Yuval Levin

Americans today are frustrated and anxious. Our economy is sluggish, and leaves workers insecure. Income inequality, cultural divisions, and political polarization increasingly pull us apart. Our governing institutions often seem paralyzed. And our politics has failed to rise to these challenges. No wonder, then, that Americans--and the politicians who represent them--are overwhelmingly nostalgic for a better time. The Left looks back to the middle of the twentieth century, when unions were strong, large public programs promised to solve pressing social problems, and the movements for racial integration and sexual equality were advancing. The Right looks back to the Reagan Era, when deregulation and lower taxes spurred the economy, cultural traditionalism seemed resurgent, and America was confident and optimistic. Each side thinks returning to its golden age could solve America’s problems. In The Fractured Republic, Yuval Levin argues that this politics of nostalgia is failing twenty-first-century Americans. Both parties are blind to how America has changed over the past half century--as the large, consolidated institutions that once dominated our economy, politics, and culture have fragmented and become smaller, more diverse, and personalized. Individualism, dynamism, and liberalization have come at the cost of dwindling solidarity, cohesion, and social order. This has left us with more choices in every realm of life but less security, stability, and national unity. Both our strengths and our weaknesses are therefore consequences of these changes. And the dysfunctions of our fragmented national life will need to be answered by the strengths of our decentralized, diverse, dynamic nation. Levin argues that this calls for a modernizing politics that avoids both radical individualism and a centralizing statism and instead revives the middle layers of society--families and communities, schools and churches, charities and associations, local governments and markets. Through them, we can achieve not a single solution to the problems of our age, but multiple and tailored answers fitted to the daunting range of challenges we face and suited to enable an American revival.

Renewing AmericaÕs Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

The Fractured Republic

For more than two centuries, our political life has been divided between a party of progress and a party of conservation. In The Great Debate, Yuval Levin explores the origins of the left/right divide by examining the views of the men who best represented each side of that debate at its outset: Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine. In a groundbreaking exploration of the roots of our political order, Levin shows that American partisanship originated in the debates over the French Revolution, fueled by the fiery rhetoric of these ideological titans. Levin masterfully shows how Burke's and Paine’s differing views, a reforming conservatism and a restoring progressivism, continue to shape our current political discourse—on issues ranging from abortion to welfare, education, economics, and beyond. Essential reading for anyone seeking to understand Washington’s often acrimonious rifts, The Great Debate offers a profound examination of what conservatism, liberalism, and the debate between them truly amount to.

Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left

The Great Debate

From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream

Time to Build

science and American democracy

Imagining the future

Room to Grow

Tyranny of Reason

A leading conservative intellectual argues that to renew America we must recommit to our institutions Americans are living through a social crisis. Our politics is polarized and bitterly divided. Culture wars rage on campus, in the media, social media, and other arenas of our common life. And for too many Americans, alienation can descend into despair, weakening families and communities and even driving an explosion of opioid abuse. Left and right alike have responded with populist anger at our institutions, and use only metaphors of destruction to describe the path forward: cleaning house, draining swamps. But, as Yuval Levin argues, this is a misguided prescription, rooted in a defective diagnosis. The social crisis we confront is defined not by an oppressive presence but by a debilitating absence of the forces that unite us and militate against alienation. As Levin argues, now is not a time to tear down, but rather to build and rebuild by committing ourselves to the institutions around us. From the military to churches, from families to schools, these institutions provide the forms and structures we need to be free. By taking concrete steps to help them be more trustworthy, we can renew the ties that bind Americans to one another.

A Time to Build

The astonishing success of the natural sciences in the modern era has led many thinkers to assume that similar feats of knowledge and power should be achievable in human affairs. That assumption, and the accompanying notion that the methods of modern science ought to be applied to social and political questions, have been at the heart of a number of prominent philosophical schools in the modern age, and much of the politics of the past century. Is the application of scientific logic to the study of human affairs philosophically defensible? Does it aid or hinder our efforts at a genuine understanding of the human world? Why have so many modern ideologies, including those responsible for some of the greatest atrocities of the 20th century, advanced themselves under the banner of science? Why, in other words, do we assume that modern science holds the key to an understanding of human affairs? Are we right to make this assumption? And what does the assumption mean for contemporary society and politics? Tyranny of Reason, which is designed for the interested lay reader and for undergraduate or beginning graduate students in the social sciences, attempts to answer these important questions in the context of the history of philosophy.

