Sublime

presented the Durkheimian vision of society, favored by social conservatives, in which the basic social unit is the family, rather than the individual, and in which order, hierarchy, and tradition are highly valued. I contrasted this vision with the liberal Millian vision, which is more open and individualistic. I noted that a Millian society has d

Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education.

The winners in Smart America have withdrawn from the national life of their fellow Americans. Christopher Lasch, writing in the early 1990s when this withdrawal was young, called it “the revolt of the elites.” Between meritocracy and democracy, it’s the first that dominates their waking hours, commands their unthinking devotion, and drives them, li

In an autobiographical essay called “Up From Liberalism” (1958), Weaver recalls that in his undergraduate years at the University of Kentucky earnest professors had him “persuaded entirely that the future was with science, liberalism, and equalitarianism.”

orthodoxy is not only (as is often urged) the only safe guardian of morality or order, but is also the only logical guardian of liberty, innovation and advance. If we wish to pull down the prosperous oppressor we cannot do it with the new doctrine of human perfectibility; we can do it with the old doctrine of Original Sin. If we want to uproot inhe

Shall the world be confined to one Paris or one Oxford forever? Cannot students be boarded here and get a liberal education under the skies of Concord? Can we not hire some Abelard to lecture to us?

The transformations of the 1970s broke up the old party alignment and with it the two relatively stable narratives of getting ahead and the fair shake. In their place four rival narratives have emerged, four accounts of America’s moral identity. They have roots in history, but they are shaped by new social arrangements, new ways of living. They ref