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Friday, May 1, 2026

On Clarence Thomas' Anti-Wilsonianism

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Justice Clarence Thomas recently delivered a speech at UT Austin on the Declaration of Independence and the principles of the American Foun...
Thursday, January 15, 2026

Some Thoughts on the Rule of Law in Plato's Statesman

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I recently had occasion to read Plato’s Statesman , an exceedingly difficult dialogue, which I do not understand. Perhaps the most famous di...
Tuesday, December 16, 2025

Some Questions for Straussians Concerning Reason and Revelation

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For the past few years, I have often found myself in the company of people deeply exercised by the problem of reason vs. revelation as artic...
Tuesday, August 19, 2025

Constitutional Government and Public Debt: The Long Hand of the Dead

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In a celebrated  1789 letter to James Madison, Thomas Jefferson declared what he took to be a self-evident truth: “ ‘that the earth belongs...
Friday, April 18, 2025

Henry Jones Ford on the Monarchical Presidency

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In his 1919 Presidential Address to the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Henry Jones Ford lays out the standar...
Saturday, March 22, 2025

Herbert Croly Against Equal Opportunity

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In 1967, John Schaar published, “Equality of Opportunity, and Beyond” in Volume 9 of Nomos. The article remains, by my lights, the best or a...
Wednesday, March 19, 2025

Edward Gibbon's Smithian Defense of Luxury

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I wrote a post some time ago contrasting Adam Smith and Jean Jacques Rousseau on the utility of luxury consumption. Smith famously argues t...
Sunday, March 9, 2025

Thomas Hobbes on Counsel vs. Command

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Thomas Hobbes' A Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England lays out the basis of Hobbes' famous po...