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Campus protests have reached Alabama. What should our universities do?

In Uncategorized on June 5, 2024 at 12:57 pm

This piece originally appeared here in The Alabama Political Reporter and here in AL.com.

It’s graduation season, yet controversy has overshadowed the end of the academic year at colleges across America.

You’ve likely seen troubling images from college campuses where students express anger over the Israel-Hamas conflict, which began when Israel retaliated against a surprise attack by Hamas on innocent Israeli civilians last October.

Riot gear, tasers, tear gas, mass arrests, handcuffed students, white students calling black cops the KKK, chants of “from the river to the sea,” police dragging away zip-tied faculty—these illustrate the escalating chaos.

How did we get here?

On April 17, Columbia University’s president testified before Congress on antisemitism at her institution. Meanwhile, students at Columbia staged a prolonged campus sit-in, demanding divestment from Israeli ties and businesses. They set up tent encampments, sparking a movement that spread from Ivy League schools to prominent public ones like the University of Alabama.

Passions run high on contentious issues like Gaza. Let’s set them aside, arguendo, to concentrate on legal and normative considerations regarding controversial speech regulation. Campus protests, after all, present a learning opportunity on permissible conduct and expression.

In a universe of purely private interactions, speech regulation is straightforward. If you insult me in my home or business, I can ask you to leave or limit what you may say. Unless private individuals or businesses act on behalf of the government or serve as its surrogate, their restrictions on speech are constitutional.

The First Amendment prohibits only government-imposed speech restrictions. However, many private universities commit to safeguarding free speech in their policy manuals, promotional materials, and student handbooks. They must be held accountable to the standards they establish in these documents.

The First Amendment does not shield students from criminal liability for acts like theft, vandalism, destruction of property, assault, or battery. Committing crimes does not fall under First Amendment rights, and students cannot evade punishment for such actions.

As long as students protest peacefully and within lawful guidelines, committing no crimes or violence, their speech is generally protected on public campuses.

What of these lawful guidelines?

Government, including public universities, can regulate speech’s time, place, and manner with content-neutral rules that serve a significant government interest while allowing alternative communication channels.

Government typically regulates speech that conflicts with others’ rights to speak or act. For example, it may restrict protests on public highways to ensure access for medical emergencies such as a pregnant woman going into labor or an ambulance rushing a heart attack patient to the emergency room. Disruptive behavior near healthcare facilities can exacerbate patients’ conditions, warranting regulation.

Certain regulations on time, place, and manner facilitate rather than impede speech. For instance, a university might differentiate between expressive and disruptive behavior to allow a visiting speaker hosted by a student group to articulate his views without interruption, cancellation, or deplatforming.

Other time, place, and manner regulations protect against violations of rights to health, peace, or safety. A university may forbid bullhorn use near dorm rooms at night or intervene if a mob tries to incite a riot or block a Jewish student’s path to class while shouting antisemitic slurs.

Even ardent libertarians will call the police if agitators disturb their sleep by shouting threats outside their home at 1:00 a.m.

Under First Amendment jurisprudence, the government cannot regulate speech because of its message or subject matter. Laws restricting speech based on its content are presumptively invalid. Accordingly, one’s opinions on events in Gaza are irrelevant when determining the legality of speech or protests about that subject at public universities.

Courts and legislatures have established numerous exceptions to the principle of unrestricted speech. Fraud, perjury, incitement of imminent lawless action (“fighting words”), distribution of child pornography, defamation, false police reports (consider, e.g., the Carlee Russell situation), and unauthorized sharing of highly classified information are prohibited.

Performative expressions that aren’t written or spoken utterances deserve protection but can be regulated. Wearing an armband to protest war is permissible whereas setting off fireworks in a Latin classroom isn’t.

Universities are unique among institutions in their dedication to advancing knowledge. Their administrators face the challenging task of protecting speech and academic freedom while ensuring the safety of students and staff. They risk losing funding or donations by permitting offensive behavior. Addressing demands for political action, such as creating a Palestinian state or providing aid to Ukraine, is beyond their scope and involves national security and foreign policy.

As hubs of intellectual curiosity, universities should adopt a broad definition of speech that they enforce impartially to allow students and professors to express controversial views. Open inquiry contributes to the accumulation of knowledge by stimulating further study and research.

