What Can We Learn from Ancient Sophistry?
Sophistry and Political Philosophy: Protagoras’ Challenge to Socrates by Robert C. Bartlett. University of Chicago Press, 2016. Hardcover, 272 pages, $40. Reviewed by Ryan Shinkel One should be silent where one cannot speak, philosophy says, yet sophistry somehow...
Upcoming Event for Attorneys and Law Students
The Society for Law and Culture will gather to discuss “Moral Imagination and the Law” on Saturday, May 19, 2018 at the Kirk Center. We are pleased to announce the following distinguished speakers: the Hon. Caleb Stegall, Justice, Kansas Supreme Court; the Hon....The Inevitability of Liberal Failure?
Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick Deneen. Yale University Press, 2018. Hardcover, 256 pages, $40. Why Liberalism Failed is a timely and radical book. It is timely because it diagnoses the deep anxiety that now characterizes American life. It is radical—in the literal...
Books in Little: A Certain Freedom
Chicago Renaissance: Literature and Art in the Midwest Metropolis by Liesl Olson. Yale University Press, 2017. Hardcover, 392 pages, $35. If you’ve ever wondered—and who hasn’t?—about what would happen if Mortimer Adler and Gertrude Stein met and talked about...The Words of a Giant of the Law
Scalia Speaks: Reflections on Law, Faith, and Life Well Lived by Antonin Scalia, edited by Christopher J. Scalia and Edward Whelan. Crown Forum, 2017. Cloth, 420 pages, $30. Antonin Scalia is the Winston Churchill of the American judiciary. He was a larger-than-life...
We’re in This Together
SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard. W.W. Norton & Company, 2015. Paperback, 608 pages, $17.95. Reviewed by Sarah Ruden For a book with so many episodes of civil uproar in it, and so many accounts of both everyday and exceptional brutality, SPQR is...Mistaking Defeat for Victory?
Defending Faith: The Politics of the Christian Conservative Legal Movement by Daniel Bennett. University Press of Kansas, 2017. Hardcover, 224 pages, $35.One of the most compelling features of Daniel Bennett’s recent book, Defending Faith: The Politics of the...The High Price of Duty
The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics by Mark Lilla. HarperCollins, 2017. Hardcover, 143 pages, $25.The publishing logic behind The Once and Future Liberal is impeccable. Defeated and divided after the 2016 election, liberals urgently asked themselves...The Problem with Liberalism
The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce. Atlantic Monthly Press, 2017. Hardcover, 226 pages, $24. Can liberals save liberalism “from itself?” Edward Luce offers this question in his new book The Retreat of Western Liberalism, but situates it as part of an...
For America250, @lsheahan enters the fray:
What the American Revolution Secured: Order, Justice, and Freedom
A "revolution not made, but prevented.” Russell Kirk fondly and frequently quoted E. J. Payne’s pithy summary of Burke’s view of the Glorious Revolution.
"So yes, Lord Alfred, perhaps you are right after all. ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world! Perhaps one last Ulyssean adventure remains beyond the sunset, and perhaps some work of noble note may yet be done."