Eric-Clifford Graf (PhD, Virginia, 1997) teaches and writes about the liberal tradition as authored by men like Alexander Hamilton, Frederick Douglass, and Jorge Luis Borges. His latest book is ANATOMY OF LIBERTY IN DON QUIJOTE DE LA MANCHA (Lexington, 2021). All of his work can be found here: ericcliffordgraf.academia.edu/research.
As with negative rights, there’s a lot of confusion regarding natural law. People use the term without much explanation of what it means, and those of us who are not trained lawyers or legal historians don’t want to reveal our ignorance by asking for clarifications. This is my attempt as a non-specialist to explain what […]
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“For in politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. Heresies in either can rarely be cured by persecution.” —Alexander Hamilton, Federalist 1 All university-level students should read, study, and discuss The Federalist Papers (1787–88). This most sacred document of the American founding explains the logic […]
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“To justify a general conclusion, requires many observations, even where the subject may be submitted to the Anatomical knife, to Optical glasses, to analysis by fire, or by solvents.” —Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XIV I’ll never forget a beautiful Peruvian girl, breathtaking she was, and a true friend, Ivy Arbulu. […]
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Negative rights signal the core of natural law in the American tradition, also known as our Bill of Rights. Without them, the Constitution might never have been ratified, or we might be a very different country today. Most of us can list them—the right to free speech, the right to keep and bear arms, the […]
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“Men learn in a negative rite to give up the best things they were born with, and forever.” —Norman Mailer, Armies of the Night (1968) William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (c.1599) and Tirso de Molina’s El burlador de Sevilla (1612?) are the most archetypal plays by any Spanish or English playwright from the early modern period, arguably […]
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Author’s Note: Dedicated to Alicia Cerezo “Rara temporum felicitas ubi sentire quae velis et quae sentias dicere licet.” —Tacitus, Historiae, 1.1 “I don’t like belonging to another person’s dream.” —Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, VIII There is a quick and easy way, I say, to introduce young readers to the political allegory of Lewis Carroll’s […]
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I had a conversation about fifteen years ago with a colleague from Seville. We sat in a restaurant in Charlottesville, Virginia, as she expounded on the dangers of economic freedom and defended what seemed to me like the divinely ordained need for government regulation. I was perplexed. “That’s not my tradition and it’s not my […]
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In stockjobber parlance, Argentina is “risk on.” By electing rising political star Javier Milei as President—he took office on December 10th—Argentina is the first modern nation to embrace the libertarian creed. We’ve not had such a determined political philosophy on the world stage since Goldwater—maybe Reagan. The runoff on November 19th wasn’t even close. The […]
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The accusation that the United States of America was “founded on slavery” is advanced to discredit the nation. Accordingly, if some people were oppressed at the time of the Founding, then somehow the entire American project is illegitimate to this day. Or, in another way, if some people who wrote or signed the Constitution also […]
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Well, this is impertinent, but to build Monticello, That domed dream of our liberties floating High on its mountain, like a cloud, demanded A certain amount of black sweat. —Robert Penn Warren, Brother to Dragons (1979) Concessive ways to dismantle woke ideology exist that don’t require America to abandon her best ideas. This will not […]
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There’s a lot of hand-wringing in Argentina regarding anti-Keynesian candidate Javier Milei’s expressed promise to dollarize the economy if he’s elected president. After a century of centralized industrial planning and oversized welfare programs, along with insane levels of money printing to pay for it all, Argentina went from one of the wealthiest nations on earth […]
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“It is desirable, in short, that in things which do not primarily concern others, individuality should assert itself.” —John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (London, 1859) Jorge Luis Borges’s story “El Aleph” (1945) contemplates the struggle for personal liberty in Argentina, a subject he conjures more formally a year later in his essay “Nuestro pobre […]
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(For don Pedro Schwartz, a great economist and a true gentleman) For sociological, political, and economic reasons—family breakdown, information overload, technological innovation, chemical and behavioral addiction, etc.—skills-based learning, along with instruction in practical areas like science, math, engineering, music, nutrition, finance, logic, and personal psychology, makes more sense today than cultural, gender, or literary studies. […]
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“Stopping first at Ephesus he made sacrifice to Artemis …” —Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War (fifth century BC) “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.” —Eagles, “Hotel California” (1976) America depends on and produces a large supply of freaks. This causes anxiety as well as comfort. Eric Hoffer—the “longshoreman philosopher” […]
