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Nathaniel Peters Subscribe

Nathaniel Peters is the executive director of the Morningside Institute and a lecturer at Columbia University.

January 7, 2019|George Weigel, The Fragility of Order

Rebuilding a Fragile Political Order

by Nathaniel Peters|2 Comments

George Weigel on the truths we still ought to hold dear.

August 2, 2018|Free Persons and the Common Good, Jacques Maritain, Michael Novak, R.R. Reno, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Michael Novak, Defender of the Common Good

by Nathaniel Peters|8 Comments

Michael Novak, October 1, 2004 (Image Credit: Basso Cannarsa/Opale/Amaly.com).
He lamented Americans’ lack of moral consensus about the common good. But unlike his critics, Novak would not impose his vision of it from the top down.

April 20, 2018|Chappaquiddick, John Kennedy, Mary Jo Kopechne, Senator Edward Kennedy

Chappaquiddick Rescues the Truth: Kopechne Needn’t Have Died

by Nathaniel Peters|5 Comments

Jason Clarke and Andria Blackman in Chappaquiddick.
Mary Jo Kopechne perished not because Ted Kennedy crashed his car, but because the legacy was more important than telling the authorities she was in it.

July 31, 2017|

The March of Freedom

by Nathaniel Peters|2 Comments

Most elites in the West believe that undomesticated Christianity is hostile to human freedom. A persecutory relic of the past, it must be chastened before it can participate in liberal society. In one of the final books before his death, for example, John Rawls takes Christianity’s political illiberalism as a fact of “historical experience”—not a failure of Christianity to live up to its ideals, but part of its very essence. He further writes that the “content and tone” of his theory of justice was influenced by pondering  the “endless oppressions and cruelties of state power and inquisition used to sustain…

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December 15, 2016|It's Dangerous to Believe, LGBTQ non-discrimination, Mark Tushnet, Mary Eberstadt, Progressivism, Religious Conservatives, Religious Freedom

Stumbling Toward a Compromise

by Nathaniel Peters|12 Comments

“If you want to understand why evangelicals could vote for someone of Trump’s morals,” Megan McArdle suggested, read Harvard Law professor Mark Tushnet’s “Abandoning Defensive Crouch Liberal Constitutionalism.”

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August 18, 2016|Alexis de Tocqueville, Amusing Ourselves to Death, solidarity, subsidiarity, The Fractured Republic, Yuval Levin

What Do We Hold in Common?

by Nathaniel Peters|29 Comments

In Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, Gil Pender vacations in Paris with his fiancée and her parents. One night Pender takes a walk to escape the insufferable egotists who surround him and stumbles upon an antique Peugeot. It takes him to the 1920s, the golden age for which he has always yearned. He falls in love with Picasso’s lover Adriana, who herself has always longed for the 1890s’ Belle Époque. After a horse and carriage pass them by and whisk them to that period, and after the Impressionists they meet yearn for the Renaissance, Pender realizes that no age is as golden as we imagine and concludes that it is better to live in the reality of the present.

Yuval Levin’s The Fractured Republic is an extended essay on the same theme.

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September 23, 2014|Common Law, John Roberts, Lord Kames, Principles of Equity

The Equitable Lord Kames

by Nathaniel Peters|1 Comment

This past year, I helped teach a course in the development of the social sciences in Boston College’s Perspectives Program, our equivalent of a great books curriculum. As we read Hobbes, Spinoza, Marx, and Weber, I asked the students to track the thinkers’ views of human nature and of an objective moral order or natural law. Such core beliefs form the foundation of the many disagreements we have in the public square, I explained. Whether you know it or not, your opinion on welfare reform, the role of “judicial activism,” or the nature of marriage can be tied back to…

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October 14, 2013|Conscience, Descartes, John Henry Newman, libertarian, Phaedo, social conservatism