Universities must allow protest and assembly in public spaces. While prioritizing free speech, they must recognize that the threat of violence can deter others from expressing themselves. When students feel safe to share their beliefs, speech thrives. However, if their security is at risk, students may hesitate to voice ideas.

Private universities of course have wider latitude to limit speech. Christian universities can prohibit the promotion of atheism in classrooms or mandate that faculty affirm belief in the Trinity. 

Public or private universities implementing valid speech policies should ensure that penalties are proportionate to the offense, avoiding excessive punishment. They can encourage high standards of speech and conduct without resorting to coercion or compulsion. The key is to ensure that student compliance with lawful speech regulations is voluntary.

Context matters; what’s acceptable in one situation may not be in another. Burning the American flag in protest outside the State Capitol Building may be constitutionally protected. Doing the same on a neighbor’s property without his permission is unlawful.

Freedom of speech, an Enlightenment ideal, doesn’t enjoy a long history. British common law historically did not value free speech. It criminalized seditious libel. The American colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries penalized blasphemy. Some Founders who ratified the First Amendment later supported the Alien and Sedition Acts, which punished criticisms of the government.

Although principles of free speech emerged during Revolutionary America, they didn’t gain widespread legal protection until the 20th century. Today, Americans can criticize their government with impunity, and the government may not discriminate against specific viewpoints. Alabama’s public universities are no exception.

Summoning the police or riot force on student protestors is a last resort, even if those engaged in civil disobedience aim for their eventual arrest.

Funny how the political pendulum swings. In the 1960s and 70s, young leftist activists advocated free speech for peace and nonviolence. Recently, conservatives have championed unfettered expression following campus crackdowns against conservative speakers. However, some conservatives now call for strict measures against student protestors, including those critical of Israel.

The political right should not pressure universities to censor disagreeable or objectionable speech. Instead, it should foster constructive dialogue and respond to expression with expression.

Our Word to the Wise comes from a quote probably erroneously attributed to Justice Holmes: “My right to swing my first ends where your nose begins.” This axiom reflects the libertarian essence of our free speech jurisprudence, which strives to facilitate speech while ensuring it doesn’t violate others’ rights.

University administrators who appreciate the wisdom of Holmes’s words will be better equipped to handle potentially volatile situations involving speech controversies.

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Are you a jerk?

In Arts & Letters, Economics, History, Humanities, liberal arts, Liberalism, Philosophy on April 24, 2024 at 8:34 am

This piece originally appeared here in the Troy Messenger.

Are you a jerk?

You probably answered no. Yet you know jerks.

When we imagine jerks, it’s usually others we envision, not ourselves. We almost never say, “I’m a jerk.”

A jerk, according to Merriam-Webster, is “an unlikable person,” especially “one who is cruel, rude, or small-minded.”

Picture the jerks you know. Do you dislike them? Is it because they think you’re a jerk?   

Adam Smith, known as the Father of Economics, was chiefly a scholar of moral philosophy. Celebrated as the author of The Wealth of Nations, he also wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments, an earlier book in which he described “sympathy” in terms of the “impartial spectator,” an ideal, conjectural third party whose imagined judgment of our actions influences our behavior.

Aversion to offense and desire to please are both selfish and unselfish qualities, Smith postulated. “Every man is, no doubt, by nature, first and principally recommended to his own,” he declared, “and as he is fitter to take care of himself, than of any other person, it is fit and right that it should be so.”

Paradoxically, though, self-regard activates regard for others.

Smith explained that when we assess ourselves as we’re conscious that others assess us, we realize we’re insignificant, just one person among many, and we humble ourselves accordingly. Preferring ourselves to others, we understand that others do likewise. Therefore, we treat others as we wish them to treat us. 

If Smith is correct, then why is it difficult to recognize personal errors or unkindness?  Isn’t the tendency to double-down on our presumed rightness, to insist that those who criticize us are mistaken?

Often, yes. Why?

Perhaps because Smith’s moral calculus requires two conditions: willingness and effort. One must be open to self-critique, which, in turn, involves intellectual labor. We may intuit our fallibility, but we must work to overcome priors and biases to examine ourselves as would hypothetical, neutral observers.

