Public Philosophy and Political Science: Crisis and Reflection

This collection of essays catalogues the decay of the moral and intellectual foundations of civic liberty, and portrays a generation of Americans alienated from institutions built on public philosophy. The contributors examine the evolution of public philosophy, the inextricable relationship between politics and philosophy, and the interplay between public philosophy, the constitution, natural law and government. They reveal the dire threat to deliberative democracy and the fundamental order of constitutional society posed by public philosophy’s waning power to refine, cultivate and civilize. This work is an indictment of a society which has discarded a way of life roted in natural law, democracy and the traditions of civility and is, furthermore, a denunciation of an educated elite that has divorced itself from the standards upon which public philosophy rests.