The Dynamic Unity of Conscience

by Nathaniel Peters|Leave a Comment

Many times in public discourse one finds oneself repeating the old line from The Princess Bride: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” We disagree about the terms of the debate, but also fail to address the more substantive disagreements that lie below the surface. Few thinkers speak as clearly as Robert P. George, the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University. “Self-awareness is, indeed, an obligation of democratic citizenship,” George writes. By that reckoning, he is a model democratic citizen. George’s newest book, Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas…

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March 6, 2013|Christian Theology, Hugo Grotius, Natural Law, Protestant Reformation, Reason, Revelation, Tolerance

Reason, Revelation, and Laïcité Positive

by Nathaniel Peters|4 Comments

The Truth of the Christian Religion, Hugo Grotius

In the public debates over religion, politics, and morality, isn’t there some rational standard that we all can agree on? Surely there must be a set of common foundations and core first principles from which we can reason together. This is by no means a new question, of course. For viciousness of rhetoric and physical treatment of other human beings, few ages rival the early modern period. In the midst of that age’s battles, Hugo Grotius, the Dutch humanist whose writings have greatly contributed to international law, sought to determine and argue for the core principles of Christianity on which all parties could agree.

The topic was not an abstract one for Grotius. He wrote from the castle in which he was imprisoned by Dutch Calvinists, who opposed his allegiance to a party that sought toleration for dissenters from strict Calvinism.

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Book Reviews

A Compelling and Compassionate Book about Epilepsy

by Theodore Dalrymple

Our knowledge of the human brain is limited, but neuroscientist Suzanne O’Sullivan’s observation of her patients yields astute insights.

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Andrew Roberts Takes the Measure of the “Populist” Aristocrat, Churchill

by Joao Carlos Espada

Yes, there is something new to be learned about Winston Churchill, and it's in the new 1,105-page biography by Andrew Roberts.

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Liberty Classics

Paul Heyne and the Trouble with Economists

by Nikolai G. Wenzel

Economics is often a morality-free zone, and Paul Heyne shows why this is a mistake.

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Bringing Natural Law to the Nations

by Samuel Gregg

If sovereign states ordered their domestic affairs in accordance with principles of natural law, the international sphere would benefit greatly.

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Podcasts

Born-Again Paganism: A Conversation with Steven Smith

A discussion with Steven D. Smith

Steven Smith talks with Richard Reinsch about his provocative thesis that a modern form of paganism is becoming public orthodoxy.

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"Slouching Towards Mar-a-Lago:" A Conversation with Andrew Bacevich

A discussion with Andrew J. Bacevich

Andrew Bacevich discusses his new book Twilight of the American Century

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Bureaucracy, Regulation, and the Unmanly Contempt for the Constitution

A discussion with John Marini

John Marini unmasks the century-long effort to undermine the Constitution's distribution of power.

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Beautiful Losers in American Politics: A Conversation with Nicole Mellow

A discussion with Nicole Mellow

Nicole Mellow on the beautiful losers in American politics who have redefined the country.

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Recent Posts

  • State Versus National Citizenship in Our New Federalism

    We are fast abandoning the fundamental jurisprudence of our law that legislatures make general rules and courts apply them to specific circumstances.
    by Thomas Ascik

  • Right Populism, Left Populism, and Constitutional Constraints

    A good constitution thus can cabin the damage that popular movements may do, while still permitting them to shake up complacent elites.
    by John O. McGinnis

  • Hell Is Truth Realized Too Late: Russia and the Legacy of World War I

    Had the costs of war and revolution been understood, Russia might have avoided much of what it suffered over the 20th century.
    by William Anthony Hay

  • Did New York City Really Lose Out in Amazon Deal?

    Perhaps we should be with the socialists on this one: NYC did not lose much in net by Amazon’s pullout.
    by James R. Rogers

  • A Corrupt Republic? Hamilton, Madison, and the Rise of Oligarchy

    Jay Cost asks his readers to reconsider the ways that corruption all too easily flows from the federal government, in every era.
    by Tony Williams

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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.

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