Category: Politics
The Quiet Centrality of Market States
It is not overstating the case to say that Americans are having a protracted debate about the relationship between markets and the nation. The conversation is simmering in both of America’s major political parties and, somewhat curiously, it may end...
Liberty Doesn’t Mean What They Think It Means
In his new book, The Case Against Socialism, Rand Paul writes that he hopes his readers will choose “liberty” instead of socialism. Likewise, in last week’s G File, Jonah Goldberg said a great deal about liberty in his response to First Things editor...
What is a society?
On Facebook my friend Scott Pryor rightly notes that if Dr. Miller failed to define ‘justice’ in his essay at Providence, my post suffers from the lack of a definition of “society.” So here is a stab at answering that question.
Impartiality is Not Neutrality
Friend of Mere O Paul D. Miller has responded to Jonathan Leeman’s recent Providence essay with a post of his own. This paragraph in particular is what I want to focus on because it highlights one of the most important points...
Did Liberalism Solve Pluralism?
One of the persistent framings of the debate about liberalism works by asserting that liberalism has figured out how to help people live together in the midst of deep differences. Thus those who reject liberalism are invoking dangerous demons from...
The Post-Liberal State and the (Highly Technical) Goods of Modernity
Several years ago my dad suffered a traumatic brain injury. To put it as plainly as I can: He is alive today because he had major brain surgery followed by a three-week long nap in the ICU that cost someone...
Is all human community parasitic?
That is the claim made by Dan Hugger in a recent post at the Acton Institute. Hugger, picking up on the French-Ahmari debate, argued that my framing of the debate—that liberalism ultimately fails because it both relies on other social...
Martin Bucer’s Anti-Poverty Program
In his book De Regno Christi, Martin Bucer outlines his vision of a Christian society, including details on how he believes such a society should handle questions of poverty. The basic vision can be sketched out as follows:
Should We Expand the Scope of the Abortion Debate?
One of the perennial questions amongst pro-lifers concerns the wisdom of expanding the definition of “pro-life” to encompass political issues beyond the question of legalized abortion. On the one hand, we’ve published several pieces at Mere O over the years...
What makes a person or theological statement “individualistic”?
I wanted to put up a quick post to deal with an objection that had been raised to John Shelton’s post over on the main site. In his post, Shelton argued that there is a strong individualistic streak to American...