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Will Morrisey Subscribe

Will Morrisey is professor emeritus of politics at Hillsdale College. His most recent book is Churchill and De Gaulle: The Geopolitics of Liberty.

December 17, 2019|Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, communism, Russia, Soviet Union, The Red Wheel

The Red Wheel of Revolution

by Will Morrisey|

After the February Revolution Russia had a Provisional Government whose authority was based on the Revolutionary Duma. Duma messengers are here protected by Armed guards. (Everett Historical, shutterstock.com).
No one surpasses Solzhenitsyn in conveying a sense of what it feels to live at and near the center of this kind of vortex.

May 6, 2019|Charles de Gaulle, Julian Jackson

De Gaulle, Re-Founder of French Republicanism

by Will Morrisey|

The man the French consider the most important figure in their long history, with Napoleon a distant runner-up.

May 21, 2018|Leonard Euler, Marshall McLuhan, network theory, Niall Ferguson, Secret Reinsurance Treaty of 1887, The Square and the Tower

Thomas Friedman’s World May Be Flat, But No One Else’s Is

by Will Morrisey|

Niall Ferguson’s entertaining survey of history as seen through network theory.

December 26, 2017|Abraham Lincoln, Democratic Religion from Locke to Obama, Giorgi Areshidze, Historicism, John Locke, Jürgen Habermas, Martin Luther King, Natural Right

Liberalism’s Ungrounded Present

by Will Morrisey|

Perhaps it was not for nothing that Augustine described the City of God as captive and stranger in the Earthly City.

November 13, 2017|Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Leo Tolstoy, March 1917, Pyotr Stolypin, Russian Revolution, The Red Wheel, World War I

Solzhenitsyn’s Sweeping Tale of War and Revolution

by Will Morrisey|

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) wrote first for Russians, especially the young. “The recent history of our country is so little known, or taught in such a distorted fashion,” said he, that young Russians more than anyone needed resources to be able to think clearly about what their forebears experienced in the cataclysmic time of his birth. In The Red Wheel, Solzhenitsyn challenged that history with a series of eight novels divided into four groups or “knots.” The image of the red wheel first comes to sight as the giant wheel of a locomotive—big enough to lean on but spine-twisting if it moves. In the…

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November 7, 2016|Federalist 84, Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, Jeremy Waldron, John Rawls, Political Political Theory

Theory Comes Down to Earth

by Will Morrisey|

Political Political Theory is no misprint. Jeremy Waldron’s stuttering title well expresses his intention. In the last generation, observes Waldron, “political theory” has become synonymous with considering the moral foundations of political life; the writings of John Rawls and Robert Nozick have framed much of the discussion. With the phrase “political political theory,” he signals the need to direct some philosophic attention to the actual operations of political life—particularly the forms, structures, and institutions by which we rule ourselves or are ruled by others. Philosophers used to think institutions too important to be left to the political scientists, and they should…

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July 11, 2016|Annexation of Texas, James Traub, John Calhoun, John Quincy Adams, Monroe Doctrine, Napoleonic Wars, Three-Fifths Clause

Formed for a Statesman

by Will Morrisey|

George Washington served as the model citizen of the republic founded upon the defense of natural rights. One might add that Benjamin Franklin served as the model citizen-intellectual, which isn’t quite the same thing. John and Abigail Adams (themselves no mean models) educated their son, John Quincy, to become the worthy successor of the Founding generation of the new regime. What does a man formed to defend natural rights look like? In John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit, the New Yorker writer James Traub gives us a carefully drawn portrait of a man “who did not aim to please, and . . . largely succeeded”—both…

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February 29, 2016|Charles de Gaulle, Fighters in the Shadows, Jean Moulin, Michel Debre, Robert Gildea

From Division to Resistance

by Will Morrisey|

To this day, every major political grouping in France has had its own account of the opposition the country mounted against the Germans in World War II, leaving it to historians to try to sort things out. Robert Gildea has produced a well-researched and balanced book on the subject, Fighters in the Shadows: A New History of the French Resistance.

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January 7, 2016|Eleanor Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Harvey J. Kaye, Henry Wallace, Historicism, Paul Eidelberg, Popular Front, The Fight for the Four Freedoms

Retro Commie Chic Tailored to This Year’s Campaign

by Will Morrisey|

Franklin D. Roosevelt delivers campaign speech, Topeka, Kansas (1932).

What made Franklin Roosevelt and the Greatest Generation great? Others may tell you it was defeating Nazism in a worldwide war. But Harvey J. Kaye, Professor of Democracy and Justice Studies at the University of Wisconsin, maintains that its heart and soul was none other than the Popular Front.

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November 25, 2015|Between Two Worlds, Charles I, James I, James II, King Philip's War, Malcolm Gaskill, Puritans, Virginia

Making Americans

by Will Morrisey|

The Early Puritans of New England Going to Church, George Henry Boughton (1867).

English settlers in America might have intended to transmit the traditions of the mother country to subsequent generations. This didn’t exactly happen—partly because the settlers disagreed amongst themselves about which of those traditions deserved preservation, and partly because the experience of life in North America challenged many of the traditions they did want to preserve. The disagreement and the adaptation together led, eventually, to a political revolution.

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Book Reviews

A Mirror of the 20th-Century Congress

by Joseph Postell

Wright undermined the very basis of his local popularity—the decentralized nature of the House—by supporting reforms that gave power to the party leaders.

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The Graces of Flannery O'Connor

by Henry T. Edmondson III

O'Connor's correspondence is a goldmine of piercing insight and startling reflections on everything from literature to philosophy to raising peacocks.

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Liberty Classics

Rereading Politica in the Post-Liberal Moment

by Glenn A. Moots

Althusius offers a rich constitutionalism that empowers persons to thrive alongside one another in deliberate communities.

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James Fenimore Cooper and the American Experiment

by Melissa Matthes

In The American Democrat, James Fenimore Cooper defended democracy against both mob rule and majority tyranny.

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Podcasts

Stuck With Decadence

A discussion with Ross Douthat

Ross Douthat discusses with Richard Reinsch his new book The Decadent Society.

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Can the Postmodern Natural Law Remedy Our Failing Humanism?

A discussion with Graham McAleer

Graham McAleer discusses how postmodern natural law can help us think more coherently about human beings and our actions.

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Did the Civil Rights Constitution Distort American Politics?

A discussion with Christopher Caldwell

Christopher Caldwell discusses his new book, The Age of Entitlement.

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America, Land of Deformed Institutions

A discussion with Yuval Levin

Yuval Levin pinpoints that American alienation and anger emerges from our weak political, social, and religious institutions.

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Recent Posts

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  • A Judicial Takeover of Asylum Policy?

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    by Thomas Ascik

  • The Environmental Uncertainty Principle

    By engaging in such flagrant projection, the Times has highlighted once again the problem with groupthink in the climate discussion.
    by Paul Schwennesen

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