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Adam Smith

Website Associate Editor and FPR Books Associate Editor

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

Articles by Adam Smith

The Word and the Machine: On Paul Kingsnorth

I wanted living color, an axe to break the frozen sea.
September 12, 2025

The Localist at the Capitol: A Conversation with Marie Glusenkamp Perez

"I don't particularly call myself an environmentalist. I love the Pinchot National Forest. My specific woods, the land that my family is from..."
July 17, 2025

On Being Indifferent

The politics of Jesus are “brutally modest.” “Jesus’ life seems to have been mostly one of local, familial labor and relations, carried out in the compass of a small town…
May 3, 2025

One Weird Trick to Getting a Perfect Education

The basic principle of education is that you can’t learn anything you don’t want to learn
March 29, 2025

On Courage

Now – every moment, but now especially, this moment in history – is the time not to watch but to act.
January 28, 2025

Against Bigness, Not Against Health Insurance

I believe in personal responsibility; insurance companies believe in impersonal responsibility.
December 23, 2024

What Plays in Peoria

You don’t have to be normal. You don’t have to be weird. You just have to be a person – which is a moral ideal, not a fact of nature…
October 15, 2024

Democracy Against Localism

That’s the great cultural task now: to relearn this old language, to keep it from dying out, to nurture it and refine and expand it, to develop new idioms and…

Waging Culture Wars Justly

To fight a culture war justly is to be confident that your arguments have a reasonable chance of success; but this means that to fight justly is not only about…
March 25, 2024

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.
January 23, 2024

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…
December 6, 2023

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…
September 11, 2023