Reading Plato is ever soul-wrenching and, at the same time, soul-forming. When I come, with a class, to a favorite passage well-marked in my text, I read it again. I shake my head. “Has anyone ever said it better?” I wonder, sometimes out-loud. How is it that something written over two thousand years ago still strikes our souls in a way little else does? Is it because, all claims to the contrary, human nature really has not changed? Some suspect that the only way they can escape the [MORE]

It is remarkable that the prospect of One Big Market—planetary, inescapable, open all hours—raises no questions for libertarians, who scorn the idea of One Big Cartel (communism) or One Big State (world government). This seems an interesting case of social blindness. If One Big Cartel is impossible or not worth the trouble its creation entails, [1] why should One Big Market be different? And what if something very like One Big State is needed to build One Big Market? Yet libertarians [MORE]

For over four decades, George W. Carey has engaged students, scholars, and educated laymen in a searching conversation regarding the nature and right ordering of public life. He is perhaps best known as an expositor of conservatism, not because most of his writings have addressed that philosophy and persuasion but because his method and his vision of the good capture what is best therein: prudence in the service of the tradition of natural-law thought that lies at the heart of Western [MORE]