Robert L. Paquette Subscribe

Robert L. Paquette is co-founder of the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization in Clinton, New York. With Mark Smith, he co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Slavery in the Americas (2010), which will be released in paperback this month.

February 26, 2018|

Robert L. Paquette Responds: The Flame Needs to Be Turned Up

by Robert L. Paquette|

In response to: What Worlds Have They to Conquer?: A Higher Ed Dystopia

Some colleges have allowed oases to exist, but these are programs. The desirable reform of the liberal arts is curricular not just programmatic.

More Responses

Never, Never Surrender

by Jacqueline Pfeffer Merrill

It's true that liberal arts curricula and academic disciplines are neglected at too many colleges, but some top public universities are countering these trends.

Paquette’s Dystopia Depicts a Future that Has Already Happened

by James M. Patterson

The issue is no longer the preservation of liberal arts curricula at elite liberal arts colleges. By now, these institutions have made their choices.

We Can Save the Remnant

by Jane Shaw Stroup

Whether Americans will lose their faith in a college education is far from certain. Even if they did, a Reformation isn't necessarily in the offing.

February 1, 2018|

What Worlds Have They to Conquer?: A Higher Ed Dystopia

by Robert L. Paquette|

“Are ye with us or agin’ us?” is what the Grand Axis demanded to know.

Responses

Never, Never Surrender

by Jacqueline Pfeffer Merrill

It's true that liberal arts curricula and academic disciplines are neglected at too many colleges, but some top public universities are countering these trends.

Paquette’s Dystopia Depicts a Future that Has Already Happened

by James M. Patterson

The issue is no longer the preservation of liberal arts curricula at elite liberal arts colleges. By now, these institutions have made their choices.

We Can Save the Remnant

by Jane Shaw Stroup

Whether Americans will lose their faith in a college education is far from certain. Even if they did, a Reformation isn't necessarily in the offing.

Robert L. Paquette Responds: The Flame Needs to Be Turned Up

by Robert L. Paquette

Some colleges have allowed oases to exist, but these are programs. The desirable reform of the liberal arts is curricular not just programmatic.

July 12, 2017|

Collapse of the Self-Governing Ethos

by Robert L. Paquette|

In response to: Can the American People Be Trusted to Govern Themselves?

A few months after the Federalists had secured the votes of nine state conventions to ratify the Constitution, James Madison wrote to Thomas Jefferson on the subject of future congressional action on a promised bill of rights. Madison proved ambivalent in his letter of October 17, 1788. Although he favored a bill of rights as an additional safeguard of “public liberty & individual rights,” a standard that could help keep rulers under the law, he worried that any formal declaration of rights amended to the Constitution might also be interpreted as conferring on the federal government powers not constitutionally granted to…

Measured Against a Reasonable Standard, the Answer Is Yes

by Gerard Alexander

The question posed in Joseph Postell’s Liberty Forum essay—“Can the American people be trusted to govern themselves?”—sounds strange, at least at first, to a student of empirical political science, especially of comparative politics. It sounds strange because it suggests that America’s experiment in self-government might have failed or might be failing or faltering in some…

The Founders as Collectivists

by Jason Kuznicki

Joseph Postell’s Liberty Forum essay intervenes in a multifaceted debate about whether Congress or the presidency best embodies the American people governing itself. A third possibility also entertained is that self-government emerges from a creative interplay between the two, and a fourth is that perhaps self-government isn’t possible at all. Absent from this debate are some…

Rebuilding the Institutions of Self-Government

by Joseph Postell

I’m thankful to Richard Reinsch for putting together this lively and interesting forum on the pressing difficulty of self-government in America today, and to those who responded to my initial essay in the Liberty Law Forum. Each response brings a different perspective to this debate. They range from optimistic about the practice of self-government in…

March 21, 2016|Atlantic slave trade, Edward E. Baptist, Joseph Schumpeter, King Cotton, Slavery, The Half Has Never Been Told, Theodore Dwight Weld, Thomas Jefferson