Reason and the Freedom of Speech
“We should by all means distinguish between academic freedom and freedom of speech. But we should be very wary of those who wish to establish a basis for that distinction when they doubt the principled commitments to reason and truth that are both freedoms’ foundation.” ~ Joseph M. Knippenberg
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The Baby and the Bathwater
“There is an imprudence in forgetting that liberal principles, suitably cherished, are a check on power, the levers of which are, one day to the next, to be controlled by the good’s worst enemies.” ~ Daniel Klein & Daniel J. Mahoney
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What Do We Mean by Liberal Education?
“The mark of a genuinely liberal education is that it aims at instilling a set of paradoxical qualities, which are often quite fiercely at odds with one another: the capacity for inquiry, and the capacity for membership.” ~ Wilfred M. McClay
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Complexity, Scientism, and Contemporary Politics
“The scientistic attitude encourages policymakers to adopt what Hayek called a ‘pretense of knowledge,’ an overconfident, if not plainly false, belief in their own knowledge and powers of social control.” ~ Scott Scheall
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Open Letter to a Young Marxist
“If any social experiment depends on scorching the earth before building a Utopia, it is probably not the way. But if an ideal system starts small and grows, pulling more human souls into its influence, it’s probably got legs.” ~ Max Borders
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How Thomas Aquinas Desacralized the State
“McCormick illustrates that Aquinas’s De Regno provides us with a politics that takes liberty and virtue seriously—but always together and never apart. And that should matter to anyone, religious or otherwise, who refuses both nihilism and collectivism.” ~ Samuel Gregg
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Hannah Arendt’s Chilling Thesis on Evil
“As Arendt explained, ‘Going along with the rest and wanting to say ‘we’ were quite enough to make the greatest of all crimes possible.'” ~ Lawrence W. Reed
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Conservatism, National or Constitutional?
“National conservatives seem to be trying to beat the left at its own game: to deploy the same disastrous methods but merely switch the ends. This is not a path to lasting improvement.” ~ Tyler Syck
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Tyrannies of Hyperreality
“Outsourcing our problems to distant capitals has always gotten us into bigger problems. So the lesson here is not just about hyperreality. We must start to decentralize. Localize. Self-organize.” ~ Max Borders
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The Rule of Law
“The rule of law gives warrant to liberalism. We should better learn to expound on how liberalism promotes the rule of law and how the governmentalization of social affairs tends to destroy the rule of law.” ~ Daniel B. Klein
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You Should Care About Martin Van Buren
“Martin Van Buren may not be everyone’s favorite President, but he is worth studying. After all, an estimated 28 percent of Americans identify with the Democratic Party. People should at least know how their political party came to be and why it endured.” ~ Garion Frankel
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Athens and Jerusalem Revisited
“Perhaps it’s time to trust what seems self-evident, and stop being afraid to look for guidance in a tradition that has proved reliable for so many for so long.” ~ Juliana Geran Pilon
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