It’s easier to avoid guilt, shame, or reproof—which accompany correction and instruction—than to challenge assumptions, question convictions, build character, and conform to high standards of conduct.

We prefer comfort to discomfort. But we mustn’t be idle. We must emulate excellence.

Smith himself furnishes this week’s Word to the Wise.

“We must endeavor,” he mused, to view impartial spectators “with the eyes of other people, or as other people are likely to view them. When seen in this light, if they appear to us as we wish, we are happy and contented. But it greatly confirms this happiness and contentment when we find that other people, viewing them with those very eyes with which we, in imagination only, were endeavoring to view them, see them precisely in the same light in which we ourselves had seen them.”

As relational creatures, we set and measure standards by others’ deeds. Our longing for praise derives from the aspiration to be praiseworthy. We don’t want to be jerks. With will and work, we don’t have to be.

 Note: This piece is adapted from Allen Mendenhall’s regular segment “Word to the Wise” on Troy Public Radio.

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The Classical Liberalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson

In America, American History, American Literature, Arts & Letters, Austrian Economics, Books, Economics, Emerson, Essays, Ethics, Historicism, History, Humane Economy, Humanities, Liberalism, Libertarianism, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Nineteenth-Century America, Philosophy, Poetry, Politics, Property, Western Philosophy on January 7, 2015 at 8:45 am

Allen 2

“The less government we have, the better.”[1] So declared Ralph Waldo Emerson, a man not usually treated as a classical liberal. Yet this man—the Sage of Concord—held views that cannot be described as anything but classical liberal or libertarian. His is a pastoral libertarianism that glorifies nature as a source of insight and inspiration for those with a poetical sense and a prophetic vision.

None other than Cornel West, no friend of the free market, has said that “Emerson is neither a liberal nor a conservative and certainly not a socialist or even a civic republican. Rather he is a petit bourgeois libertarian, with at times anarchist tendencies and limited yet genuine democratic sentiments.”[2] “Throughout his career,” Neal Dolan adds, “Emerson remained fully committed to the Scottish-inflected Lockean-libertarian liberalism whose influence we have traced to his earliest notebooks.”[3] An abundance of evidence supports this view. Dolan himself has written an entire book on the subject: Emerson’s Liberalism (University of Wisconsin Press, 2009). Emerson extolled the “infinitude of the private man”[4] and projected a “strong libertarian-liberal emphasis”[5] in his essays and speeches. He was not an anarchist: he believed that “[p]ersonal rights, universally the same, demand a government framed on the ratio of the census” because “property demands a government framed on the ratio of owners and of owning.”[6] Nevertheless, he opined that “[e]very actual State is corrupt”[7] and that, if the people in a given territory were wise, no government would be necessary: “[W]ith the appearance of the wise man, the State expires. The appearance of character makes the State unnecessary.”[8] One need only look to one of Emerson’s most famous essays, “Self Reliance,” for proof of his libertarianism.

“Self‑Reliance” is perhaps the most exhilarating expression of individualism ever written, premised as it is on the idea that each of us possesses a degree of genius that can be realized through confidence, intuition, and nonconformity. “To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,” Emerson proclaims, “that is genius.”[9]

Genius, then, is a belief in the awesome power of the human mind and in its ability to divine truths that, although comprehended differently by each individual, are common to everyone. Not all genius, on this view, is necessarily or universally right, since genius is, by definition, a belief only, not a definite reality. Yet it is a belief that leads individuals to “trust thyself”[10] and thereby to realize their fullest potential and to energize their most creative faculties. Such self‑realization has a spiritual component insofar as “nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind”[11] and “no law can be sacred to me but that of my nature.”[12]

According to Emerson, genius precedes society and the State, which corrupt rather than clarify reasoning and which thwart rather than generate productivity. “Wild liberty develops iron conscience” whereas a “[w]ant of liberty […] stupefies conscience.”[13] History shows that great minds have challenged the conventions and authority of society and the State and that “great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good‑humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side.”[14] Accordingly, we ought to refuse to “capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.”[15] We ought, that is, to be deliberate, nonconformist pursuers of truth rather than of mere apprehensions of truth prescribed for us by others. “Whoso would be a man,” Emerson says, “must be a noncomformist.”[16]

