originally published 2/24/2020

In the midst of so much turmoil surrounding the sustainability of political liberalism, professor of government Mark Mitchell asks whether there is anything that truly binds Americans together beyond their commitment to self-creation. Because liberalism presents an impoverished anthropology, which denies both a normative nature and a given social context to human beings, the result is that human beings are nothing more than uninhibited wills and a combination of various competing desires. In his book, The Limits of Liberalism: Tradition, Individualism, and the Crisis of Freedom (Notre Dame Press, 2018), Mitchell examines the threat that liberalism poses to tradition especially and looks at three prominent thinkers who placed a high value upon tradition: Michael Oakeshott, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Michael Polanyi. This interview was originally published on Volume 146 of the Journal.

34 minutes

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