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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.

Articles by Ted V. McAllister

Civic Engagement and the “Native Country”

[This post is adapted with permission from “Making American Places: Civic Engagement Rightly Understood,” an essay in the anthology Why Place Matters: Geography, Identity, and Civic Life in Modern America,…
July 15, 2014

In Search of the Real Coolidge

Our interest in historical subjects says as much about our society as about the subjects themselves.  The growing interest in the life, thought and presidency of Calvin Coolidge issues from…
August 13, 2013

Public versus Government Schools

In an essay posted at the law and liberty blog I explored how Progressives seek to rear citizens--to create the kind of citizens well suited to the Progressive administrative state.…
August 9, 2012

Whatever Happened to the Playful Ad Hominem?

Few things excited or engaged my mind as a child as much as Buckley’s playful ad hominem attacks, launched regularly at his guests on Firing Line.  The debates concerned heavy…
July 24, 2012

Nisbet, Austerity, and Progressive Community

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…
July 24, 2012

Cars, Individualism, and the Paradox of Freedom in a Mass Society

The automobile squared perfectly with a distinctive American ideal of freedom—freedom of mobility.
October 14, 2011

Rocky and the New Populism

Today we can easily forget how dark things looked in the 1970s and how much people feared that they might be living in the sunset years of our nation and…
September 9, 2011

Iris Chang and the Delicate Art of Remembering

A proper remembering requires more than telling the facts or chronicling the plunder, rape, murder in Nanking; it requires that one explain the event.
August 5, 2011

Can the Left Govern?

Recently I was asked to participate in a symposium on Michael Berube's "The Left At War" for the journal "Politics and Culture."  I took the author to be scolding those…
January 19, 2011

Allan Bloom and Homogenizing Nature

What is the purpose of education?
August 31, 2010

Liberated From Community?

Was Nisbet wrong about the quest for community?
August 18, 2010

Pale Liberalism

It is time to reopen the questions about human nature, about human autonomy, about the desirability self-creation. Liberals should, in brief, broaden their horizons to ponder competing views of human…
August 2, 2010