Self‑Interest and Conviction

For Emerson as for Ayn Rand, rational agents act morally by pursuing their self‑interests, including self‑interests in the well‑being of family, friends, and neighbors, who are known and tangible companions rather than abstract political concepts. In Emerson’s words, “The only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it.”[17] Or: “Few and mean as my gifts may be, I actually am, and do not need for my own assurance or the assurance of my fellows any secondary testimony.”[18] It is in everyone’s best interest that each individual resides in his own truth without selling off his liberty.[19] “It is,” in other words, “easy to see that a greater self-reliance must work a revolution in all the offices and relations of men.”[20]

It is not that self‑assurance equates with rightness or that stubbornness is a virtue; it is that confidence in what one knows and believes is a condition precedent to achieving one’s goals. Failures are inevitable, as are setbacks; only by exerting one’s will may one overcome the failures and setbacks that are needed to achieve success. Because “man’s nature is a sufficient advertisement to him of the character of his fellows,”[21] self-reliance enables cooperative enterprise: “Whilst I do what is fit for me, and abstain from what is unfit, my neighbor and I shall often agree in our means, and work together for a time to one end.”[22] Counterintuitively, only in total isolation and autonomy does “all mean egotism vanish.”[23]

If, as Emerson suggests, a “man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition, as if everything were titular and ephemeral but he,”[24] how should he treat the poor? Emerson supplies this answer:

Do not tell me, as a good man did to‑day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison, if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting‑houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots; and the thousandfold Relief Societies;—though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.[25]

These lines require qualification. Emerson is not damning philanthropy or charity categorically or unconditionally; after all, he will, he says, go to prison for certain individuals with whom he shares a special relationship. “I shall endeavor to nourish my parents, to support my family, to be the chaste husband of one wife,” he elaborates.[26] Emerson is, instead, pointing out, with much exhibition, that one does not act morally simply by giving away money without conviction or to subsidize irresponsible, unsustainable, or exploitative business activities.

It is not moral to give away a little money that you do not care to part with or to fund an abstract cause when you lack knowledge of, and have no stake in, its outcome. Only when you give money to people or causes with which you are familiar,[27] and with whom or which you have something at stake, is your gift meaningful; and it is never moral to give for show or merely to please society. To give morally, you must mean to give morally—and have something to lose. The best thing one can do for the poor is to help them to empower themselves to achieve their own ends and to utilize their own skills—to put “them once more in communication with their own reason.”[28] “A man is fed,” Emerson says, not that he may be fed, but that he may work.”[29] Emerson’s work ethic does not demean the poor; it builds up the poor. It is good and right to enable a poor man to overcome his conditions and to elevate his station in life, but there is no point in trying to establish absolute equality among people, for only the “foolish […] suppose every man is as every other man.”[30] The wise man, by contrast, “shows his wisdom in separation, in gradation, and his scale of creatures and of merits as wide as nature.”[31] Such separation and gradation are elements of the beautiful variety and complexity of the natural, phenomenal world in which man pursues his aims and accomplishes what he wills.

Dissent

Emerson famously remarks that a “foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”[32] Much ink has been spilled to explain (or explain away) these lines. I take them to mean, in context, that although servile flattery and showy sycophancy may gain a person recognition and popularity, they will not make that person moral or great but, instead, weak and dependent. There is no goodness or greatness in a consistency imposed from the outside and against one’s better judgment; many ideas and practices have been consistently bad and made worse by their very consistency. “With consistency,” therefore, as Emerson warns, “a great soul has simply nothing to do.”[33]

Ludwig von Mises seems to have adopted the animating, affirming individualism of Emerson, and even, perhaps, Emerson’s dictum of nonconformity. Troping Emerson, Mises remarks that “literature is not conformism, but dissent.”[34] “Those authors,” he adds, “who merely repeat what everybody approves and wants to hear are of no importance. What counts alone is the innovator, the dissenter, the harbinger of things unheard of, the man who rejects the traditional standards and aims at substituting new values and ideas for old ones.”[35] This man does not mindlessly stand for society and the State and their compulsive institutions; he is “by necessity anti‑authoritarian and anti‑governmental, irreconcilably opposed to the immense majority of his contemporaries. He is precisely the author whose books the greater part of the public does not buy.”[36] He is, in short, an Emersonian, as Mises himself was.

