Gottfried looks at Schmitt as a critic of modern liberalism and as a defender of the national state who carefully examined Western historical and political traditions. Challenging the view that Schmitt was a mere polemicist who set out to subvert "German Democracy", Gottfried's work argues instead, that Schmitt criticized liberal democracy from a highly liberal reflective position that combined analytical depth with staggering erudition. This new source also provides a useful bibliography on secondary literature dealing with Carl Schmitt's work.

Introduction -- A significant life -- Constructing a methodology -- The method under assault -- Politics as practice -- Political theory as political practice -- Conclusion.

Reading Anthony Gregory's massive tome on the development of habeas corpus from fourteenth century England through its incorporation into Common Law, and then into Article One of the US Constitution and finally, down to the Patriot Act and other more recent modifications of the “great writ,” I am reminded of something that I heard as a graduate student many decades ago, when I asked a professor about reading a particularly demanding book. I was urged to plunge into that text, providing (...) I could spare a few months. Unlike the book I asked about then, which was a total waste of time (as I soon discovered), Gregory's study is a monument to meticulous research. (shrink)

Hugh Murray's comments on the civil rights movement recall Marge Schott's badly received observations on the Nazi regime. Murray is also describing something that turned out badly but which he insists began well. Contrary to Murray and Dinesh D'Souza, whose book he reviews, the continuities of the Civil Rights Movement and affirmative action policies are more significant than its alleged turning points. Affirmative action as a practice goes back to the last year of the Johnson administration, but some civil rights (...) leaders supported it before. As early as 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr., whom D'Souza elevates to a cultic figure, advocated the preferential treatment of blacks under a vastly expanded state apparatus. (shrink)

Rick Johnstone's plea for liberal federalism and a supranational mechanism for enforcing “human rights” is reminiscent of what Thomas Hobbes said about “Christian commonwealths.” Behind their appeal to universal morality and religious doctrine was the frenzied attempt to shift rule “from Christian kings and sovereign assemblies absolute in their own territories” to “one Vicar of Christ, constituted of the universal church, to be judged, condemned, or deposed, or put to death as he shall think expedient, or necessary, for the common (...) good.” Johnstone is proposing or justifying a similar shift of authority for existing sovereign states to self-appointed vicars of…. (shrink)

A striking characteristic of today's American education is its acquiescence to public administration. Evidence for this is that proposals for better-funded private education never show how private schools can be kept free of government control. In California, Wisconsin, Michigan and other states, battle lines have been drawn over plans to give public subsidies to students attending private schools. In this confrontation, teachers' unions, public employees, and Left liberals stand predictably on the one side, libertarians and the Christian Right on the (...) other. Vouchers and tax relief have been the remedies offered for the public school monopoly of government funding—a situation…. (shrink)

The Human Project: The Year 2000, by Nicola Abbagnano. Translated byBruno Martini and Nino Langiulli, edited by Nino Langiulli. Amsterdam andNew York: Rodopi, 2002. xxv+162 pp. $30.Time Consciousness: The Philosophical Uses of History, by Gabriel Ricci.New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2002. xlvii+192 pp. $59.95.

Reminiscences -- Robert Nisbet : conservative sociologist -- Defining right and left -- The problem of historical connections -- Liberal democracy as a God term -- Origins of the state -- Reexamining the conservative legacy -- Whig history revisited -- The European Union election, 2014 -- The English Constitution reconsidered -- Redefining classes -- Did Mussolini have a Pope? -- Heidegger and Strauss : a comparative study -- Explaining Trump.

