thoughts in and out of season
A slightly edited version of the preceding essay, originally entitled “Liberalism, the Transcendent, and Restoration,” appeared in the Summer 2000 issue of Modern Age. It is also available in German and Czech.
The disappearance of the radical left is a sign that in principle it has reached its attainable goals. While no one … More ...
A slightly edited version of the following essay appeared in the Winter 2002 issue of Telos.
Why does liberalism—the tradition that makes equal freedom the political touchstone—combine such strength with such incoherence? The attempt to make freedom dominant leads to contradiction. Liberalism is triumphant almost everywhere, but its victory reverses the meaning of its … More ...
A slightly edited version of the following essay appeared in issue 20 of The Scorpion.
Political thinkers engage our attention by their presentation of the particular features of their own time and place as well as the permanent qualities of man in society. We can read Aristotle and Hobbes for general lessons, or for … More ...
The relation among individual, society and state is a confused one in our time. Is the individual everything and society nothing, or the other way around? Why should one care about the other? Can the state treat the whole social world as the theater for its meddling? If not, what are the limits? Such questions … More ...
The following review of Paul Gottfried’s After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State (Princeton 1999) appeared in the Summer 2001 issue of Telos.
The title of this book refers to the practice and ideology of contemporary Western government, which, in Gottfried’s view, bears little resemblance to historical liberalism and in many ways is … More ...
James Kalb
Yale Law School
Independent Study—Charles Gray, supervisor
May 1, 1978
During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and indeed until the break with Rome under Henry VIII, king and church agreed that each had a sphere of exclusive jurisdiction that the other could not infringe upon without usurpation. Naturally, problems arose in defining the … More ...
James Kalb
Yale Law School
Supervised Analytic Writing—Barbara Black, supervisor
1977
Draft
This paper deals with developments in the substantive criminal law of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and New York during what I shall call the “eighteenth century”: the period beginning in Pennsylvania in 1682 with the founding of the proprietary government, in Massachusetts in 1692 with … More ...
A Swedish translation of the following essay appeared in the Swedish mainstream conservative quarterly Contextus (no. 4, 1998). Bracketed language did not appear in the essay as published.
The American Founding was the first of the liberal revolutions; nonetheless, America is in many ways the most conservative of Western countries. It is the most anticommunist, … More ...
The goals and ultimate destiny of the European Union have been variously explained. The uncertainty is not altogether accidental, since the plan of the EU Founding Fathers was to bring about European unity by indirection. The strategy is a good one; it is hard to criticize what has no accepted description. Those who favor the … More ...
My Liberal Lawyer correspondent has provoked me to the following reflections on the relationship between liberalism and totalitarianism:
… More ...How you use political words depends on the features of political life you think deserve to be played up. People view these things differently so maybe the best I can do is explain what I have in