This is just a friendly reminder that my new book will be published very soon. It’s part of series that includes Conserving America? by the legendary Pat Deneen, which is also about to appear, and another to come by Dan Mahoney. Proposals for the series are welcome and should be sent to me.
Here’s what Mark Bauerlein, author of The Dumbest Generation, says about American Heresies and Higher Education:
Peter Lawler is one of our most intelligent observers of higher education in America, and these essays demonstrate why. They range from ancient thinkers to today’s ‘futurists,’ from the Puritan colonies to the 21st-century liberal arts college. Along the way, Lawler offers many bits of wisdom worth saving, such as this: ‘The preference for diversity over truth and the common good depends on the detached attitude of the tourist.’ His work is a sweet and potent antidote to the deterioration of humanitas in the classroom — I’ve read it for many years. It is also a welcome change from the flaccid and predictable commentary on the university that tumbles forth daily.
And there’s so much more. If you want to know the truth about esoteric writing, Atticus Finch, evolutionary psychology, the Southern mind, the Cartesian Americans, the disappearance of the middle class, libertarian securitarians, Superman, Friday Night Lights,Hannah Arendt and natality, the end of History, transhumanism, the accreditation scam, human rights, technological vs. personal progress, Plato, Solzhenitsyn,Groundhog Day, getting beyond competency and diversity, evolutionary psychologists, campus bubbles, Louis C.K., various forms of countercultural American religion, and so forth and so on, this book is for you.
If you want a review copy — for, of course, reviewing purposes- – please let me know.
Another blurb just showed up! From Sam Goldman of GW and The American Conservative:
Reading this book is like sitting in on the best kind of lecture. The tone is conversational, but the argument is provocative and based on careful scholarship. Challenging orthodoxies of the right as well as the left, Peter Lawler shows that we have a lot to learn from Plato, the Puritans, and even Louis C.K. He is one of our wisest guides to the weirdness and wonder of postmodern America.