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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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]