So it’s been called to my attention that I forgot to shamelessly promote the July-September issue of PERSPECTIVES ON POLITICAL SCIENCE.
Well, it’s one of the best issues ever. There’s a symposium on the dazzling and genuinely original political thought of David Walsh, edited by Steve McGuire. All the contributions are worthy, but those by Tim Fuller and our Ralph Hancock are actually deep and rich contributions to political thought (as a whole) today.
The symposium includes Walsh’s “Response to Symposiasts,” which is all you need to read to become convinced that he deserves to be ranked among the finest thinkers around right now. Contrary to the view that modern liberalism is all about techno-domination, commodification, wastelands and all that, Walsh writes: “The logic of respect for persons is inexorable . . . At their core liberal political principles enshrine the transcendent dignity and worth of every human being. The person is the one inexhaustible center of meaning and value in the whole universe. The imago Dei may not be so regularly pronounced, but its undertow remains inescapable. In the final analysis it is because the inspirations of liberal theory exceed its capacity for articulation that it cannot be fully explicated.”
If you think about it, Strauss and Walsh are on opposite extremes when it comes to this modern/personal issue here, and there’s some connection between Walsh and (in a more moderate and less sanguine form) our philosopher-pope’s efforts to reinvigorate the personal logos . You could also think here of Chesterton’s interpretation of our Declaration of Independence, showing that it depends upon a center of significance in the universe that gives each person equal significance (or something not articulated at all by Locke).
But here’s Ralph’s challenge to what might seem to be Walsh’s Christian existentialism: “the Christian and modern evocation of the mystery of personal existence must not lose touch with the insuperable bond between the good of the soul and the good of the city. And a concern for this bond would lead us back, in turn, to Kant’s ‘fretting’ over the link between the moral law within and the starry heavens above. And such fretting might, further, lead us to consider how ‘practical’ it was of he ancients to praise the supremacy of ‘theory.’”
There’s so much more to say about this great issue. But I gotta go to work.
