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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.
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So the excellent editor of The New Atlantis, maybe our best journal on technology and society, reflects on the HBO series Stay of Play. It’s all about the parents finding too […]
#14. The greatness of Thanksgiving is that it doesn’t aspire to greatness, but only to the shared experiences that make living worth living for each one of us.
I’ve just gotten around to reading closely Marilynne Robinson’s most recent collection of essays—When I Was a Child I Read Books. Robinson, maybe our best novelist, is a challenging writer. […]
Conservative NYT columnist Ross Douthat explores the next stage of creeping—and sometimes creepy—American libertarianism. We Americans are still becoming less Puritanical, if by Puritanical we remain a combination of religious […]
So Republicans are starting to compare the signature lies of President Clinton and President Obama. Here they are: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.” “No […]
Most of the highly industrious, post-industrial, and prosperous parts of the world have a “birth dearth,” a birth rate significantly below the rate of replacement. Japan, of course, has one […]
Judging from their mid-term essays, I would say that among the many and diverse books and essays we’ve read so far in my course in technology, the one that has impressed the […]
Don’t worry. Be happy. Live in the present. The philosopher Rousseau said that was the natural condition of man, before he was screwed up by self-consciousness, time, awareness of death, […]
So here’s some savvy conservative commentary on Saturday Night Live’s hilarious fake promo for the new season of the HBO hit Girls. Introducing a needed note of realism into the show is the new […]
There’s a new columnist out there writing for The American Conservative. You may or may not regard him as conservative. Patrick Deneen reflects on a semi-depressing book written by my favorite […]
So I thought I’d share with you my contribution to a symposium sponsored by a fairly conservative organization on what to do to improve the teaching of the humanities. The other contributions […]
Studies show that students flourish best when under constantly under a moderate amount of stress.
So my class on technology is beginning to consider skeptical views of the transformative possibilities of biotechnology. One comes from those who say that the evolutionary understanding of nature explains […]
The reason Socrates banished laughter or comedy from the poetry of the just city is that comedians, at their best, remind us of what we all know: There’s an inexpressible […]
Yuval Levin, in his neglected classic Imagining the Future, claims that there are two characteristic ways of viewing our technological and biotechnological future. One is in terms of innovations, the […]
As I explained a couple of years ago, I lost interest in talking up Constitution Day when the government said we at colleges that get federal money are required to […]
So you might think I’m excessively anti-technological. That’s not true at all. I do think that liberal education should be a counterweight to all our technological obsessions. That means its […]
Mark Bauerlein, author of The Dumbest Generation, responded quite positively to the final point of my appreciative comments on his book. I said liberal education is always countercultural. Mark wisely […]
Well, it depends on what you mean by science. There was a panel at the meeting of the American Political Science Association on the (alleged?) outrage of the “Coburn Amendment.” […]
So I’m teaching a seminar this semester on Technology, Biotechnology, and Democracy. Its balanced effort, of course, will be show how technology makes our lives both better and worse, as […]