That’s where I’ll be Thursday through Sunday at the American Political Science Association meeting.
You can see me at two big shows:
Thursday at 2, I’ll be on a Claremont panel with Hadley Arkes, our own Jim Ceaser, Pat Deneen, and Matt Spalding on the place of natural rights in understanding America today. So there are various things I could talk about: How the Road to Serfdom Never Gets to Serfdom… How natural rights vs. History doesn’t account for our situation today. How the Lockean change of our time (both economic and “social) is change we can half believe in…. etc. Not to mention my legislative compromise, accidental Thomism theory of the Declaration. I will, of course, be cast as the anti-American evildoer. But I might actually be the mean between the extremes of Deneen and Ceaser.
Friday at 8 (a.m.!) I will be on a really good panel on Tocqueville and Catholicism–including presentations by Paul Rahe and Gary Glenn. I’ve already suggested that the seeds of American Thomism can be found in Tocqueville, although he didn’t really locate an American aristocracy he could believe in.
I just got interviewed by THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE on Catholic views of President Bush the younger. Although I didn’t defend a lot of the results of his policies, it seemed heretical even to say that his intentions were almost always good and he was our most Catholic president ever. I also took shots on both MacIntyre and “new natural law” that I hope aren’t used, because I didn’t get to balance those unkind remarks with some positive stuff. I was asked: What public officials around today (including public intellectuals) do you believe in? I went with Yuval Levin–not a Catholic. But if you have any more names, I’d be pleased to have them.
August 31st, 2011 | 1:35 pm
Have you published anywhere your thoughts on the new natural law theory of Grisez, Finnis, etc.?
August 31st, 2011 | 1:48 pm
no
August 31st, 2011 | 3:10 pm
Well, Peter as the one b/t the extremes should hold for this set (Ceaser, Lawler, Deneen), but it seems sort of funny to apply the label “extreme,” in any manner, to our Jim, the man who wants to bring various conservatives together(albeit with his distinctively modest type of natural rights championship in the driver’s seat), the man who’s not sure if there’s any bankable difference between postmodern and regular ol’ conservatives. If Reaganesque big-tent conservatism has a philosopher, it’s him; that is, if its tendencies as a “persuasion” are consistent enough to merit a philosophic analysis, he’s the one who’s done/doing it.
Enjoy Seattle, y’all!
August 31st, 2011 | 4:26 pm
There’s a lot of perhaps warmish air and vague arm-waving in these precincts about how this or that post-Enlightenment figure was really a closet “Thomist”, or that he “thom’ed better than he knew”, so to speak. E.g. Tocqueville or the Founders. But I have seen no evidence that Peter or any of the other regular correspondents here has actually done any close sustained reading of *any* texts by Aquinas, or even of the important secondary literature, such as recent Analytic Thomism. I would be happy to be wrong about this, if I might be pointed to some serious exegesis and philosophizing along these lines. Re Thomas’s actual social philosophy, to the extent that there is one (based on what he plainly says in the Summa, not some tortured neo-Scalian tendentious hermeneutic thereof) I recommend Eleonore Stump’s chapter “Justice” in her magisterial book on Aquinas (it was called such by a reviewer in “Mind”, not just me). It’s not that long and can be read in isolation from the rest of the excellent text. –Btw, “most Catholic president ever”: LOL, howling.
August 31st, 2011 | 5:05 pm
Carl, after all, I meant on the exact issue before us!
September 1st, 2011 | 11:29 pm
(expresses reserved agreement with HT.) Why accidental Thomism? Based on your interpretation of Locke, why couldn’t the fusion of elements in the Declaration tend more toward, e.g., Duns Scotus? He would have been closer to Locke on the answer to the question of universals but still believe in a personal God.
September 2nd, 2011 | 12:22 pm
Thanks for getting the point, jack. May I remark that Stump, who has basically devoted her adult life to studying Thomas, does a fair bit of *contrasting* Locke with Aquinas on private property, e.g.? What is Peter’s argument against her, I should like to know? Locke is not a philosopher with whom I find myself in much agreement (his Bear-eats-a-berry argument for the naturalness of private property is risible–I suppose when the bear sh*ts the berry it ceases to be his private property anymore–which may have a ‘bearing’ on some of our modern real estate practices), but at least he was concerned with the full breadth of philosophy — do Pomophilosocons and rock critics ever actually stoop to thinking about…*philosophical* questions?
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