The Marketplace of Ideas

To be truly Emersonian you may not accept the endorsements and propositions here as unconditional truth, but must, instead, read Emerson and Mises and Rand for yourself to see whether their individualism is alike in its affirmation of human agency resulting from inspirational nonconformity. If you do so with an inquiring seriousness, while trusting the integrity of your own impressions, you will, I suspect, arrive at the same conclusion I have reached.

There is an understandable and powerful tendency among libertarians to consider themselves part of a unit, a movement, a party, or a coalition, and of course it is fine and necessary to celebrate the ways in which economic freedom facilitates cooperation and harmony among groups or communities; nevertheless, there is also a danger in shutting down debate and in eliminating competition among different ideas, which is to say, a danger in groupthink or compromise, in treating the market as an undifferentiated mass divorced from the innumerable transactions of voluntarily acting agents. There is, too, the tendency to become what Emerson called a “retained attorney”[37] who is able to recite talking points and to argue the predictable “airs of the bench”[38] without engaging the opposition in a meaningful debate.

Emerson teaches not only to follow your convictions but to engage and interact with others lest your convictions be kept to yourself and deprived of any utility. It is the free play of competing ideas that filters the good from the bad; your ideas aren’t worth a lick until you’ve submitted them to the test of the marketplace.

“It is easy in the world,” Emerson reminds us, “to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”[39] We can stand together only by first standing alone. Thus, “[w]e must go alone.”[40] You must “[i]nsist on yourself”[41] and “[s]peak the truth.”[42] You must channel your knowledge and originality to enable others to empower themselves. All collectives are made up of constituent parts; the unit benefits from the aggregate constructive action of motivated individuals. Emerson teaches us that if we all, each one of us, endeavor to excel at our favorite preoccupations and to expand the reach of our talent and industry, we will better the lives of those around us and pass along our prosperity to our posterity.

[1] Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Politics,” in Emerson: Essays & Poems (The Library of America, 1996), p. 567.

[2] Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy (University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), p. 40.

[3] Neal Dolan, “Property in Being,” in A Political Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by Alan M. Levine and Daniel S. Malachuk (The University Press of Kentucky, 2011), p. 371.

[4] Ralph Waldo Emerson, correspondence in The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 16 vols., ed. William H. Gilman, Ralph H. Orth, et al. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960-1982). This quote comes from Vol. 7, p. 342.

[5] Neal Dolan, Emerson’s Liberalism (University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), p. 182.

[6] Emerson, “Politics,” at 560.

[7] Emerson, “Politics,” at 563.

[8] Emerson, “Politics,” at 568.

[9] Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in Emerson: Essays & Poems (The Library of America, 1996), p. 259.

[10] Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” at 260.

[11] Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” at 261.

[12] Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” at 262.

[13] Emerson, “Politics” at 565-566.

[14] Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” at 259.

[15] Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” at 262.

[16] Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” at 261.

[17] Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” at 262.

[18] Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” at 263.

[19] Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” at 274.

[20] Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” at 275.

[21] Emerson, “Politics,” at 566.

[22] Emerson, “Politics,” at 567.

[23] Emerson, “Nature,” in Emerson: Essays and Poems, p. 10. The original reads “all mean egotism vanishes” rather than “vanish.”

[24] Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” at 262.

[25] Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” at 262-63.

[26] Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” at 273.

[27] “Consider whether you have satisfied your relations to father, mother, cousin, neighbor, town, cat, and dog,” Emerson says. Emerson, “Self Reliance,” at 274.

[28] Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” at 276.

[29] Emerson, “Nature,” at 13.

[30] Emerson, “Nature,” at 27.

[31] Emerson, “Nature,” at 27.

[32] Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” at 265.

[33] Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” at 265.

[34] Ludwig von Mises, The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality (Auburn: The Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2008), p. 51.

[35] Mises, The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality, at 51.

[36] Mises, The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality, at 51.

[37] Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” at 264.

[38] Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” at 264.

[39] Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” at 263.

[40] Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” at 272.

[41] Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” at 278.