This is the thirty-first volume in Religion and Public Life, formerly This World, a series on religion and public affairs. This ongoing series seeks to provide a wide-ranging forum for differing views on religious and ethical considerations. The essays grouped together in Culture and Consumption discuss the phenomenon of consumption, an identifiable and pervasive feature of American culture that distinguishes it from other national cultures. The lead article provides an insight into the long-standing pattern of consumption that has been progressively (...) elevated into social policy in America. This is a balanced analysis of the history of the consumption cultural ethos beginning with the undermining of the Native American Culture and ending with Wilsonian Liberal-Internationalism and the demise of the moral authority of organized labor. This commercialization of culture has always competed with the funding vision of a dispassionate social order in which custom, deferential politics, and continuation of traditional hierarchal values would be the constitutional agenda. Another contributor argues that the emergence of the democratic-consumer state in America was anticipated in de Tocqueville's observation that "in democracies nothing has brighter luster than commercea." Other contributor essays treat issues such as the New Class and the consumer state; technology's triumph at the expense of the social and natural worlds; and argue against the materialist perspective in addiction. Culture and Consumption includes the following major contributions: "The Dialectic of Consumption: Materialism and Social Control" by David Brown; "Religion, Social Science and the Ironies of Parasitic Modernity" by Guy Alchon; The Dilemma of Hypermodernity" by Mark Wegierski; "Toward an Epistemology of Addiction" by Leonard Kaplan and Vince Rinella. Also included are book reviews by Martha Davis and Conrad Kanagy. In a concluding essay, Gabriel Ricci reviews Jerome Bruner's The Culture of Education. Culture and Consumption is part of an annual survey of religion and public life that provides relevant information and ideas about significant issues of the day. (shrink)

"This volume in Religion and Public Life, a series on religion and public affairs, provides a wide-ranging forum for differing views on religious and ethical considerations. The contributions address the decline of social capital-those patterns of behavior which are conducive to self-governance and the spirit of self-reliance-and its relation to the demise of the civic-humanist tradition in American education. The unifying theme, is that classical studies do not merely result in individual mastery over a particular technique or body of knowledge, (...) but also link the individual to the polity and even to the whole of the cosmic order. At the same time, American republicanism, in its exaltation of the common man from the Jeffersonian agrarian soldier to the apotheosis of Lincoln tempers the classical ideal into something less exalted, if more democratic. The effects on the contemporary state of the liberal arts curriculum are demonstrated in articles critical of the market-model university. Two essays explore the historical and philosophical significance of the discipline of rhetoric, that has suffered under the hegemony of rationalistic philosophy. A concluding contribution, invokes Giambattista Vico as an eloquent defender of the humanities. Humanities and Civic Life includes: "Rome, Florence, and Philadelphia: Using the History of the Humanities to Renew Our Civic Life" by Robert E. Proctor; "The Dark Fields of the Republic: The Persistence of Republican Thought in American History" by David Brown; "Unleashing the Humanities" by Robert Weisbuch; "Liberal Arts: Listening to Faculty" by Dennis O'Brien; "Historical Consciousness in Antiquity" by Paul Gottfried; "Taking the Measure of Relativism and the Civic Virtue of Rhetoric" by Gabriel R. Ricci; "The River: A Vichian Dialogue on Humanistic Education" by Randall E. Auxier."--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Following his teacher, Stephen Holmes, in this book John P. McCormick sets out to vindicate the “liberal” tradition against the “stunning critiques” of one of liberalism's allegedly most dangerous opponents—the very embodiment of “illiberalism”—Carl Schmitt.1 To make his case, McCormick relies primarily on Schmitt's least sympathetic commentators. In the process, however, he makes a number of errors. Moreover, he brands Schmitt's critique of liberalism “fascist,” by constructing fascism as “the dark side of liberalism.” Thus it becomes impossible to distinguish a (...) fascist anti-liberal, which Schmitt was not, from a critic of liberalism, which he was. McCormick claims to find in…. (shrink)

In his newest book, Botwinick continues a project begun in earlier works: presenting a "generalized agnosticism" that can provide support for participatory democracy in a postmodern culture. To be sure, this project's premises are still far from certain. There is no reason to assume that our entire society is moving into a culture being shaped by postmodern philosophers, though Botwinick is correct that the acids of skepticism have eaten deeply into most traditional systems of belief. Unlike dogmatic skeptics, moreover, Botwinick (...) does make clear that his own method can never escape entirely the taint of circularity. Like dialectic historicists and others who seek to relativize once settled opinions, skeptics, we are told, often hide the foundations of their own critical thinking. They therefore elevate to a privileged status their methods and views without acknowledging their epistemic limits. (shrink)