Samuel Gregg

Samuel Gregg is research director at the Acton Institute.

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Reform, Reformations, and the West

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The year 1517 is considered one of those historical watersheds—like 1789, 1914, or 1968—at which Western societies took a radical turn away from hitherto prevailing political, economic, cultural, or religious settings. Such shifts, however, never come from nowhere. History’s time-bombs are invariably years in the making. The Reformation certainly didn’t simply spring from the mind of Martin Luther. But as a historical development, it has been the subject of polemics for 500 years: not just between Catholics and Protestants, but also, over the past century, between historians and sociologists with disparate views on how the modern world emerged. Any serious study…

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The Hamilton-Jefferson Clash: Stark but Intricate

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One of the late Forrest McDonald’s many contributions to our understanding of the American Founding was that he illustrated, often humorously, the human side of some extraordinary men. Though often taking classic Roman republicans as role models, the Founders were, like the rest of us, given to occasional pettiness. They lost their tempers. They often resorted to underhanded methods to get their way. Nor were they above scheming against each other. Yet McDonald’s books also showed that the generation that fought for independence and then established the United States were also an unusually talented and well-educated group. Even when not…

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An Enlightened Faith

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In his book Catholics and Unbelievers in Eighteenth Century France (1939), the historian R.R. Palmer wrote that on the whole, it must be confessed that the thought of the Age of Enlightenment, more than that of any equally important period in modern history, has been studied chiefly from writings which express only one side of the question. Palmer went some way to illustrating that there was considerable intellectual opposition to the philosophes, overwhelming from Catholics, which could not be dismissed as bloody-minded obscurantism. He also illustrated that Voltaire and others, for all their purported advocacy of tolerance, were not above using underhanded…

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Between Euro-Impotence and Jihadism

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Dramatic events often focus our minds on the dilemmas we would prefer to ignore. In writing Situation de la France to describe the predicament facing his native country and much of Western Europe, the French conservative philosopher Pierre Manent is unlikely to have anticipated the slaughter of 130 people in Paris by seven ISIS-aligned Muslims in November. But the timing of Manent’s short book on the political challenges associated with the presence of approximately 4.7 million Muslims in France (about 7.5 percent of its population) could not be more providential. In a nation’s life, there are moments that decisively change its…

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The Anglosphere: A Viable Global Actor or Simply a Culture?

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anglosphere

Given that I am of Scottish and English descent, grew up in Australia, did my doctorate in Britain, and now live and work in America, I am about as much a product of what is often called “the Anglosphere” as it gets. That such a sphere exists, culturally speaking, has never seemed in doubt to me, even beyond the common linguistic and historical connections to the British Isles of this grouping of nations. Though I attended Catholic schools in Australia, for example, we learnt far more about British history than that of the Catholic Church (or Australia for that matter). The…

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The Yanks Made Us Do It

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The central question addressed by Samuel Gregg in his timely ruminations about the Anglosphere is how ready and willing its member nations are to “collectively shape the global order” through collaboration beyond that in which they already engage. His chief contention is that, while the nations of the Anglosphere jointly possess the necessary economic, demographic,…

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Snubbing the Anglosphere

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Samuel Gregg rightly concludes that the political cooperation required for the nations of “the Anglosphere” to act as an effective international bloc rests upon choices by leaders. Cultural ties and longstanding security relationships open possibilities, but pursuing them requires conscious decision. To elaborate on Gregg’s analysis, one would have to consider what presuppositions and concerns…

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Crisis of Identity: Here, There, and in the Canuckosphere

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Samuel Gregg’s thoughtful Liberty Forum essay on the prospects for a functional “Anglosphere” leaves me perplexed. He is no Pollyanna on the matter, but to my mind he underestimates some monumental intellectual and practical difficulties confronting statesmen who would try to move the English-speaking peoples from ad hoc cooperation in various areas, animated by real…

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What is Social Justice?

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Lamartine in front of the Town Hall of Paris rejects the red flag on 25 February 1848.

