Mises matters today because his method enables far more than a utilitarian calculation of the whole in building a just society.
Is it really correct to say that the Reagan era is the crucial period that consolidated the movements of the 1960s?
Public sector unions are exacerbating our criminal justice crisis and making it much harder to educate the next generation during the coronavirus pandemic.
The trouble with experts is that intellectuals have a tendency to convince themselves that mastery of one subject entails mastery of all.
Will the zealous pursuit of equal group outcomes over individual rewards erode our prosperity, prowess, effectiveness, and international competitiveness?
Despite our crises, the world is remarkably better off than in 1919, or in 1939.
Remembering a brilliant jurist, scholar of Russian history, and friend.
A reasonable approach to history requires a certain sophistication, that is to say, an ability to hold in the mind more than one thought at a time.
On almost every page of Tankersley's book, the villain—with its own organic intelligence compelling its operation—is "the economy."
The Court's inconsistencies may be a function of the peculiarities of our political system, not the peculiarities of particular justices.
Murray means to deepen American political truths with a comprehensive sense of the ideas, laws, and institutions that made America possible.
Going into the past in search of wrongs could lead to the discovery of innumerable injustices that conceivably demand contemporary rectification.
Lincoln prudently acted on the moral principle that slavery and its expansion was wrong and violated American principles of self-government.
If Chiafalo is the best that originalists can do, that is a damning indictment.
Local leaders across the nation, many elected with handsome majorities, have been shown feckless in the face of mobs raging through their cities.
Richard Ellis shows that there was much more to the 1840 presidential contest than hard cider and log cabins.
Conservatives should recognize that our embrace of the very constitutional vices the Anti-Federalists warned about has made our Republic one in name only.
As progressives understand better than most people, if you win the vision game, you likely win everything else.
We confront a crisis of constitutional misunderstandings—fundamental misunderstandings among much of the legal left; partial misunderstandings by others.
Seila Law reveals the need to find a better legal foundation for the modern administrative state, one that works within the separation of powers.
The goods of human dignity, human rights, and human liberty can be secured only by a transcendent source and an ontological grounding.
The difficulty with the reparations argument has always been practical, not moral. It lies in the questions, by whom? to whom? and how much?
What lessons should we recall after seventy-five years in the shadow of World War II?
Without taking into consideration a metaphysical make-up of human beings and the world that surrounds them, comprehending political life will be difficult.
How the effort to cancel Hamilton actually cancels the possibility of life together.
Competitive labor markets remain far better at generating value for both employers and employees.
The ideological discourse of the communist regime always demanded a certain “contextualization” that blinded one from the particular and the concrete.
Property rights and the neutral rule of law have done far more to sustain innovation and raise living standards than any government social program.
Men are not billiard balls whose direction is determined in a purely mechanistic way by the impact of a few physical forces.
Wordsworth's was a prophetic voice, but one that, through the medium of poetry, celebrated meekness, kindliness, graciousness, and compassion.
One might be forgiven for thinking that today’s Republican Party is an American Christian Democratic party in everything but name only.
Gregory Collins has written the definitive account of Burke’s economic thought.
Sean Shelby announced as President & CEO of Liberty Fund.
What if the “self” that is “realized” under the conditions of liberal capitalism is a self that despises liberal capitalism?
Our deepest official lie is that the line between good and evil runs through sexes, classes, and races—not through every human heart.
Williamson sets out how the British social democratic tradition focused on achieving significant economic equality and (close to) full employment.
The Framers, very cognizant of history, sought to frame a constitution that successfully balanced self-government and liberty.
Sheridan wants to teach by tragedy, so his protagonists are essentially honorable, which is no longer tolerated in our storytelling.
Increasing the efficiency of criminal record-keeping gives the state greater ability to control its citizens.
Dante’s Bones tells a fascinating story about the afterlife of a brilliant artist. But it also reveals how political figures distorted his legacy.
The United States ultimately won the Cold War because we had a more prosperous and otherwise attractive society than the Soviet Union.
A peculiar aspect of our nation’s lockdowns and mandatory safety precautions is that they have been imposed on everyone, irrespective of age.
In the real world, the wage offered by the employer is merely the employer’s first move in a game of “higgling,” with the worker at a disadvantage.
The development of American politics can be understood as a centuries-long grappling with two competing but equally essential conceptions of "the people."
According to We Built Reality, economists with their dark magic of supply and demand curves have bewitched academia—and the world.
The 1988 campaign was a capstone for long-running changes to the postwar GOP, and its campaign themes would reverberate into the future.
The dignity of work is a theme that unites overlapping strands of nationalists and free-marketeers, just as it was in the Scottish Enlightenment.
In face of uncertainty, there is no wonder that some projects only move forward if the government is willing to subsidize them.
Today, it does not suffice tell people they have souls, they must come to believe it by certain experience—and Christopher Nolan offers this.
Kelton offers an alternative to orthodox monetary theory, but it is an alternative with even more conceptual deficits.
As appealing as Confucian thought is, it works better as theory than in the messy reality of power and competing interests and human longings.
Nothing is more essential to our nation than that we sustain schools that will compete against the monolithically left-liberal educational establishment.
As with all sins, racism will never end without God’s grace and a willingness by all to conduct themselves with charity.
A healthy polity cannot exist without a viable middle class, and unions can't help recreate one.
The failure to maintain a connection to what is best in the Western tradition could prove devastating to what’s left of our constitutional order.
The constitutional reasonability of today’s requirements are more constitutionally doubtful than many believe.
It is not hard to see that the modern presidency bears no resemblance to the Hamiltonian presidency exemplified by Washington.
Kevin C. O'Leary offers his readers a defamatory revisionism that unintentionally sheds light on how we got here.