Today we bring you the final episode in our series on speech and censorship. We wrap up a series by bringing back guests from previous episodes to discuss the broader themes and dilemmas that have persisted over the course of the series. In this conversation we discuss if and how making distinctions among different kinds of speech might improve our ability to navigate the dilemmas around free speech. We discuss the recent phenomenon of campus protests and this extent to which this sort of activi...
Jun 05, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Season 4Ep. 9
This month we continue our series on speech and censorship by discussing an extraordinary book published in 1996, The Repeal of Reticence: America’s Cultural and Legal Struggles Over Free Speech, Obscenity, Sexual Liberation, and Modern Art . It’s terrific book of political, social, cultural history and analysis. It covers an amazingly broad range of topics, from 19th century literary sensibilities to early 20th century Supreme Court obscenity jurisprudence to the midcentury New York public inte...
May 01, 2024•1 hr 21 min•Season 4Ep. 8
This month we continue our series on speech and censorship by discussing a famous critique of free speech from the left. My guest and I dig into Herbert Marcuse’s famous essay and try to make sense of its critique of tolerance and free speech. We discuss Marcuse’s background and role as a leading thinker of the New Left. We also analyze Marcuse’s goal of liberation or autonomy, his understanding of the relationship between speech and action, his use of the term totalitarian, and his understandin...
Mar 27, 2024•1 hr 3 min•Season 4Ep. 7
This month we continue our series of episodes on speech and censorship. We discuss James Madison’s “Report of 1800,” a document in which Madison discusses the controversies around the Alien and Sedition Acts. Madison’s report contains fascinating reflections on the nature of speech in a republic and why the Sedition Acts in particular are inconsistent with free government. His ideas have some surprising resonances with some of our contemporary debates about free speech. Our guest is Michael Zuck...
Feb 14, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Season 4Ep. 6
This month our topic is a recent essay by Jenna Silber Storey and Benjamin Storey called “ Political Speech in Divided Times ,” first published in National Affairs in Fall of 2022. The essay is a reflection on the particular character of political speech and its authors make use of the work of the contemporary French political philosopher named Pierre Manent. The books by Manent most relevant to this essay are The Metamorphosis of the City and Beyond Radical Secularism . We are pleased to have o...
Jan 17, 2024•1 hr 7 min•Season 4Ep. 4
With our December episode we continue our series on speech and censorship. We take up two essays which make the case for a particular kind of censorship: Walter Berns’s “Pornography v. Democracy: The Case for Censorship” and Irving Kristol’s “Pornography, Obscenity and the Case for Censorship.” Berns’s essay was published in The Public Interest in the winter of 1971 and Kristol’s in The New York Times Magazine in March 1971. Our guest is Yuval Levin, who’s the director of Social, Cultural, and C...
Dec 13, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Season 4Ep. 3
Here at Enduring Interest we are in the midst of exploring books and essays that address the question of speech and censorship. Forthcoming episodes will discuss authors including Walter Berns, Irving Kristol, Herbert Marcuse, James Madison, and Pierre Manent. However, this month we’re pausing on that theme to discuss a newly published book by the great French thinker and writer Raymond Aron. On April 4, 1978 Aron brought his academic career to close with a final lecture at the College de France...
Nov 13, 2023•1 hr 18 min
John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty has been a consistent and prominent reference point in the ongoing debates about free speech. In this episode we discuss an elegant and powerful critique of Mill by the twentieth century political theorist Willmoore Kendall. His essay “The ‘Open Society’ and Its Fallacies” was published in the American Political Science Review in December of 1960. Our conversation covers various aspects of Kendall’s critique. Kendall claims that Mill’s argument for freedom rests on ...
Oct 11, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 37
Enduring Interest is very pleased to launch our series on speech and censorship with this conversation on Jonathan Rauch’s Kindly Inquisitors, first published in 1993 and reissued in 2013 with a new afterword. We discuss Jonathan’s conception of “liberal science,” or the liberal intellectual system’s approach to sorting truth from falsehood. He suggests this is arguably liberalism’s greatest achievement yet seems always under attack from a variety of quarters. We discuss the fundamentalist and h...
