Peter Lawler

Here’s my response to Deneen’s just concern that his fans my be scared off by my accusing him of being too Marxist: Here’s Marx: Who a human being is is determined by HISTORY (you paleos should love him—he really, really takes history seriously)—that is, by the . . . . Continue Reading »

So here’s something I just posted on their site to rile them up: Postmodern conservatives aren’t first wave liberals and are anti-Cartesian in the spirit of Maritain/Percy/Deneen/MacIntyre, while thinking Maritain himself is too Kantian and Deneen/MacIntyre are too Marxist. So the . . . . Continue Reading »

Dr. Patrick Deneen has gotten all uppity and wants some kind of showdown at one of his people’s corrals between the Postmodern Conservatives and the “Front Porch Republicans” (none of whom would be caught dead doing something REALLY conservative like voting REPUBLICAN). I emailed . . . . Continue Reading »

So any postmodern conservative who would want to give the strongest possible case for Walt Whitman would begin, as I have, with a long footnote to the 1876 preface to his LEAVES OF GRASS: Given the necessarily inegalitarian manifestations of human greatness of war and politics that Whitman . . . . Continue Reading »

This is a part of my study of Kass that I’m posting today instead of saying more about Rousseau . . . The thought of Enlightenment thinkers such as Bacon, Descartes and Condorcet was that only indefinite longevity could transform the world in a genuinely humane way. With it, the progress of . . . . Continue Reading »

Kass reports that he was prepared by his experiences at Harvard (with privileged scientific intellectuals) and in Mississippi (with the nobility of the poor and oppressed) for reading “Rousseau’s Discourse on the Arts and Sciences .” This book was the first major effort of a . . . . Continue Reading »

Let me begin by admitting that I should have called my previous post on Leon “Kass, the Dissenting Physician.” Despite “inchoate reservations” coming from both personal experience and reading Great Books, Kass, M.D. went on to pursue a PhD in biochemistry. (He couldn’t get . . . . Continue Reading »

PAT does a very fine job reminding us that gay marriage only became plausible at a certain point in the long process of the Lockeanization of marriage. If the institution is all about rights with no corresponding duties then we really can’t explain why all Americans — including, of . . . . Continue Reading »

The next stage of Kass’s education was the “educational prejudice” he acquired at the University of Chicago “in favor of discussing the great questions and reading the Great Books.” There he was inspired by the “exemplary” dignity of the life devoted to . . . . Continue Reading »

Leon Kass’s Jefferson lecture, as I said before, needs to be read with the lectures of two of his predecessors-the philosopher of manliness Harvey Mansfield and the novelist of manliness Tom Wolfe-as a most instructive way of being introduced to the question “Who is a man?” The . . . . Continue Reading »