Introduction Few terms have assumed more prominence in public discourse, especially that emanating from the left, in recent decades than “social justice.” It has now become part of the rhetorical apparatus of virtually all center-left, social democratic and labor political movements as well as central to the language of modern liberalism. In Western Europe, the term has also been embraced by more-than-a-few center-right, Christian Democrat, and conservative groupings, David Cameron’s Tory Party being a prominent example. Religious groups—most notably, but not exclusively, the Catholic Church—also utilize the expression extensively in their commentary on social and economic subjects. In the case of…

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Social Justice is the State

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Samuel Gregg’s essay, “What is Social Justice?” is an important reminder that many different moral traditions – including the Catholic natural law tradition – may lay claim to the vocabulary of “social justice” and to an associated notion of the “common good.”  As articulated by Gregg, this natural law tradition can employ the language of…

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Social Justice Theory: A Solution in Search of a Problem

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What is social justice? Sam Gregg’s essay answers this question by reviewing the origins and evolution of the concept. I find little to quibble with in Sam’s remarks and I am certainly in no position to make them a fortiori. My contribution will therefore be to offer an explanation for why social justice theory is both…

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Becoming Europe

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Becoming Europe

This Liberty Law Talk is a discussion with Samuel Gregg about his most recent book, Becoming Europe: Economic Decline, Culture, and How America Can Avoid a European Future. Recent events in Cyprus, to say nothing of the economic stasis that envelopes much of Europe, highlight America's need to think deeply about the current trajectory of our fiscal and entitlements policies, among other weighty matters. Gregg's book, however, is not merely a rehashing of dire spending problems and bankrupting entitlements and the predictably poorer future this promises, but is a discussion of the social and cultural commitments that are required to…

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Why Religious Liberty (and Thomas Becket) Really Matters

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Thomas Becket

When consolidating their control over society, authoritarian regimes know that extinguishing political, civil and economic freedom is never quite enough. All authoritarians recognize that taking religious freedom seriously limits their capacity to interfere with the ability of people (including non-believers) to pursue and draw conclusions about religious truth; the decisions of people to make choices consistent with their religious beliefs; and the external activities and internal life of religious organizations. In short, robust conceptions of religious freedom make a truly authoritarian state that much harder to realize. The significance of religious liberty—and, more particularly, libertas ecclesiae—for freedom more generally has been…

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The Profoundly anti-Keynesian Political Economy of Wilhelm Röpke

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Wilhelm Ropke

This edition of Liberty Law Talk is a conversation with Samuel Gregg, Research Director of the Acton Institution, on his latest book, Wilhelm Röpke's Political Economy. Röpke's name is not frequently mentioned in the parade of great free market economists of the twentieth century. This is unfortunate, for those who know Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises may not be aware of this German economist who was as fluent in history, philosophy, and classical languages as he was in economics. One of the leading postwar German thinkers whose ideas guided Germany's free market economic revival, Röpke approached business cycle theory, international…

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John Tomasi Rearranges the Deck Chairs on the Good Ship Liberalism

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The number of contradictory positions associated with the words “liberal” and “liberalism” have led some to conclude that such expressions are now so unstable in their meaning that they lack sufficient descriptive power of any lasting significance. Of course, the same could be said of terms used to describe most modern political positions, including “conservatism” and “socialism.” Liberalism, however, seems particularly amorphous inasmuch as the phrase is associated with figures as apparently different in their starting points and conclusions such as Friedrich Hayek and John Rawls, but also David Hume and Immanuel Kant.

Or is it? In his new book Free Market Fairness, the political philosopher John Tomasi challenges and seeks to overcome some of the internal divisions among those who ascribe to the liberal nomenclature. Rather than attempting a synthesis of competing schools of liberal thought, Tomasi outlines what he is very careful to specify as a “hybrid” (87) political theory that draws upon classical liberalism and libertarianism on the one hand, and what he calls high or left liberalism on the other. Tomasi does not seek to somehow ground classical liberal institutions on the basis of left liberal moral imperatives, or vice-versa. Instead he argues for what he calls market democracy as a “justificatory hybrid . . . which combines insights from the classical and liberal traditions at the level of moral foundations” (95).

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