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What is federalism? Historians and political philosophers will bicker about its origins and definitions. I like the natural-law approach—think Locke and Madison in the Anglo tradition. It’s tangible, comparable, and verifiable. Further, any policy decisions related to federalism can be kept simple. A warning, however: I come from the field of literature. I’ve read too […]
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When Thomas Jefferson returned from France in the fall of 1789, he turned his home at Monticello 180 degrees. The building had originally faced east, that is, toward the Atlantic, Europe, and the Mediterranean. Now he made it face west, that is, toward Louisiana, Texas, Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, California, Oregon, and the Pacific. Any Hispanist […]
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Gustave Doré, Don Quijote 2.22 (1869) I wondered what all the fuss was about after I saw the movie There Will Be Blood (2007). It’s visually remarkable but overly moralizing. After two and a half hours, you’re supposed to think American capitalism is about greed, treachery, and murder. In Texas the movie is a litmus […]
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Fear Versus Glory in a Hyper-Democracy Democracy dumbs things down by rewarding conformity. This echoes both the vote and the market. It also explains why new urban America struggles to be as attractive as old urban Europe. In a hyper-democracy—politically, economically, and sociologically speaking—the vulgar mean takes the prize due to its astonishing potential to […]
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Guiding Readers Toward the Problem “Mailer finally came to decide that his love for his wife while not at all equal or congruent to his love for America was damnably parallel.” – Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night (1968) Alexis de Tocqueville’s epic Democracy in America (1835/40) offers a curious preview of the American […]
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At the age of ten, while running on my family’s patio I slipped and put my arm through the window of the kitchen door. I paused to marvel. I hadn’t cut myself. But when I saw shards of glass in the frame, I jerked away, leaving a two-inch gash in my forearm. My mother telephoned […]
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Curiosity or Ideology? On the morning of September 11, 2001, faculty members at an elite college in Massachusetts aimed their frustration at President Bush. We stood like a small crowd in the department lounge, all of us facing the TV. CNN showed the moment an assistant whispered in the president’s ear while he was reading […]
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Many centrists and conservatives are leery of Michel Foucault’s enduring popularity in higher education. Some think he’s the very essence of a great postmodern conspiracy to take down Western Civilization. Perhaps. But even if he’s part of a bigger problem, we ought not dismiss the entirety of his work. Not all his books merit attention, […]
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Lean over on the bookcase. If you really wanna get straight, Read Norman Mailer Or get a new tailor. – Lloyd Cole, “Are You Ready to Be Heartbroken?” Sometimes Norman Mailer looks to me like George Bush, Jr. after an all-night bender at Yale. That’s where the resemblance stops, I think. Mailer counts among the […]
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“Each side is coming face to face with its own conception of the devil!” – Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night Arthur Rackham’s 1935 illustration of Edgar Allan Poe’s “A Descent into the Maelstrom” At some point while reading The Peloponnesian War (late fifth century BC) you begin to realize that Thucydides is up […]
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Literature Is Critical Precisely Because Nobody Thinks So As he sailed into the horizon, Odysseus might have wondered what really happens when you become nobody. That was Dante’s take on him, at least (see Inferno 26). The Ithacan overreached and his individualism erased him from the world. The Pillars of Hercules, which marked the edge […]
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“Die Hydra der Diktator” (1946) is a famous drawing by Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) finished about a decade before he went blind in 1955. Today Borges rests firmly in the pantheon of classical liberalism. His stories convey a complex, yet also mysteriously ordered vision of the cosmos. His smooth, organic style makes him particularly compatible […]
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Political Hydras, Part 1 (for Javier Fernández-Lasquetty Blanc) “Such is its nature that, as fast as one doubt is cut away, innumerable others spring up like Hydra’s heads, nor could we set any limit to their renewal did we not apply the mind’s living fire to suppress them.” —Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy (4.6) Among […]
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“… everything is queer today.” – Alice P. Oxy. LII 3679, 3rd century AD, with fragments of Plato’s Republic Near the end of Plato’s Republic, a gap opens in the form of the famous Allegory of the Cave at the beginning of Book 7. It’s among the most metaphorical gestures in all of Plato’s work. As such […]
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Neapolitan Overtime What is a constitution? In the very broadest sense, whether we refer to Moses’s ten commandments (1450 BC), the Magna Carta (1215), or the Articles of Confederation (1777–89), a constitution is a document that defines and reflects the existence of a people or a nation. A constitution doesn’t have to be a specific […]
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There are professors, and then there are professors. Donald Leslie Shaw (1930–2017) was a titan in the field of Hispanic literature. He wrote two definitive books on the principal literary movements of modern Spain and Latin America: The Generation of 1898 in Spain (1975) and Nueva narrativa Hispanoamericana (1981). He also wrote what remains the best […]
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