[42] Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Divinity School Address,” in Emerson: Essays & Poems (The Library of America, 1996), p. 77.

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My Reading List for 2013

In Arts & Letters, Books, Creativity, Fiction, History, Humanities, Law, Literature, Novels, Philosophy, Politics, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy, Writing on December 12, 2012 at 8:45 am

Allen Mendenhall

Editorial Note (April 15, 2013):  At this point in the year, I have already discovered flaws in this list. For instance, I gave myself two weeks to read Augustine’s Confessions and one week to read Aquinas’s Summa Theologica.  I should have done the reverse.  Summa Theologica may have required more than two weeks to read, since I found myself rushing through it, and it is not a book through which one should rush.  My schedule has forced me to speed read some texts in order to avoid taking shortcuts.  Some of the texts on this list will therefore appear on my list for next year, so that they get the treatment and consideration they deserve.

2013 will be a good year for reading.  I’ve made a list of the books I’m going to undertake, and I hope you’ll consider reading along with me.  As you can see, I’ll be enjoying many canonical works of Western Civilization.  Some I’ve read before; some I haven’t.  My goal is to reacquaint myself with the great works I fell in love with years ago and to read some of the great works that I’ve always wanted to read but haven’t.  I wouldn’t go so far as to say that everybody ought to read these works, but I do think that by reading them, a person will gain a fundamental understanding of the essential questions and problems that have faced humans for generations.

Some works are conspicuous in their absence; the list betrays my preferences.  Notably missing are the works of Shakespeare and the canonical texts that make up the Old and New Testament.  There’s a reason for that.  I’ve developed a morning habit of reading the scriptures as well as Shakespeare before I go to work.  If I’m reading these already, there’s no need to add them to the list, which is designed to establish a healthy routine.  What’s more, the list comes with tight deadlines, and I’m inclined to relish rather than rush through the Bible or Shakespeare.

Lists provide order and clarity; we make them to reduce options or enumerate measurable, targeted goals.  Lists rescue us from what has been called the “tyranny of choice.”  Benjamin Franklin made a list of the 13 virtues he wished to live by.  What motivated him is perhaps what’s motivating me: a sense of purpose and direction and edification.

At first I wanted to assign myself a book a week, but realizing that some works are longer or more challenging than others, that as a matter of obligation I will have other books to read and review, that I have a doctoral dissertation to write, that the legal profession is time consuming, and that unforeseen circumstances could arise, I decided that I might need more time than a week per book depending on the complexity of the particular selection or the busyness of the season.  Although I hope to stick to schedule, I own that I might have to permit myself flexibility.  We’ll see.

For variety—and respite—I have chosen to alternate between a pre-20th century text and a 20th century text.  In other words, one week I might read Milton, the next Heidegger.  For the pre-20th century texts, I will advance more or less chronologically; there is no method or sequence for the 20th century texts, which I listed as they came to mind (“oh, I’ve always wanted to read more Oakeshott—I should add him.  And isn’t my knowledge of Proust severely limited?—I’ll add him as well.”).  It’s too early to say what lasting and significant effects these latter texts will have, so I hesitate to number them among the demonstrably great pre-20th century texts, but a general consensus has, I think, established these 20th century texts as at least among the candidates for canonicity.

I have dated some of the texts in the list below.  Not all dates are known with certainty, by me or anyone else.  Some texts were revised multiple times after their initial publication; others were written in installments.  Therefore, I have noted the time span for those works produced over the course of many years.

One would be justified in wondering why I’ve selected these texts over others.  The answer, I suppose, pertains to something Harold Bloom once said: that there are many books but only one lifetime, so why not read the best and most enduring?  I paraphrase because I can’t remember precisely what he said or where he said it, but the point is clear enough: read the most important books before you run out of time.

Making this list, I learned that one can read only so many great works by picking them off one week at a time.  The initial disheartenment I felt at this realization quickly gave way to motivation: if I want to understand the human condition as the most talented and creative of our predecessors understood it, I will have to make a new list every year, and I will have to squeeze in time for additional texts whenever possible.  I am shocked at the number of books that I wanted to include in this list, but that didn’t make it in.  I ran out of weeks.  What a shame.

Here is my list.  I hope you enjoy. Read the rest of this entry »