Scott Yenor

The Family: What is to Be Done?

Scott Yenor — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 10:45:25 PST

We have seen how the logic of contract and the movement to conquer nature have resulted in a triumph of autonomy and the demise of family. The family thus stands in need of a defense. Defense of the family means defense of an institution, and that defense requires some defense of the nature that these institutions react to and reflect. This is where contemporary advocates have focused their attention. Both the modern principles—the principle of contract and the move to conquer nature—are partial truths, and it is best to understand how they each fit into a proper understanding of married life. We can see the partial truth of these principles by seeing how today’s defenders of marriage and family life appeal to anatomy, on the one hand, and love, on the other hand. The defense of marriage and family life in the name of love must ultimately supplement the defense in the name of anatomy.

The Family's End

Scott Yenor — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 10:45:24 PST

Family decline appears to be inevitable when viewed with a long perspective. The family has been progressively differentiated from institutions that now accomplish what was formerly within the provenance of the family. The city's gods, and eventually the Church, replaced ancestral gods. The marketplace, and eventually the modern economy, replaced the family as the unit of economic production. The city replaced primitive patriarchy. Slowly, and more controversially, the state has come to fulfill increasing portions of the family’s educational mission. Even the family’s "provision of social services" has come, more and more, to be a state concern. This "loss of functions" is a rational application of the division of labor, as functions extraneous to family life devolve in the presence of institutions better suited to accomplish these goals. As the family loses more and more functions, its purposes become thinner but, it is hoped, truer to the reality of what a family is.

Political Philosophy in The Sun Also Rises

Scott Yenor — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 08:39:15 PDT

An America's Founding and Future Lecture: The Family in the Liberal Order

Scott Yenor — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 15:54:10 PDT

Lincoln and the Problem of Civil Rights During Wartime

Scott Yenor — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 15:54:09 PDT

Today’s concerns about the Patriot Act and the status of our combatants in the War on Terrorism raise perennial issues of democratic governance in a liberal society. No president faced these issues more clearly and stridently than Abraham Lincoln. Responding to arguments from Erastus Corning and other New York Democrats, Lincoln defended his decisions with respect to civil rights as being humane and respectful of the goals of union. In this talk, Dr. Yenor discusses Lincoln’s arguments and then transfers the principles of his arguments to contemporary issues. Today’s issues may be as complicated as, or even more complicated than, those faced by Lincoln, but our resolution of those issues favors civil rights much more than the Great Emancipator’s view.

Marriage and the Limits of Modern Political Thought

Scott Yenor — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 15:54:07 PDT

What is a family? In this podcast, Dr. Yenor discusses how family and marriage are viewed through the prism of political and cultural beliefs. Many modern thinkers see marriage and family life as defined by the principle of consent and are not averse to reforming the family as part of their larger efforts to reform society. Others feel that these modern principles tend to be imperial and to cloud our vision to the detriment of marriage and family life. Consent is not adequate to explain most of the reality of marriage and family life, and there are important limits (including the nature of love and the importance of the body) on our ability to reform this central human institution.

Hegel and John Paul II

Scott Yenor — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 15:54:06 PDT

Locke and the Problem of Friendship in Modern Liberalism

Scott Yenor — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 15:54:04 PDT

Family Politics: The Idea of Marriage in Modern Political Thought

Scott Yenor — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 15:54:02 PDT

With crisp prose and intellectual fairness, Family Politics traces the treatment of the family in the philosophies of leading political thinkers of the modern world. What is family? What is marriage? In an effort to address contemporary society’s disputes over the meanings of these human social institutions, Scott Yenor carefully examines a roster of major and unexpected modern political philosophers—from Locke and Rousseau to Hegel and Marx to Freud and Beauvoir. He lucidly presents how these individuals developed an understanding of family in order to advance their goals of political and social reform. Through this exploration, Yenor unveils the effect of modern liberty on this foundational institution and argues that the quest to pursue individual autonomy has undermined the nature of marriage and jeopardizes its future.

Between Rationalism and Postmodernism: Hume's Political Science of our “Mixed Kind of Life”

Scott Yenor — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 15:54:00 PDT

Many recent studies of David Hume emphasize his criticism of Enlightenment rationalism, but these studies risk making Hume into a paleoconservative advocate of local attachment. This article suggests that Humes political science can best be seen as advocating a middle position between Enlightenment rationalism and postmodern relativism in its Rortyan and paleo-conservative manifestations. In his criticism of rationalism, Hume concedes much to postmodern views on foundations, history, and subjectivity Hume, however, still defends the possibility of philosophic detachment and therefore political science as against postmodern theories. Hume's criticism of Enlightenment rationalism permit him to affirm important truths about the human condition: that ours is a “mixed kind of life.” Based on this understanding of our mixed condition, Hume argues that the modern world is the home of the virtues most attuned to our complex and mixed nature.