The Origins and Consequences of the Social Scientific Outlook

For more than forty years Leon R. Kass has been a prolific and distinguished writer, an outstanding teacher of the humanities, and a wise interpreter of the moral implications of modern science. In Apples of Gold in Pictures of Silver, fifteen of his colleagues, students, and friends celebrate his life's work with a collection of essays on themes and issues that have been of central concern to his scholarship.

Honoring the Work of Leon R. Kass

Apples of Gold in Pictures of Silver

21st century America is anxious and discontented. Our economy is sluggish, our culture is always at war with itself, our governing institutions are frequently paralyzed, and our politics seems incapable of rising to these challenges. The resulting frustration runs broad and deep: It fans populist anger while driving elites to despair. It persuades progressives that America is stuck while convincing conservatives that we are rushing in the wrong direction. It manages to make people on all sides of most issues feel as though they are under siege simultaneously. Why should this be? And how can we overcome our frustration? In this groundbreaking exploration of America's 21st-century challenges, Yuval Levin argues that our anxiety is rooted in a failure of diagnosis. Our politics is drenched in nostalgia, with Democrats always living in 1965 and Republicans in 1981, and is therefore blind to the profound transformations of the last half century. America's midcentury order was dominated by large, interconnected institutions: big government, big business, big labor, big media, big universities, mass culture. But in every arena of our national life—or at least every arena except government, for now—we have witnessed the centrifugal forces of diffusion, diversity, individualism, and decentralization pulling these large institutions apart. These forces have liberated many Americans from oppressive social constraints but also estranged many from families, communities, work, and faith. They have set loose a profusion of options in every part of life but also unraveled the social order and economic security of an earlier era. They have loosened the reins of cultural conformity but also sharpened our differences and weakened the roots of mutual trust. Building on our strengths while healing our wounds, Levin argues, would require a politics better adapted to the society we have become—a politics rooted in neither an ethic of centralized power nor a spirit of radical individualism but a regard for the potential of a modernized subsidiarity and civil society.

Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

Thomas W. Merrill

Adam Schulman

Leon R. Kass has been helping Americans better understand the human condition for over four decades_as a teacher, writer, scholar, public champion of the humanities, and defender of human dignity. From bioethics to civic education, from interpreting the Bible to weighing the moral implications of modern science, Kass has offered wisdom, guidance, and instruction. In this volume, fifteen of Kass's admirers, including students, colleagues, and friends, honor his work by reflecting on the broad range of subjects to which he has devoted his life's work. Some of the essays offer interpretations of great works of literature and philosophy from Homer, Sophocles, and Plato to Rousseau, Franklin, Jane Austen, Hawthorne, and Henry James. Others examine the significance of Leon Kass's work as a bioethicist and Chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics and as an interpreter of the Book of Genesis. The essays collected in Apples of Gold in Pictures of Silver offer a sense of the breadth of Kass's interests and insights and of the influence he has had on generations of scholars. The reader is further acquainted with the career of Leon R. Kass by a biographical introduction and a comprehensive listing of his published writings and the courses he has taught.

Yuval Levin explora as raízes da divisão entre esquerda e direita ao examinar as visões dos homens que melhor representaram cada lado em sua origem: Edmund Burke e Thomas Paine. Em tempo de posições extremas, é fácil esquecer que nosso sistema político é mais do que discussões partidárias, clamor de grupos de interesses e algumas frases de efeito. É uma janela para conjuntos contrastantes de crenças filosóficas sobre a natureza da liberdade, da igualdade e da democracia. Por meio de cuidadosa consideração da obra dos dois autores, Levin descortina a política moderna e oferece um retrato das raízes de nossa divisão política. Leitura essencial para qualquer um que queira compreender não apenas as bases de nossa ordem política, mas também as controvérsias que alimentam as divisões entre o conservadorismo e o progressismo, oferecendo um exame profundo do que verdadeiramente significa o debate entre eles.

Yuval Levin

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