Sep 15, 2023•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 36
To lead into the next season of Enduring Interest, we're re-releasing our first two seasons, covering totalitarianism and ideology and liberal education. We'll be back on September 8 with a new season covering free speech and censorship. This episode concludes our series on liberal education. We have three of our previous guests in the series back to discuss some common themes in the work of Leo Strauss, Michael Oakeshott and Hannah Arendt. We have Michael and Catherine Zuckert, Rita Koganzon, a...
Sep 04, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 35
To lead into the next season of Enduring Interest, we're re-releasing our first two seasons, covering totalitarianism and ideology and liberal education. We'll be back on September 8 with a new season covering free speech and censorship. In this episode we discuss a short essay by the philosopher Henry Bugbee, “Education and the Style of our Lives.” Bugbee taught for a number of years at the University of Montana. This short, beautiful and thought-provoking essay was occasioned by a report that ...
Sep 01, 2023•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 34
To lead into the next season of Enduring Interest, we're re-releasing our first two seasons, covering totalitarianism and ideology and liberal education. We'll be back on September 8 with a new season covering free speech and censorship. This month we are pleased to bring you a special episode that departs from our normal path. For the past several months, we’ve been looking at forgotten or neglected books and essays on liberal education. We’re very excited to bring you this conversation with th...
Aug 28, 2023•1 hr 24 min•Ep. 33
To lead into the next season of Enduring Interest, we're re-releasing our first two seasons, covering totalitarianism and ideology and liberal education. We'll be back on September 8 with a new season covering free speech and censorship. This month our subject is Michael Oakeshott. We discuss two essays in particular: “A Place of Learning” and “Learning and Teaching.” Both essays can be found in the volume The Voice of Liberal Learning . Our guest is Elizabeth Corey of Baylor University. Elizabe...
Aug 25, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 32
To lead into the next season of Enduring Interest, we're re-releasing our first two seasons, covering totalitarianism and ideology and liberal education. We'll be back on September 8 with a new season covering free speech and censorship. This month we’re pleased to present a conversation on Eva Brann’s book Paradoxes of Education in a Republic. Brann serves as a tutor at St. John’s College—she’s the author of many books and Paradoxes was published in 1979. Our guest is Pavlos Papadopoulos—himsel...
Aug 21, 2023•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 31
To lead into the next season of Enduring Interest, we're re-releasing our first two seasons, covering totalitarianism and ideology and liberal education. We'll be back on September 8 with a new season covering free speech and censorship. In this episode Rita Koganzon and I discuss two essays by the philosopher Hannah Arendt: “Crisis in Education” and “Reflections on Little Rock.” The former was first published in Partisan Review in 1958 and the latter in Dissent in 1959. Rita gives an account of...
Aug 18, 2023•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 30
To lead into the next season of Enduring Interest, we're re-releasing our first two seasons, covering totalitarianism and ideology and liberal education. We'll be back on September 8 with a new season covering free speech and censorship. With this episode Enduring Interest moves into a new series on the subject of education. In the coming months we will be hearing from guests on authors including Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, Eva Brann, Michael Oakshott, and others. Leo Strauss once wrote, “I own ...
Aug 14, 2023•1 hr 27 min•Ep. 29
To lead into the next season of Enduring Interest, we're re-releasing our first two seasons, covering totalitarianism and ideology and liberal education. We'll be back on September 8 with a new season covering free speech and censorship. In this episode I speak with four previous guests on the podcast (Clare Cavanagh, Jacob Howland, Perry Link, and James Pontuso) and take up the question of the relationship between art and totalitarianism. We consider the fate of artistic inquiry and expression ...
