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Category Archive: Politics

Obama's faith - November 17, 2007
In the December issue of The Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan describes Barak Obama's conversion. In an interview with Sullivan, Obama said, "I didn't have an epiphany. What I really did was to take a set of values or ideals that were...

To the public - October 26, 2007
Hamann address his first dedication to his Socratic Memorabilia "To the Public, or, Nobody, the Well-Known." The dedication begins with a concatenation of biblical polemics against idols: "You bear a name and need no proof of your existence, you find...

War's balance sheet - September 05, 2007
Citing a still-unknown Greek writer, Kant shrewdly said, "War . . . creates more evil men than it takes away."...

Hart's Secular Faith - March 21, 2007
For those interested in Reformed political thought, Bill Chellis of De Regno Christi has organized an online discussion of Darryl Hart's recent book, A Secular Faith. You can find the discussion at a new address: http://deregnochristi.org/2007/03/19/throwing-down-the-gauntlet....

Violence and the good - March 17, 2007
In an interview in the March 17 issue of World, Duke's theologien provocateur Stanley Hauerwas expresses sympathy for the view that killing to protect the innocent is allowable, but refuses to let his sympathy budge him from his pacifist convictions....

Humanism and health care - March 06, 2007
The folks at First Things were kind enough to include a short article of mine on their blog. You can find it at: http://www.firstthings.com....

Christ's Rule - January 31, 2007
Readers interested in Christian political theory might be interested in the De Regno Christi web site (http://deregnochristi.blogspot.com). The site is managed by Bill Chellis, a pastor in the RPCNA, and contributors include Daryl Hart, Richard C. Gamble, and myself....

True Toleration - November 15, 2006
J. Budziszewski gave a sharply argued and spryly humorous deconstruction of liberalism's neutralist view of tolerance, arguing that liberal states are confessional states that pretend not to be and that liberalism leads to a disguised dictatorship (a plenary ETS session)....

Pomo politics - November 11, 2006
In 1991, Jody Williams and two other people formed the "International Campaign to Ban Landmines." During the following six years, the group had entered into a coalition with over 1000 Non-Government Organizations and got 121 nations to sign a treaty...

Therapeutic politics - November 09, 2006
Christopher Lasch pointed to the therapeutic dimensions of 1960s radicalism: "Acting out fantasies does not end repressions . . . it merely dramatizes the permissible limits of antisocial behavior. In the sixties and early seventies, radicals who transgressed these limits,...

PR Politics - November 09, 2006
Clem Whittaker, a pioneer in the political use of media during the 1930s and 40s, candidly explained his theory of campaigning in a speech to the PUblic Relations Society of America: "There are thousands of experts bidding for every man's...

Toleration and absolutism - October 31, 2006
In his history of the idea of toleration, the late A.J. Conyers summarizes the arguments of Robert P. Kraynak on the development of Locke's thought on religious toleration. The puzzle is this: Locke's early works are absolutist in a Hobbesian...

Fruit Trees - August 28, 2006
Michael Walzer (TNR, July 31) argues, "Selected infrastructural targets are easy enough to justify: bridges over which supplies are carried to the army in the field provide an obvious example. But power and water . . . are very much...

Discourses of power - August 08, 2006
Postmodernists claim that discourses are inevitably exercises of power. To theorize is to classify, and classification, well, puts things in classes, asserts authority over them. Butler offers this example: "You believe what the young surgeon tells you, and so you...

Architecture of control - July 18, 2006
One of the key themes of Foucault's work is an effort to uncover the social conditions of modern individualism. He suggests that the idea that "the model of a society that has individuals as its constituent elements is borrowed from...

Politics and visibility - July 18, 2006
Discussing Bentham's vision of the panopticon, Foucault notes that Bentham’s vision inverts the relationship of visibility and power. Traditional power was made visible in various sorts of symbols - crowns, robes, rituals; the powerful displayed their power in public, and...

Plague v. Leprosy - July 18, 2006
Foucault draws an intriguing political contrast between the "rituals of exclusion" that arise with lepers and the "disciplinary confinement" that constituted the response to the plague. Leprosy and its rules of "rejection, of exile-exclusion" produces a "massive, binary division between...

Neutral public space - March 30, 2006
Markus wants to distinguish between the fact that people who act in the public realm always act with ultimate ends in view, and that their actions are either moral or immoral from the notion that there is a neutral public...

Two Modes of Secularism - March 30, 2006
Charles Taylor has suggested that secularism was an "exit strategy" from religious conflict. There were two exit strategies. In the summary by RA Markus, "The first, 'the common ground strategy,' assumes a certain range of beliefs shared by all Christians...

