1. What may be the GREATEST issue in America’s leading journal of the philosophic dimension of political science is now out!
2. There’s a SYMPOSIUM on Bob Faulkner’s THE CASE FOR GREATNESS, featuring Don Maletz, Andrew Sabl, Mary Keys, Wayne Ambler, and Bob himself responding with grace and depth to his astute critics.
3. NOT ONLY THAT: There’s a special extended book review section, featuring long reviews by David Nichols, our Carl Scott, David Schaefer, Lauren Weiner, Graham McAleer, and (our book review editor himself) Paul Seaton.
4. I’m not kidding when I say that every contribution this time is great. (Eat your heart out POLITICAL THEORY, REVIEW OF POLITICS, and even INTERPRETATION.)
5. Mary Keys: “Faulkner’s [George] Washington who is good as well as great and always mindful of the priority of duty over honor represents the pinnacle of virtue in political life, yet even that majestic peak is gray-stoned and heavy, unable to rejoice and be happy and fully free in the sun that shines on it.”
6. That suggests, in Mary’s eyes, that magnanimity can be reconciled with joy only by being balanced with humility. “Humility opens magnanimity’s doors wider to make room for gratitude, delight, and wonder, and lightens the weight of greatness . . . .” “Humility well-understood emerges as enabling and liberating rather than, as many post-Christian moderns would have it, crippling and constraining.”
7.Our Carl Scott on the shortcomings of the “WCS” [West Coast Straussian] interpretation of the progressives, Woodrow Wilson, etc. (Obviously, I’m actually only giving two of his three criticisms.): “First, it has not sketched an alternative solutions to the real problems that had emerged in the urbanizing, industrializing, and party-and-courts-dominated America of the late 1800s and early 1900s.”
8. Carl goes on: “Third, and perhaps most importantly, it has not been willing to consider the rise of the progressive movement as a response to certain political desires and goods that were not adequately addressed at the time, and which never can be by any merely natural rights approach.”
9. Those two criticisms cry out for development by Carl and others. And certainly someone needs to get Glenn Beck in on the discussion.
