Adam Smith

Adam Smith
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Adam Smith is Assistant Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Dubuque, in Dubuque, Iowa, where he also directs the Honors Program.

Recent Essays

Localism without Nostalgia

Let’s have a localism without nostalgia, a practical but also a faithful localism. As localists let’s be committed to an accurate accounting of the checkered past that grounds our hope.

Seeking a President for the End of the World

For brokenists, the new regime is not just a matter of garden-variety regulatory capture, and “the rules” are just as often a symptom of the problem as a solution to it. This “merger of state and corporate power” comes, like all regimes, with a legitimating ideology, a cultural vision. And there seem to be quite a lot of rules involved in that vision. It’s technocratic, to say the least.

Camping and Homemaking

You can’t actually get to utopia; it only seems like you can because it looms so large. I think it’s better to start wherever you are, and ask what it needs you to do.

Liberalism, Postliberalism, and Localism: A Review of Justice By Means of Democracy

Allen notes that in ancient political thought, “the people” or demos referred not to the whole but to one part of the whole political community, namely the poor. The question of regime analysis or prescription was the question of which part actually ruled or ought to rule on behalf of the whole.

Is Regime Change too Radical? Or too Conservative?

What is more radical, and more conservative, than to cast the ring into the fire? That would be a real “regime change,” would it not?

Observing Limits to Re-enchant a Mute World: A Review of The Uncontrollability of the World

Even Rosa the respectable sociologist entertains the possibility that if we relearned how to listen, the mountains might speak. Perhaps they too have their spirits, mute but waiting.

Localism as a Form of Government, or Localism as a Way of Life?

Consider that here at FPR we are at least as concerned with cultural issues as with political ones. If we are being honest, many of us are probably more concerned with the former than with the latter.

Après Nous, Le Déluge

What keeps me on one side rather than the other is my belief that if we had been living more fully in that real world, a lot of what we call “the pandemic” simply would not have occurred (perhaps including the virus itself, if we accept the increasingly compelling theory that it was man-made).

Putting Two Things Together: Reflections on Institution Building

I came away from Steubenville, as I came away later from Grove City, with the startling idea that things are possible. Small things; local things; putting two things together, not all things but two things.

Where Is Our Freedom to Exercise Sympathy?

The same things that happened to the family farms, and to farmers like my father, are now happening to the colleges, and to faculty like me.

On the Front Porch with Ursula Le Guin

Those who do know her work might be a bit surprised if I suggest that Le Guin has a real porcher sensibility.

Clearing Ground

The romantic impulse toward wholeness, or the longing for when things were better—take a few bad turns in that mood, and you find yourself chanting hymns to blood-and-soil. People can start out defending Berry’s proper prejudices and end up celebrating prejudice itself.