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February 9, 2018|American Sign Language, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Guillermo del Toro, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Shape of Water

The Shape of Water: Non-Potable

by Molly Brigid McGrath|

Don’t fall for the Oscar-winning romance starring a sublinguistic amphibious hunk.

January 18, 2018|Civilization, Family, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie, Mark Kremer, marriage, New Heloise, Romanticism

Understanding Love and Marriage with Rousseau

by Paul Seaton|

The Visit to the Nursery, by Jean-Honore Fragonard, 1775.
Reading Rousseau may help us sort out our love lives, but we have to think like the ancients to make good on his ideas.

November 22, 2017|

Don’t Make Anti-Opioid Laws the Villain Here

by David Murray|

In response to: What the Opioid Crisis Can Teach Us about the War on Drugs

Confronting a litany of harms from the use of a dangerous substance, he finds the fault not in ourselves, nor the substance, but rather in our laws.

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Psychoactive Drugs in Light of Libertarian Principles

by Jonathan Caulkins

Psychoactive drugs collectively nonetheless belong to a small class of products that merit a carve-out from libertarian principles.

Legalizing Opioids Would Dramatically Reduce Overdoses

by Jeffrey Miron

Prohibition makes opioids more dangerous because it forces the market underground, which inhibits normal quality control.

Contra Criminalization

by Andrew I. Cohen

The problems, then, go much deeper than the use and abuse of this particular class of drug.

The Opioid Epidemic and Drug Legalization: Robert VerBruggen Replies to His Critics

by Robert VerBruggen

Being mugged by reality is never fun, especially regarding so grave a topic as drug addiction.

October 23, 2017|Ben Sasse, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Saint Augustine, The Vanishing American Adult, Theodore Roosevelt

America’s Delayed Adolescence in the Digital Economy

by Ryan Shinkel|

American grit was once thought permanent. With the right stuff, a single person with a few kindred spirits could find salvation, start a business, run for offic

August 7, 2017|Aristotle, Charles Darwin, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Nelson Lund, Rousseau's Rejuvenation of Political Philosophy

A Rehearing for Rousseau

by Rita Koganzon|

Canonical authors, it seems, are always on trial. Not only do they face a jury of contemporary readers disinclined to recognize their greatness, but they must re-argue their case with every succeeding generation that charges them with irrelevance. As the arbiters in this tribunal are biased and the prosecutors zealous and unprincipled, a skilled and tenacious advocate can be an extraordinary asset. It is convenient, then, that Nelson Lund, who has published a new defense of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Rousseau’s Rejuvenation of Political Philosophy, is a lawyer. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that, because the author is a…

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July 21, 2017|Free Speech, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, Justice Holmes, On Liberty

Rousseau’s Contrarian View of the Marketplace of Ideas

by James R. Rogers|

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The idea of the “marketplace of ideas” in which truth wins out through competition with error has a strong tradition in the U.S. Suggested in nascent form by Milton and Mill, US Supreme Court decisions appeal to it in free speech decisions, and it frequently appears in commentary and everyday conversations. It continues to hold axiomatic status in the U.S., at least outside of a set of college campuses.

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August 22, 2016|Adam Smith, Bernard Mandeville, Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, Istvan Hont, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Politics in Commercial Society, Theory of Moral Sentiments

Rousseau Contra Smith Revisited

by Henry Clark|

Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith have long been powerful symbols of two very different approaches to the 18th century Enlightenment: the one liberal, the other democratic; the one for individual rights, the other collective sovereignty; the one focused on the economic, the other on the political; at bottom, the one for Enlightenment, the other mainly against it. In some versions of this story, such as the one articulated by F.A. Hayek, the two authors represent not just two different paths to modernity but two different national styles: Smith is not just the emblematic liberal, but the archetypal Anglo-Scot, with Rousseau…

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February 2, 2016|Adam Smith, Donald Trump, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Theory of Moral Sentiments

The Donald, the Impartial Spectator, and the Command of the Passions

by Joseph Knippenberg|

Adam Smith statue in Edinburgh's High Street.

I spend the better part of my professional life teaching “Great Books.” This semester’s lineup so far has included Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Second Discourse (1775), Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), John Milton’s Areopagitica (1644), John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), and Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince (1532). I’m committed to the proposition that these old books continue to speak to us, if only we have ears to hear.

My students don’t always agree, but they really perked up when I speculated about how Adam Smith would approach the phenomenon—the yuuge phenomenon—of Donald Trump.

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January 28, 2016|Calvinism, Democracy, Gilead, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Marilynne Robinson, Scientism

Marilynne Robinson and the Mystery of Progressive Democracy

by Ralph Hancock|

My favorite novelist is also Barack Obama’s. That shouldn’t be a problem, you might say—two people of widely different political opinions can love the same beautiful things. As Paul Seaton has observed on this site, studying Marilynne Robinson’s nonfiction, marked as it is by her very conventional academic-liberal political opinions, is not very conducive to appreciating the exquisite subtlety of her fiction.[1]

The New York Review of Books late last year published an extensive conversation between the President and the novelist (which Joe Knippenberg commented on here). Obama and the author of Housekeeping (1980), Gilead (2004), and Home (2008) come to an immediate meeting of minds, or rather hearts, on their faith in “democracy,” which, the ostensibly Calvinist Robinson posits, is based on “the willingness to assume well about other people.”

Asked by the President to explain the convergence between her Christianity and her “concerns about democracy,” Robinson offers the simplest possible explanation: she believes “people are images of God” and that “democracy is the logical, the inevitable consequence of this kind of religious humanism at its highest level.” To the President’s and the novelist’s joint chagrin, though, the “loudest voices” for Christianity in American politics don’t really take their Christianity seriously; supposedly they fail to follow Christ’s injunction to love one’s neighbor as oneself. Robinson has gone so far as to describe Christian America as “associating the precious Lord with ignorance, intolerance, and belligerent nationalism.”

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November 10, 2014|Arthur Melzer, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Leo Strauss, Philosophy Between the Lines

Uncovering the Meaning of Covering Meanings

by Peter Augustine Lawler|

The most important book published in political philosophy in years is Arthur M. Melzer’s Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing. It first of all establishes, beyond all reasonable doubt, that philosophers (and poets, and other writers) routinely deployed “a double doctrine.” One was “exoteric” or “external” and “public.” The other was “esoteric” or “internal” and “secret.” The intention of the French philosophes—or enlightening, publicizing philosophers— was that the truth about these two contradictory doctrines become public knowledge. They turned esotericism into an exoteric or public doctrine. And Melzer, a professor of political science at Michigan State University,…

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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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About

Law & Liberty’s focus is on the classical liberal tradition of law and political thought and how it shapes a society of free and responsible persons. This site brings together serious debate, commentary, essays, book reviews, interviews, and educational material in a commitment to the first principles of law in a free society. Law & Liberty considers a range of foundational and contemporary legal issues, legal philosophy, and pedagogy.

The opinions expressed on Law & Liberty are solely those of the contributors to the site and do not reflect the opinions of Liberty Fund.
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