What we've been up to

New Web Feature: What does the crisis of higher education have to do with the practice of free speech? And how is the meaning of free speech determined by the relationship between the First Amendment and the Second? In his review of Dennis Baron's You Can't Always Say What You Want, Todd Ream, Honors Professor of Humanities at Indiana Wesleyan University, argues that the well-being of all our institutions of deliberation—from the classroom to the courts—depends on articulating the purpose of free speech.

"The crisis the university faces might be diagnosed as a failure of faculty members and administrators to articulate why free speech is critical to the pursuit of truth. As a community populated by finite beings, the university inherently embraces the risk of falling into error. Fortunately, virtues such as charity and courage, to name only two, not only make that risk tolerable but also necessary. Activities occurring in spaces such as laboratories, seminar rooms, and recital halls might be ordered toward an ultimate goal and greatest potential."

Hedgehog Noontime Discussion Now Available: Critical theory used to find its strongest support from the political left. Now conservatives and postliberals are the most prominent critics of such power centers as the establishment, the deep state, and the managerial elite. How did this transvaluation of critical theory happen?

We considered this question and other topics related to the latest issue, "By Theory Possessed," in a Hedgehog Noontime Discussion. A recording of that event is available on YouTube. It featured political theorist and Stanford University PhD student Malloy Owen, author of "From Frankfurt to Fox." Joining him was Michael Weinman, senior fellow at the Institute and professor of philosophy and politics at Bard College Berlin. He is the author of "Hannah Arendt and the Loss of a Common World."

Read more from the spring issue:

"The Spirit of Appomattox: Shelby Foote, Then and Now" by Jonathan Clarke.

Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn reviews In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility by

Costică Brădățan.

"Toward a Leisure Ethic" by Stuart Whatley.

Peter Hartwig reviews Beyond Belief: How Pentecostal Christianity Is Taking Over the World by Elle Hardy.

"Desire in the Cave" by Mary Townsend.

Paul Scherz writes about modern decision theory and the experience of FOMO.

"Adjacency" by Jay Tolson.

Ohad Reiss-Sorokin on Othmar Spann and the erotic search for knowledge.

"'I Love You' (in Theory)" by Blake Smith.

Kyle Edward Williams reviews Tradition and Apocalypse: An Essay on the Future of Christian Belief by David Bentley Hart.

"The Monster Discloses Himself: On the Allurements of Conspiracy Theory" by Phil Christman.

Joseph E. Davis writes about public health screenings for anxiety—and why they can be so dangerous.

"From Frankfurt to Fox: The Strange Career of Critical Theory" by Malloy Owen.

"Hannah Arendt and the Loss of a Common World" by Michael Weinman.

Jennifer A. Frey reviews Alasdair MacIntyre: An Intellectual Biography by Émile Perreau-Saussine.

"Hilary Mantel and the Historical Novel" by David K. Anderson.

Recommended Reading

From the archives: In the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, many leading intellectuals and politicians declared with confidence that liberal democracy had finally triumphed. But that confidence has clearly crumbled amid the recent resurgence of ultranationalism, authoritarianism, and other forms of illiberalism. In "Gnosticism in Modernity, or Why History Refuses to End," an essay for the fall 2022 issue, philosopher Michael Weinman and sociologist Isaac Ariail Reed, both senior fellows at the Institute, argue that such countervailing trends are only the most recent recurrence of a Gnostic impulse in Western culture. And its ancient sources must be reckoned with.

"It would be convenient for analysis if such Gnostic tendencies could be located uniquely in the explosion of illiberalism after the Cold War or in the twentieth-century European bloodlands. However, the insistence that the radical restructuring of society must begin with a destruction of the world as we know it runs far deeper than the past thirty, one hundred, or even two hundred years. Indeed, the Gnostic return (or its threat) has been a constant companion to Western political culture since antiquity."