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.
The most powerful, courageous, penetrating, and eloquent dissident opponents of Communist tyranny were Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and the Czech philosopher-playright-president Vaclav Havel (1936-December 18, 2011). We forget that their criticism was […]
The Descendants is the most critically acclaimed film in the theatres right now. I’m not sure I know quite why. Well, one reason is the excellent track record of its […]
As the astute Ross Douthat points out, the race in Iowa is now between Gingrich and Paul Right now, the polls show Paul to be in second place, with Romney still fading […]
I’m finally getting around to talking about recent films. Two that had great promise but ultimately disappoint are J. Edgar and The Descendants. They both address the questions of virtue—particularly manliness […]
So a professor of philosophy—Gary Gutting—opinionating for the NYT invites us to think about the relationship between politicians and intellectuals. He says that politicians, to be credible, don’t have to […]
So I promised I would do a post based on what we can learn about courage from the philosopher of manliness Harvey Mansfield. But it turns out that there’s a […]
One virtue BIG THINK has not been big on is COURAGE. That might be a problem. According Aristotle, courage is not only the first of the virtues, but all the […]
So the New York Times has a predictably pointless or just randomly condescending article on America’s leading diner. The long and diverse thread is a lot more interesting than the article. […]
So BIG THINK reports a study that shows that social networking stimulates generosity. Here’s how: Rather than be shunned by one’s fellow generous networkers or “friends” (as in Facebook friends), […]
Nobody’s so politically correct as to be offended by Happy Thanksgiving. From a merely historical point of view, maybe we should be more sensitive.
So we really do have an aging society. The good news, as I’ve said before, is that we’re living longer, on average, than ever before. The bad (some say) is […]
So my previous post clearly irked most BIG THINK readers. They didn’t want to address the fact of the birth dearth in the United States, Europe, Japan, and so forth. […]
Another issue we’ll address at the big conference at Berry College this Thursday and Friday is the erosion or even implosion of our health care and entitlement systems. According to […]
I gave the case for some kind of kidney markets in my last post. The limited commodification of that particular part of the body is the only way, for now, for […]
As I’ve told you before, we’re having this big conference at Berry College funded by the Science of Virtues Project at the University of Chicago on November 17-18. We’re going […]
So Tocqueville found two sources of the American devotion to universal education. The first is the universal literacy that is a requirement for a country where everyone works for himself. Being […]
So far we’ve concluded, following Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, that most of what we call higher education is really technical education. It’s the acquisition of indispensable skills for […]
So this post is, first of all, a piece of shameless self-promotion. I’m the editor of the best journal in political philosophy and the related fields—Perspectives on Political Science. The most […]
So my post on whether or not higher education is worth it got a lot of responses, mostly negative. Many of the respondents chimed in through email and want to […]
The fascinating billionaire entrepreneur Peter Thiel (a Facebook guy, the PayPal guy etc.) seems to be carrying the day against the educational establishment in answering this question negatively. He’s teamed up […]
The high-tech parents from Silicon Valley are now sending their kids to a school—the Waldorf School of the Peninsula—that sells itself as computer-free. Why? Such technology is a distraction, turning […]
I debated the excellent libertarian author Ronald Bailey over this question at Wheaton College in Massachusetts. Ron has already responded to me here. Before I respond to him, I thought […]
That’s the conclusion of Flagg Taylor—one of the leading experts on totalitarian communism: I’ve spent and continue to spend a great deal of time thinking about totalitarianism. In what guise […]
This serious and thoughtful—and maybe great—film is quite the labor of love. It’s a film about broken families and broken lives made by the father-and-son team of Martin Sheen and Emilio […]
As of right now, polls show that Herman Cain is in the lead for the Republican presidential nomination. They also show that likely Republican voters really like him. And there’s a […]
Tonight’s Republican Presidential Debate at Dartmouth College will feature a pre-debate panel discussion, exclusively co-sponsored by Big Think and Dartmouth College. This discussion will stream LIVE right here at 5pm […]
50/50 is a pretty profound movie. It’s also as perfectly cast as MONEYBALL, apparently because they were cast by the same person. MONEYBALL, of course, is about the attempt to […]
Given the increasingly complacently atheistic tone of many of the BIG THINKERS, I thought I’d introduce some realism about our Constitution’s silence on God. My position will be, of course, somewhere […]
So TRAVEL AND LEISURE has ranked the place where I teach eighth in the nation in terms of beauty. That’s news, of course, to those who have the leisure to travel […]
The theme of Turkle’s indispensable book is in its title. It’s an old theme, originating, maybe, with the philosopher Rousseau. Technological progress is at the expense of personal virtue and the relational […]