Peter Lawler
Professor of Government, Berry College
Peter Lawler is Dana Professor of Government and former chair of the department of Government and International Studies at Berry College. He serves as executive editor of the journal Perspectives on Political Science, and has been chair of the politics and literature section of the American Political Science Association. He also served on the editorial board of the new bilingual critical edition of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, and serves on the editorial boards of several journals. He has written or edited fifteen books and over 200 articles and chapters in a wide variety of venues. He was the 2007 winner of the Weaver Prize in Scholarly Letters.rnrnLawler served on President Bush's Council on Bioethics from 2004 – 09. His most recent book, Modern and American Dignity, is available from ISI Books.rnrnFollow him on Twitter @peteralawler.
So we read in THE WALL STREET JOURNAL and elsewhere that one in four divorces now separate people over fifty. The divorce rate as a whole has plateaued or has […]
So here’s another perspective on the HHS mandate that all employer-based policies provide free oral contraceptives: Oral contraceptives are really cheap. A one-month supply of Sprintec is $9 at Walmart. […]
Respected Republican leaders—such as Tom Coburn and Eric Cantor—are rallying around Romney now. They don’t see a viable alternative, and they see that prolonging “the process” isn’t going to benefit […]
I suggested, although not as insistently as I should have, that February would be the month of Santorum. Well, it was. Santorum was so impressive that he was the non-Romney who came closest to winning.
Georgetown University Professor Pat Deneen has this to say about a recent study of the opinion and attitudes of today’s college freshmen: Contemporary liberals who significantly shape the views of […]
Brooks offends our pride by reminding us that the American level of social spending is the same as Europe’s. The difference is the method. The Europeans use taxes to fund public […]
The question of my last post: Why do we deny that it’s our nature to die? The answer from many of my threaders: We aren’t merely or even essentially natural […]
Dr. Craig Bowron has done as much as anyone to explain why we’re all about exaggerating what medical science and the coming biotechnology can possibly do to extend particular lives. […]
Our BIG THINKING friend Robert de Neufville is right to notice public opinion trending in favor of same-sex marriage. And so it seems reasonable for him to predict that it […]
The GRAMMYS turned out to be one of the classiest and most entertaining award shows ever. Certainly the show blew away the Super Bowl on both fronts. Even the commercials […]
So I’ve gotten too many enthusiastic and too many critical emails about my recent “Liberal Education” post for the wrong reasons. It was critical, of course, with the general approach […]
Our competencies, unlike philosophy or theology or poetry, disconnect the method from the end, and that means they’re disconnected from liberal education.
I’m distorting, of course, the lengendary admonition of the evil Dean Wormer to the (seemingly) fat loser Delta pledge Flounder in the classic film Animal House. I had to add “smoking” […]
Our BIG THINKING friend, Robert de Neufville, wonders why more Republicans aren’t voting in the primaries. His wondering, of course, is hopeful. It must mean either that the ferocity of the […]
David Brooks is unparalleled as a summarizer and popularizer of social science. So we do well to note what he finds especially noteworthy about Charles Murray (with Peter Lawler’s spin added, of course).
This author explains convincingly that we haven’t been concerned enough with our children’s moral virtue—or acquiring the habits required to flourish as free and rational animals in a society such as ours. Aristotle, […]
BIG THINKER Robert de Neufville has said, quite correctly, that Romney is the favorite for the Republican nomination two weeks in a row. But it’s a little misleading to say he […]
There are a lot of cool posts on BIG THINK today. Austin Allen’s on stuff the great literary critic Harold Bloom declared dead is a kind of an ironic appreciation. The […]
So, as I predicted, Romney is now 1-2. And he’s gone from overwhelming favorite to a probable underdog. Mitt is collapsing across the nation. It’s easy to predict that Gingrich will […]
Each of the below deserves all kinds of links. But I only have a moment, and I dislike links for the same reason I dislike footnotes. 1. It turns out […]
The controversial social analyst Charles Murray has written an important book on the unprecedented class divide in America today. The link is to an article summarizing the book’s key arguments. […]
Here’s a fine think-piece by Susan Cain that praises some introversion as indispensable for creativity. To some great extent, Socrates and Jesus were solitary men. And the wisdom they shared with us couldn’t […]
1. The turnout was lower than in 2008 and almost half of the voters in the Republican primary were independents. That shows, of course, an unexpected lack of enthusiasm among Republicans. […]
The Wall Street Journal has a generally positive view of Santorum’s pro-growth policies. But here’s a tough criticism: Most disappointing is the Pennsylvanian’s proposal to triple the tax credit for […]
So the Iowa outcome, with some perversity, made it more likely than ever that Romney would be the Republican nominee. That’s true although most Republicans have made it clear they […]
My last post, following the lead of David Brooks and Rod Dreher, was about giving the argument for “communitarian conservatism” in the context of Dreher’s decision to move back to […]
David Brooks has a generous and eloquent column on the decision of “crunchy conservative” Rod Dreher to move back to his hometown of St. Francisville, LA. Dreher is embracing the […]
That’s the conclusion of this study. The discovery that being married without children is one path to happiness vindicated the feminists, the liberationists, the authentic followers of Simone de Beauvoir. Authentic […]
To be human is to wonder and wander. The being who wonders can’t be fully at home in the cosmos the scientists can otherwise, perhaps, perfectly describe.
Jay Cost, one of our best politcal bloggers, told us at Berry College a few weeks ago that what’s wrong with the current system used by our political parties to […]