Peter Lawler
Professor of Government, Berry College
Peter Lawler is Dana Professor of Government and former chair of the department of Government and International Studies at Berry College. He serves as executive editor of the journal Perspectives on Political Science, and has been chair of the politics and literature section of the American Political Science Association. He also served on the editorial board of the new bilingual critical edition of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, and serves on the editorial boards of several journals. He has written or edited fifteen books and over 200 articles and chapters in a wide variety of venues. He was the 2007 winner of the Weaver Prize in Scholarly Letters.rnrnLawler served on President Bush's Council on Bioethics from 2004 – 09. His most recent book, Modern and American Dignity, is available from ISI Books.rnrnFollow him on Twitter @peteralawler.
Ross Douthat, the only conservative columnist for the New York Times, reports some good news and some bad news. The good: The Americans are becoming less criminal and less violent. […]
So libertarians are rightly outraged by the Obama administration’s new Puritanical speech code. But others have either praised or blamed that same administration for its “aggressive libertarianism” when it comes to sexual […]
Here’s a good article that offers six explanations for why “median-income men in America” are “in distress.” Their incomes are dropping. Lots of “prime-age men” have been “dropping out of […]
R.R. Reno, quite an astute conservative public intellectual, claims that those with eyes to see know that the big news these days is the global victory of capitalism. I’m not […]
So Peter Sacks, author of the excellent Generation X Goes to College, explains what’s really wrong with the likely MOOCification of higher education. Studies show that learning through MOOCS and […]
So here’s a funny article on the sheer silliness and passive-aggressive hostility of the jargon that dominates the worlds of management, consultants, marketing, and all that. That world, it seems to me, […]
So let me remind you that The Atlantic does the best job of popularizing scientific studies. For one thing, it’s remarkably unideological. Both the left and the right—and the libertarians and the […]
So I want to call your attention to a fine article by Jonathan Marks in Inside Higher Ed, the daily online newspaper of higher education. Marks writes at a level […]
That legalization of or especially creating a constitutional right to same-sex marriage will lead to a constitutional right to polygamy is a favorite “scare tactic” of social conservatives. But Slate‘s Jillian Keenan argues, […]
So BIG THINK published a sensible little essay by the distinguished public intellectual John Gray. He says don’t think about immortality as something you can achieve through your own efforts. […]
So I’ve been thinking a lot about the charge that conservatives are bad because they hate science. But it’s just not true. Here’s a beginning of my explanation why. We […]
So constitutional journalists such as Linda Greenhouse have attacked the federalism argument that libertarian constitutional scholars such as Randy Barnett want to use to strike down the DOMA. The result, […]
Conservative John Fund, writing in the National Review,
Many conservatives are sympathetic to one argument against the Defense of Marriage Act: It's a violation of the principle of federalism.
Our displays of techno-freedom are turning more and more of us into dependents: Apart from specific job categories, technological advances in products and services, along with greater outsourcing opportunities and […]
So the University of Colorado has hired my friend Steve Hayward to be a visiting professor in conservative thought and policy. Some alum’ funded the position because he believed that students […]
I’ve gotten a lot of comments by email and “other locations” on the web about my recent post on Tom Friedman’s expert certification of the reality of MOOCs. One comment […]
The BIG educational news today is that the mainstream expert journalist Thomas Friedman has certified that MOOCs are real. And a quick bit of GOOGLING reveals that all the marketers of […]
Here’s the third part of my celebration of Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos. I know I’m annoying many BIG THINK readers. I may even be bad for their health; […]
The title Lost in the Cosmos is meant to be a correction to Carl Sagan’s “splendid picture book” Cosmos, which Percy understands as a failed self-help book. Sagan aims to get […]
So lots of readers (about six) have written ME asking for advice on what book they should read to turn their lives around. Here’s my recommendation: Lost in the Cosmos by […]
“How to Make the Most of Your College Education” has become a popular blogging theme. Megan McArdle got things started this time, but the most sensible contribution has come from […]
One of our country’s most able and prolific bloggers, Walter Russell Mead, reports that the idea of being able to sit for the bar after just two years of law […]
So anyone who’s ever really thought about love knows that our techno-liberated world is pretty weak on talking about love and death. We’re either too vulgar or too vague. It’s not […]
So Paul LeBlanc, president of Southern New Hampshire University, graciously and thoughtfully responded in the thread to my post complaining about his disruptive understanding of education that reduced to the “traditional” college […]
So I’ve gotten several emails this morning asking me what I think about this article by Paul J. LeBlanc, the president of Southern New Hampshire University. It’s a plea for […]
The great benefit of education, "the key to increasingly upward mobility," is expanding the vocabulary of students.
So Joe Carter, a particularly able blogger, mocks the indignation of the North Carolina legislators who want to keep people on welfare from being able to play the state-run lottery. […]
1. Today is Lee-Jackson day. It reminds us that Virginia was forced into a war it didn’t want by events initiated by the states of the deep South and President […]
So what will you be doing Sunday night? My advice: Watch more TV! Now you innovative and disruptive BIG THINK readers might think you don’t have the time. But that’s […]