On this Memorial Day we take some time to reflect on books and movies that can help us better understand the experiences of soldiers at war.

Rousseau’s seemingly optimistic theory that man is good in nature (the “noble savage”) but is corrupted by private property and by traditional social, political, and ecclesiastical institutions proved disastrous, leading to the irrational and deadly utopianism of the French Revolution.

Being in the middle has a bad reputation. Middle children often seem willful and resentful.

Ever since Ford pardoned Nixon, the perspective of the press and the nation changed.

We are winding toward a season in America in which our thoughts about our country must come to bear upon our decisions, and we must, whatever our convictions about modern democracy, consider how we should best use our constitutional rights.

Last week we introduced readers to John Marshall, one of the most consequential and least-known members of the founding generation.

When we think of the United States, we see it as a patchwork of regions, states, and communities.

Many Americans know the names of Washington and Jefferson and could probably tell you a thing or two about that person but display little to no familiarity with a figure who rightfully claims a place alongside them as an important figure of the so-called founding generation: John Marshall.

“When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross,” Sinclair Lewis probably never said.

Former NPR business editor Uri Berliner earned extensive conservative accolades for his recent essay besmirching the federally-funded media organization for what he described as a newsroom increasingly biased in favor of the woke tenets of the Democratic Party.

On January 4, 1975, US President Gerald Ford signed into law a section of the Social Security Act that established a national child support collection system.

My field of political philosophy contains an inherent contradiction since a philosophical disposition often eschews too close an engagement with the powers and principalities of this world.

From their early Puritan days Americans have painted their politics with Biblical imagery.

We think of economics as “the dismal science” in part because it tries to bracket the question of values, opting for mere description and impersonal laws.

Has the practice of “civility” been left behind? Though it has never been practiced as well as it should, it nonetheless has supported a system of social manners, without which it is difficult to live together.

We find ourselves once again in the midst of a depressing spectacle: election season. In my role as a political scientist I had to pay attention to electoral politics, even though I thought the art of governing was far more interesting.

Most of my students say that the main reason for the sorry state of our democracy is that people are “not well-informed.”

Political life must operate at some intuitive level on a coherence between views of the self and modes of governance.

The Declaration of Independence listed among its complaints against the king that he had involved us in Europe’s wars, insisting that their problems should not be our concern.

I live not far from Prince George’s County, Maryland, which, due to rising rents and housing prices, enacted in April 2023 a temporary rent-stabilization law.