Chapters and Articles

Leo Strauss and His Catholic Readers (2018)

Chapter Title: "Leo Strauss's Profound and Fragile Critique of Christianity"

This book looks at the work and influence of Leo Strauss in a variety of ways that will be of interest to readers of political philosophy. It will be of particular interest to Catholics and scholars of other religious traditions. Strauss had a great deal of interaction with his contemporary Catholic scholars, and many of his students or their students teach or have taught at Catholic colleges and universities in America. The first section of essays considers Catholic responses to Strauss's project of recovering Classical natural right as against modern individual rights. Some of the authors suggest that his approach can be a fruitful corrective to an uncritical reception of modern ideas. Nevertheless, most point out that the Catholic cannot accept all of Strauss's project. The second section deals with areas of overlap between Strauss and Catholics. Some of the chapters explore encounters with his contemporary scholars while others turn to more current concerns. The final section approaches the theological-political question itself, a question central to both Strauss's work and that of the Catholic intellectual tradition. This section of the book considers the relationship of Strauss's work to Christianity and Christian commitments at a broader level. Because Christianity does not have an explicit political doctrine, Christians have found themselves as rulers, subjects, and citizens in a variety of political regimes. Leo Strauss's return to Platonic political philosophy can provide a useful lens through which his Catholic readers can assess what it means for there to be a best regime.

A Political Companion to Marilynne Robinson (2016)

Chapter Title: "Transcendence and Human Purpose: Marilynne Robinson and the Travails of Liberal Calvinism"

From Marilynne Robinson’s essays (especially in The Death of Adam) we learn that she finds herself in an awkward situation, politically: a liberal Calvinist who does not flinch from pointing up the affinities between secular liberal elitism and “Stalinism,” she also has only contempt for anything associated with conservatism, especially Christian conservatism. In many ways her political comments simply reflect the frustrations of a “mainstream Protestant” liberal who is as ready to deconstruct secularism (especially in the form of Darwinism) on the left and in the prestigious academy as to lambaste the narrow sympathies of the right. But these frustrations can point us to deeper, perennial problems surrounding Christianity and politics, and for reflection on these problems we find much more substantial material in Robinson’s fiction, particularly in her masterpiece of exquisite and understated piety, Gilead, and in its mysterious doppelgänger, Home. Reflection on the wisdom as well as the blind spots of her hero, the Reverend John Ames, will help us explore the problematic relationship between incarnational transcendence and political responsibility.

La Politique de l’Ame: Autour Pierre Manent (2014)

Chapter title: "Les Métamorphoses de Pierre Manent : le prix de la gloire"

Manent's Metamorphoses lead us to the pivotal relationship between honor and conscience. Honor without a moral conscience tethered to a divine authority gives way to a limitless passion for glory. Conscience, untethered to the laws and code of honor of a particular city or people tends to calculation rooted in sheer consciousness of necessity. And Manent has shown that the extremes of glory (the perspective of universal empire) and of the reduction of individual consciousness tend to meet: the One and the All, radical transcendence and reductive equality, are two sides of the same spiritual coin. Thus Pierre Manent has contributed immeasurably to our understanding of the dynamic movement that tends towards these complicit extremes. But how are we now to understand reason’s responsibility in the face of this dynamic that seems inherent in the human condition?

Democracy and its Friendly Critics: Tocqueville and Political Life Today (2004)

Chapter 5: “The Modern Revolution and the Collapse of Moral Analogy: Tocqueville and Guizot”

In this edited collection, Peter Lawler presents a lucid and comprehensive introduction to a diverse set of political issues according to Tocqueville. Democracy and Its Friendly Critics addresses a variety of modern political and social concerns, such as the moral dimension of democracy, the theoretical challenges to democracy in our time, the religious dimension of liberty, and the meaning of work in contemporary American Life. Taking innovative and unexpected approaches toward familiar topics, the essays present engaging insights into a democratic society, and the contributors include some of today's leading figures in political philosophy. No other collection on Tocqueville addresses contemporary American political issues in such a direct and accessible fashion, making this book a valuable resource for the study of political theory in America.

