American Heresies and Higher Education

In these learned and scintillating essays, Peter Augustine Lawler confirms his status as our leading conservative Catholic American dissident. Against the technocratic and libertarian distortions of our humanity, he defends the the free and relational person who is meant to work and love, pray and contemplate and to govern himself. With the help of Plato, Tocqueville, and Solzhenitsyn he gives us the language and categories to once again experience our humanity in all its amplitude. Like his aforementioned great predecessors, he is a "friendly critic" of democratic excesses and a partisan of the "one true progress" toward wisdom, virtue, and self-mastery. With wit and penetration, Lawler attacks techno-imperialism and the mania for "diversity" in higher education today without ever denying the legitimacy of technology and true intellectual diversity within their spheres. His book thus embodies the balanced and humanizing spirit of liberal education, properly understood. Daniel J. Mahoney, Augustine Chair In Distinguished Scholarship, Assumption College