"Hobbes, Bramhall and the Politics of Liberty and Necessity/Hobbes and Republican Liberty" [Book Reviews]

Scott Yenor — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 15:53:58 PDT

Revealed Religion and the Politics of Humanity in Hume's Philosophy of Common Life

Scott Yenor — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 15:53:57 PDT

Hume's philosophy of common life consists in two moments: philosophic agnosticism about deep irresolvable metaphysical issues and a willingness to assume the common sense of the matter so that philosophy can proceed. This method works so long as he maintains agnosticism in the metaphysical issues as he entertains the common sense assumptions. When Hume turns his attention to revealed religion, however, his common life philosophy breaks down as his anti-transcendent metaphysic contaminates his assumptions; his embrace of humanity as the chief virtue of the modern world illuminates this contamination, as does his suggestion that religious belief might be extinguished in the modern world.

Humanity and Happiness: Philosophic Treatment of Happiness in a Non-Teleological World

Scott Yenor — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 15:53:55 PDT

Federalism and David Hume's Perfect Commonwealth

Will R. Jordan et al. — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 15:53:53 PDT

Alexander Hamilton bemoans, in Federalist No. 9, the disappointing record of Republican forms of government. It is impossible, he writes, "to read the history of the petty republics of Greece and Italy without feeling sensations of horror and disgust at the distractions with which they were kept in a state of perpetual vibration between the extremes of tyranny and anarchy." Given this record of factious instability, Hamilton fears that republican government and, more importantly, the principle of civil liberty will be sacrificed to the more reliable principle of political order. Yet Hamilton urges his readers not to lose faith in republican forms. "The science of politics," in his view, "like most other sciences, has received great improvement. The efficacy of various principles is now well understood, which were either not known at all, or imperfectly known to the ancients." This new science of politics includes the separation of powers, institutional checks and controls, and the principle of representation -- all of which tend to mollify factious tendencies of popular government. Also among the discoveries of this new science is what is now known as federalism, the "enlargement of the orbit" of republican systems through the "consolidation of several smaller States into on great Confederacy" (Hamilton, Madison, Jay 1999, 39-41).

Natural Religion and Human Perfectibility: Tocqueville's Account of Religion in Modern Democracy

Scott Yenor — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 15:53:51 PDT

Few issues are as troublesome as the problem of technology. On the level of common opinion, people wonder whether our consumptive culture will destroy the ecosystem necessary to sustain human life, whether the proliferation of biological and nuclear weapons threatens the existence of liberal democracies, and whether human cloning is consistent with the goodness of existence. Thinkers see matters of permanent significance in these occasional issues. Critics from a somewhat leftist perspective worry that the advance of technology turns human beings into anonymous cogs in the hands of a dehumanizing capitalist despotism.¹ Critics from a culturally conservative (whether religious, romantic, or existentialist) perspective think that technology destroys the aesthetic, spiritual, and moral horizon necessary for flourishing human life.² All concerned fear that the spread of technology brings with it an unstated but inescapable predisposition to life or being. Although we risk distortion in the name of simplicity, the technological attitude views the natural world as something to be brought under human control, and it discourages thinking about the ends served by human control. Technological people do not recognize beauty, revere a Creator, or recognize their enslavement to a mere means of production because they are busy trying to find ways to make the future brighter by escaping tradition and controlling nature.

The Framers Intended the Nation to be Based on Christian Values

Scott Yenor — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 15:53:49 PDT

Willa Cather's Turns

Scott Yenor — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 15:53:47 PDT

Examining Willa Cather's corpus of literary works reveals several phases of her illustrious career. After defending commercial culture in O Pioneers! and My Ántonia, her later novels, especially her One of Ours, diagnose an unmediated split in the Western world illustrated by the experience of the Great War: the bourgeois commercial culture undermines aspirations for human greatness. Her later novels deepen this diagnosis and offer a way out in a return to a rooted community of believers living in the shadows of the Church.

Hate Crimes: Protected Prejudice or Punishable Motive?

Scott Yenor et al. — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 15:53:46 PDT

Spontaneous Order and the Problem of Religious Revolution

Scott Yenor — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 15:53:44 PDT

Hayek uses spontaneous order to explain how free markets operate and how they arise. Explaining how markets operate, Hayek argues that economic efficiency on a global scale arises as the consequence of many discrete, individual, dispersed actions. Individuals possess pieces of knowledge necessary to pursue interests, and the price system of the free market acts as an uncontrolled and uncontrollable mechanism sending signals to people as they pursue their interests. The positive results of this free market system are twofold and mutually reinforcing: producers and consumers cooperate in exchanging goods and the economy as a whole achieves high levels of productivity in goods produced. Following Smith's famous thesis about the "invisible hand," Hayek holds that no single mind is capacious or competent enough to move the pieces of the free market chessboard as efficiently as the free market itself. This led Hayek to believe in the spontaneous ascension of the spontaneous order itself. The Great Society arose as the product of cultural evolution whereby "institutions and morals, language and law have evolved by a process of cumulative growth and that it is only with and within this framework that human reason has grown and can successfully operate."¹ This evolution also is Darwinian because homegrown traditions survive when they, unlike competing traditions, successfully meet needs.²