Tocqueville's Political Science: Classic Essays

Chapter 8: "Tocqueville on the Good of American Federalism"

Tocqueville's Defense of Human Liberty: Current Essays

Chapter 7: "Liberal Education and Moral Liberty: Tocqueville as a Critic of Bloom"

Perspectives on Mormon Theology: Apologetics (2017)

Chapter Title: "Mormon Apologetics and Mormon Studies: Truth, Relativism and the New Mormon Love-in"

This volume in the Perspectives on Mormon Theology series is an exploration of Mormon apologetics—or the defense of faith. Since its very beginning, various Latter-day Saints have sought to utilize evidence and reason to actively promote or defend beliefs and claims within the Mormon tradition. Mormon apologetics reached new levels of sophistication as believers trained in fields such as Near-Eastern languages and culture, history, and philosophy began to utilize their knowledge and skills to defend their beliefs. The contributors to this volume seek to explore the textures and contours of apologetics from multiple perspectives, revealing deep theological and ideological fissures within the Mormon scholarly community concerning apologetics. However, in spite of deep-seated differences, what each author has in common is a passion for Mormonism and how it is presented and defended. This volume captures that reality and allows readers to encounter the terrain of Mormon apologetics at close range.

Subjectivity: Ancient and Modern (2016)

Chapter 5: “The Claims of Subjectivity and the Limits of Politics”

Responded to by Richard Velkley.
The term “subject” contains a deep and very revealing ambiguity. On the one hand, “subject” can suggest the desire for or claim to self-possession and self-transparency; on the other hand, it can refer to our being “subject” to powers or to an authority beyond our capacity to ground or to explain. In fact, these apparently opposite meanings seem to be complicit: the claim to transparent subjective self-possession tends powerfully to accompany or to call forth a surrender of human agency to some non-rational power, whether naturalistic or divine.
I argue, through engagements with Alexis de Tocqueville, Leo Strauss, Michael Davis and Emmanuel Lévinas, that the only alternative to the abyss opened up by these complicit extremes is the soul’s acceptance of the mediation of a politics and a poetry respectful of the mutual dependence between the order of the soul and the order of the whole. The suppression of this political and poetic mediation cannot emancipate us from the authority of the (partisan) whole, but only subject us to an inhuman orientation in which the meaning of being collapses into pure power. Whether we name this power “matter” or “History” or “God,” or even “the Other,” its effectual truth, at the limit, can only be nihilism.

Reason, Revelation, and the Civil Order: Political Philosophy and the Claims of Faith (2014)

Chapter 6: “Pierre Manent: Between Nature and History"

In a one-of-a-kind collection, DeHart and Holloway bring together leading scholars from various fields, including political science, philosophy, and theology, to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy and to demonstrate the role that religion can and does play in political life. Contributing authors include such important thinkers as Peter Augustine Lawler, Robert C. Koons, J. Budziszewski, Francis J. Beckwith, and James Stoner.

The Science of Modern Virtue: On Descartes, Darwin, and Locke (2013)

Chapter 10: “The Mutual Sacrifice of Science and Virtue”

Thirteen scholars in this volume learnedly explore questions drawn from the diverse disciplines of political science, philosophy, theology, biology, and metaphysics. Let the reader be warned: The authors of these essays are anything but consensual in their analysis. Considered together, the chapters in this volume carry on a lively internal debate that mirrors theoretical modernity’s ongoing discussion about the true nature of human beings and the science of virtue. Some authors powerfully argue that Locke’s and Darwin’s thought is amenable to the claims made about human beings and human virtue by classical philosophers such as Aristotle and classical Christian theologians such as Thomas Aquinas. Others make the opposite case, drawing attention to the ways in which Descartes, Locke, and Darwin knowingly and dialectically depart from central teachings of both classical philosophy and classical Christian theology.

Educating the Prince: Essays in Honor of Harvey Mansfield (2000)

Chapter 4: “Necessity, Morality, Christianity”

For forty years, Harvey Mansfield has been worth reading. Whether plumbing the depths of Machiavelli's Discourses or explaining what was at stake in Bill Clinton's impeachment, Mansfield ‘s work in political philosophy and political science has set the standard.
In Educating the Prince, twenty-one of his students, themselves distinguished scholars, try to live up to that standard. Their essays offer penetrating analyses of Machiavellianism, liberalism, and America., all of them informed by Mansfield's own work. The volume also includes a bibliography of Mansfield's writings.