“President Anheuser W. Bush was having a bad day.” [...] “Here it was, the eve of the American Tercentennial, and America had no place to celebrate it, because the last remaining piece of American soil had been sold off.”

On the Kolnai front, start with Ethics, Value & Reality. Or, if you like quirky but penetrating political philosophy, do Privilege and Liberty.

Thanks for the tip on Kolnai, whom I’d never heard of. I’ll check him out — I frequently like off-the-beaten-path thinkers. Incidentally, I see the well-known analytic philosopher Barry Smith has an interest in him, so once in a while even those dryasdust academics hit pay dirt (as the Wittgensteinian Peter Winch developed a fascination with Simone Weil). The journal Analysis usually doesn’t have much on politics, but recently they published an interesting reductio ad absurdum of libertarian thinking applied to foreign ownership of a country’s property — so you never know.

Thanks for your response. Gotta go teach … .

Thanks for reading what I said carefully and responding.

I did seem to strike more than one nerve, though, with the post, since HT also displayed his capacity for (moderate) snideness with his “silo” comment and his exasperated (?) brief exposition of what true “Catholic philosophy” is and entails today. HT probably has a certain conception of what “political philosophy” is, which led to his (mild but) slighting remark about it. What I, or Manent, mean by it may be something different, though. One would be hard-pressed to judge on the basis of a post or two.

However, the real issue his comments raise — one that I am personally and professionally interested in, and some of our more systematic-minded readers and commentators as well — is, how the genuinely catholic Catholic intellectual should conduct his or her mind? I tried to indicate that Wright embodies a (particular biblical) faith without openness to philosophy, while Manent practices a high form of philosophical analysis, but brackets his own faith, which is unsatisfying to the demands of faith. As for HT’s comments, I’m certainly not averse to the various disciplines he (?) listed (and we both would agree there are many more), but how they are arranged and ordered is a real issue. Merely denigrating “political philosophy” and listing other disciplines that a catholic/Catholic mind should pursue doesn’t get us very far. And the list of eminent practitioners, many of whom I read, some with profit, doesn’t get me very far in this regard. I strongly suspect that this is not the place to pursue this topic, since it can very quickly get academic and pedantic, but I thought I’d at least acknowledge that it was, and is, worth pursuing. Cheers.