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Graham McAleer Subscribe

Graham McAleer is a professor of philosophy at Loyola University Maryland. His latest book is Veneration & Refinement: The Ethics of Fashion, an open source web book found at www.ethicsoffashion.com.

April 12, 2018|Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, Bernard Mandeville, David Hume, deodand, Francis Hutcheson, Lord Kames, Scottish Enlightenment, the Black Watch, Thomas Reid

What Was the Scottish Enlightenment?

by Graham McAleer|22 Comments

Statue of David Hume on the Royal Mile, Edinburgh
Without abolishing the individual, the Scottish Enlightenment nonetheless made solidarity basic to human existence.

April 6, 2018|9/11, Charles Darwin, Marquis de Condorcet, Postmodernism, Richard Rorty

The “Really Real” Rorty, Frozen in Amber

by Graham McAleer|3 Comments

Richard Rorty, 2005
Rorty's blend of European postmodern thought and American pragmatism caught on in the universities of 30 years ago.

January 17, 2018|identity, Jacques Lacan, Psychoanalysis, Roger Scruton, Slavoj Zizek, Soren Kierkegaard, The Other, the self

Jacques Lacan: Conservative Icon?

by Graham McAleer|8 Comments

It is time for those on the right to start exploring Lacan and use him to theoretically advance conservatism.

June 30, 2017|Brooke Harrington, Capital without Borders, Edmund Burke, Pierre Bourdieu, Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners, tax shelters

In Trusts We Trust

by Graham McAleer|10 Comments

Offshore Banking and Tax Havens Concept

Are tax havens immoral? The question is posed by Brooke Harrington’s extremely interesting book, Capital without Borders: Wealth Managers and the One Percent.  Harrington teaches at Copenhagen Business School in Denmark but qualified in wealth management to “infiltrate” the secretive world of the super-rich and the advisors who shield their wealth.

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May 22, 2017|Aurel Kolnai, Human Rights, John M. Rist, Regensburg Address, What Is Truth?

Contesting the Re-Primitivism of the West

by Graham McAleer|3 Comments

Does Catholicism expand civilization? Thinking of Thomas Aquinas, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, and Gregor Johann Mendel, and the Gothic, Baroque, and Rococo, the answer seems an obvious “yes.”  However, it is also undoubtedly true that a snap survey on any street in the West would find a decent number of respondents either angered by the suggestion or just clueless. John M. Rist thinks the answer certainly “yes.” What’s more, he thinks that re-primitivism (to borrow a term Aurel Kolnai used in his 1938 War Against the West) threatens our civilization, and only Catholicism has the theoretical heft to ward it off. It is…

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November 28, 2016|Adam Ferguson, Central Intelligence Agency, Crony Capitalism, Self-Government

Beauty and the Beast

by Graham McAleer|4 Comments

(Photo: Clearista/Facebook)

Skincential Sciences is a small company and something of a curiosity: a significant portion of its capital comes from In-Q-Tel, the investment fund of the Central Intelligence Agency.

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October 28, 2016|Earl of Shaftesbury, J.R.R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings, Max Scheler

Tolkien’s Establishment

by Graham McAleer|8 Comments

To those of us in the universities, the Left’s animus to Catholicism revealed by Wikileaks this past week is not news. What Podesta and the Clinton circle said might have been exposed, but such slights about Catholicism are heard around universities all the time. As the Wall Street Journal points out, if such things were said about Islam they would be denounced as bigotry.

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September 7, 2016|burkini, corporate social responsibility, France, Islamic garment market, Marks and Spencer, Reflections on the Revolution in France, virtue theory

Burke and Burkinis

by Graham McAleer|7 Comments

Albert Camus adored swimming in the Mediterranean Sea. It would be fascinating to know how this great philosopher, who was acutely aware of France’s complicated relationship with the Arab world, would have reacted to the burkini ban on the French Riviera.

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June 1, 2016|"Hard Look" Judicial Review, Carl Schmitt, Dictatorship, The Concept of the Political

Dictator Games

by Graham McAleer|Leave a Comment

Was he or wasn’t he? An enormous number of words have been written to contest the question of whether Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) was an avid supporter of Hitlerism and totalitarianism.

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May 26, 2016|A Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume, House of Hanover, James A. Harris, The History of England, Thomas Reid

The Rational Objectivity of a Man of Letters

by Graham McAleer|Leave a Comment

When David Hume died at the age of 65 in the year of the American Revolution, he was rich, famous, and often misunderstood.

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Book Reviews

The Ford Restoration

by Kirk Emmert

Occupying the White House in unfavorable circumstances can make a President fall back on his best friend: the U.S. Constitution.

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John C. Calhoun, Madisonian Manqué

by Thomas W. Merrill

His institutional innovations were geared toward preserving slavery.

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Podcasts

The Solid Ground of Mere Civility: A Conversation with Teresa Bejan

A discussion with Teresa M. Bejan

Teresa Bejan discusses with us how early modern debates over religious toleration are an example of how we can disagree well.

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Leading a Worthy Life in a Scattered Time: A Conversation with Leon Kass

A discussion with Leon Kass

Leon Kass discusses Leading a Worthy Life.

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Eric Voegelin Studies: A Conversation with Charles Embry

A discussion with Charles Embry

What did "Don't immanentize the eschaton!" really mean? An intro podcast on the formidable mind of Eric Voegelin.

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Republican Virtue, Interrupted: A Conversation with Frank Buckley

A discussion with F.H. Buckley

The real conflict in our politics centers on reforming massive levels of public corruption.

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Recent Posts

  • Kubrick’s Odyssey at 50

    The movie that inserted existentialism into our understanding of science fiction on screen.
    by Titus Techera

  • Immigration Cases Make Strange Bedfellows. But Is It a Long-Term Relationship?

    Dimaya v. Sessions is a milestone simply because the Court struck down a provision of immigration law, but it has wider implications.
    by Michael Kagan

  • Making Our Universities a Source of Universal Knowledge

    The distance between the humanities and sciences has grown wider since C.P. Snow discussed it six decades ago in "The Two Cultures." We need both.
    by John O. McGinnis

  • Moneyball Illustrates Efficient Markets, Not Behavioral Economics

    Many have the story of Moneyball wrong: it's not a story of systematic error but one of eliminating systematic error in a market.
    by James R. Rogers

  • Academic Freedom Won’t Survive Carnival Act Universities

    Public institutions of supposedly liberal learning, which are increasingly alienating mainstream Americans, have no entitlement to public support.
    by Greg Weiner

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Law and Liberty’s focus is on the content, status, and development of law in the context of republican and limited government and the ways that liberty and law and law and liberty mutually reinforce the other. This site brings together serious debate, commentary, essays, book reviews, interviews, and educational material in a commitment to the first principles of law in a free society. Law and Liberty considers a range of foundational and contemporary legal issues, legal philosophy, and pedagogy.

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