Locke on religion - March 30, 2006
John Locke drew up the basic contours of the modern conception of religion as internal and private in his "Letter Concerning Toleration." He made a sharp distinction between religious and civil realms: "The end of a religious society, as has...

Hobbes on Gratitude and Justice - March 20, 2006
Strikingly, Hobbes, like Thomas, treats gratitude under the heading of justice: "Justice of actions is by writers divided into commutative and distributive: and the former they say consisteth in proportion arithmetical; the latter in proportion geometrical. Commutative, therefore, they place...

Machiavelli on Ingratitude - March 20, 2006
From Book 1 of the Discourses on Livy: FOR WHAT REASONS THE ROMANS WERE LESS UNGRATEFUL TO THEIR CITIZENS THAN THE ATHENIANS Whoever reads of the things done by Republics will find in all of them some species of ingratitude...

Theology of punishment - February 21, 2006
In a recent First Things review, Gilbert Meilander summarized Oliver O'Donovan's theory of punishment as follows: "anything called punishment must be 'backward-looking' and hence, in some sense, retributive. But he is not persuaded by any account of retribution that things...

Two Headed Christendom? - September 22, 2005
The question debated among medieval political theorists was not whether Christendom was a body, ultimately the body of Christ, but whether there was room for more than one "head" of the body. As Otto Gierke summarizes,"Mankind constituted a Mystical Body,...

Covenant Idea - September 02, 2005
I recently came across the work of Daniel Judah Elazar, a political scientist at Temple University who has devoted much of his working life to tracing the impact of biblical ideas of covenant on the development of Western politics. This...

Brownson on Social Contract - August 19, 2005
Orestes Brownson has some sharp insights on the purposes and effects of social contract theory as developed by early modern theorists. He recognizes that Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau have detached social contract ideas from their original mooring in Christian thought...

Death Penalty and High Justice - July 31, 2005
Do secular democracies have the right to engage in "high justice," that is, "the attempt to balance the cosmic books, to stabilize a shaken universe" to answer the blood that cries from the ground by shedding blood? That is the...

Radical Egaligarianism - July 02, 2005
A couple of insights from the redoubtable Aaron Wildavsky's The Rise of Radical Egalitarianism (1991): He points out that early American individualists saw the central government as the main source of corruption and inequality. That all changed after the Civil...

Exhortation, January 23 - January 23, 2005
It looked like such a good idea. Jeroboam has been given ten tribes of Israel to rule, and he wants to keep them together. If the people of Israel continue to worship in the Jerusalem, their loyalties of his people...

Political Theology - January 11, 2005
Richard Neuhaus has his gleeful fun attacking John Milbank in the November 2004 issue of First Things. I don't think he's entirely fair to Milbank's political thought, and his charge that Milbank's attack on the Catholic Church is an "annoyingly...

Kristol on Bush - October 06, 2003
Bill Kristol is very concerned for the Bush administration. In the lead editorial in this week's Weekly Standard, he says that the administration is internally at war, a war that has come to public view in the furor over the...

Bush Hatred - October 03, 2003
Jonathan Chait begins an article on "Bush hatred" (TNR) with the kind of rant that journalists are supposed to keep to themselves. He hates Bush's policies, but he also hates the way Bush walks, the way he talks, the look...

Arnold's Campaign - October 03, 2003
From the radio reports I hear, it seems that Arnold's campaign is an extension of his movie career. At one stop, he unveils a bus bearing his mug, and buses for the press labeled "Predators." At another stop, he talks...

Br'er Rabbit - September 17, 2003
The Weekly Standard has been playing Br'er Rabbit with the Democrats, publishing several hand-wringing articles worrying over threat posed by Howard Dean to the Bush reelection. "Please, Oh, Please, NOT Howard DEAN! ANYBODY, anybody but Howard DEAN!" The entrance of...

Noemie Emery - September 12, 2003
Noemie Emery is one of the most interesting political writers today. She has a David Brooksish ability to display the inner connections between politics, personality, and culture, all with a sharp historical sensibility. She is not nearly so entertaining a...

Congressmen in Plato's Cave - September 07, 2003
David Brooks has a typically delightful and instructive piece in the current issue of Atlantic. He points out that over four decades, 49 members of Congress have run for President, and of those exactly 49 have been beaten. The main...

Muravchik on "Neo-Cons" - August 31, 2003
Joshua Muravchik has an entertaining critique of the current wave of "neo-con" spotting in the current issue of Commentary. He cites absurdly distorted newspaper articles claiming that the Bush administration is "rife" with neo-con Straussians, which then go on to...

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