Bin Laden is gone now, dispatched from this earthly realm in 2011 by the Navy’s lethal SEAL Team Six. Yet we remain mired in the seemingly endless fighting in the Middle East, and the rationale for that is in dire need of clarification, if not justification.

In “Why Liberalism Failed,” Patrick Deneen makes an eye-opening contribution to the critique of liberalism. Equating liberalism with the modern tradition of freedom, he distills abuses of state power, nature, culture, technology, and education that are undertaken in freedom’s name yet leave citizens less self-sufficient, less disposed to cooperate, and less capable of looking beyond material goods and social status to the cultivation of character and to the claims of duty.

“Nothing is so obscure it does not deserve to be found.” These words are from Delba Winthrop’s 1974 dissertation on Book III of Aristotle’s Politics, a document high on the list of things that deserve to be found. When Winthrop died in 2006, her dissertation was still unpublished despite the protestations of her husband, Harvey Mansfield, perhaps the dean of conservative political philosophy in this country. 

The Hoover Institution has recently released a new volume edited by Hoover’s Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow Peter Berkowitz entitled Renewing the American Constitutional Tradition.

In an effort to restore the teaching of our nation's founding principles at colleges and universities and produce the next generation of professors prepared to effectively teach America's history and institutions, new academic centers of excellence are now active at the University of Chicago; University of Colorado, Boulder; University of Texas, Austin; and Emory University...

The controversy sparked by the Sept. 15, 2009, publication of the Report of the United Nations Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, otherwise known as the Goldstone Report, may appear to exclusively concern the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. . . .

Don't be misled by how little was said about Iran in the major speeches recently delivered by President Barack Obama at Cairo University and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu at Bar-Ilan University...

Factions, argued James Madison in Federalist No. 10, had ever been the bane of governments grounded in the consent of the governed. However, an improved political science informed the new charter of government that he and his fellow delegates drafted a few months before in Philadelphia over the course of the summer of 1787. Well-designed institutions that minimized freedom’s costs offered a more promising approach to preserving freedom. So effective is Madisonian political science that it provides remedies for such up-to-date threats to freedom as social media and the giant companies that monopolize the provision of information about us and about others.

Peter Berkowitz on Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life  by  Anthony T. Kronman