Over at the Liberty and Law blog I am writing a series of essays in which I examine Robert Nisbet’s ideas in light of contemporary austerity. In the first essay I reflect on how the over-reach of the administrative state is making some space for the rise of intermediary institutions to develop. In the second essay I offer a sharp contrast between the Progressive construction of community, which depends on both individualism and collectivism, and a more conservative communitarianism that stresses self-reliance rather than individualism. Parts three and four to follow.
Ted V. McAllister
Ted McAllister is a native of Oklahoma, now living in Moorpark, California with his wife, Dena, and his two children, Elisa and Luke. He yearns for his own chunk of land and for those bits of nature that please him, but not for farming or for unnecessary drudgery of the sort that involves physical labor. He is an aesthetic agrarian, not a practicing one. Educated as an Intellectual and Cultural Historian at Vanderbilt University, he now teaches at Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy where he pursues with his students the enduring questions rather than the particular answers. His book, Revolt Against Modernity: Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, and the Search for a Post-Liberal Order launched him into the study of political philosophy, though his epistemological orientation is much shaped by his training as a historian. Working presently on Walter Lippmann as well as a US History textbook, he expects soon to write a multi-volume history of the Baby-boomers.
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