Aug 11, 2023•1 hr 29 min•Ep. 28
To lead into the next season of Enduring Interest, we're re-releasing our first two seasons, covering totalitarianism and ideology and liberal education. We'll be back on September 8 with a new season covering free speech and censorship. Nathan Pinkoski, Research Fellow and Academic Director at the Zephyr Institute, and I discuss François Furet’s terrific book The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism of the Twentieth Century—first published in English in 1999. We talk a bit about Furet’...
Aug 07, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 27
To lead into the next season of Enduring Interest, we're re-releasing our first two seasons, covering totalitarianism and ideology and liberal education. We'll be back on September 8 with a new season covering free speech and censorship. In this episode I speak with Clare Cavanagh, Frances Hooper Professor of Arts and Humanities and Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Northwestern University. She’s the author of a forthcoming authorized biography of Czeslaw Milosz and a prize-winnin...
Aug 04, 2023•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 26
To lead into the next season of Enduring Interest, we're re-releasing our first two seasons, covering totalitarianism and ideology and liberal education. We'll be back on September 8 with a new season covering free speech and censorship. In this episode I speak with James Pontuso, the Charles Patterson Professor of Government and Foreign Affairs at Hampton Sydney College, about Václav Havel’s trilogy revolving around the remarkable character Ferdinand Vaněk. We discuss Havel’s life as a playwrig...
Jul 31, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 25
To lead into the next season of Enduring Interest, we're re-releasing our first two seasons, covering totalitarianism and ideology and liberal education. We'll be back on September 8 with a new season covering free speech and censorship. In this episode I speak with Daniel J. Mahoney, Professor and Augustinian Boulanger Chair in the Department of Political Science at Assumption University, about The Opium of the Intellectuals by the great French political thinker Raymond Aron. Dan argues that Ar...
Jul 28, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 24
To lead into the third season of Enduring Interest, we're re-releasing our first two seasons, covering totalitarianism and ideology and liberal education. We'll be back on September 8 with a new season covering free speech and censorship. In this episode I speak with renowned China scholar Perry Link, the Chancellorial Chair for Teaching Across Disciplines at the University of California, Riverside, about his now classic 2002 essay “China: The Anaconda in the Chandelier.” We discuss the origins ...
Jul 24, 2023•1 hr 8 min•Season 1Ep. 2
To lead into the third season of Enduring Interest, we're re-releasing our first two seasons, covering totalitarianism and ideology and liberal education. We'll be back on September 8 with a new season covering free speech and censorship. In the inaugural episode of Enduring Interest, I speak with Jacob Howland, McFarlin Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Tulsa, about Yevgeny Zamyatin’s great dystopian novel WE. Jacob and I talk about Zamyatin himself—his early commitment to t...
Jul 21, 2023•55 min•Ep. 23
Here’s the second episode in our occasional series on lesser-known works by authors of acknowledged classics. We discuss Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Letter to d’Alembert on the Theater. D’Alembert published an article on Geneva for the Encyclopédie in 1757 which included a recommendation that Geneva should have a theater. Rousseau soon took up his been to argue against his friend’s proposal. “In so doing,” wrote Allan Bloom, “Rousseau presented as complete a treatment of the arts in relation to poli...
May 15, 2023•1 hr 28 min•Ep. 22
This month we discuss Norman Podhoretz’s memoir Making It. The book was first published in 1967 and then was reissued in 2017 by the New York Review of Books. Making It was controversial upon publication—friends like Jason Epstein even warned Podhoretz against publishing it. Making It chronicles Podhoretz’s rise from Jewish Brooklyn, to Columbia University, on to Cambridge University, and then to joining the exclusive community of New York Intellectuals. He frames his story with the themes of su...
Mar 06, 2023•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 21
This month we discuss William Alexander Percy’s memoir, Lanterns on the Levee, first published in 1941. Percy lived a full and extraordinary life, beautifully captured in this book. A native of Greenville, Mississippi, Percy writes as a witness of the “disintegration of that moral cohesion of the South.” He was by turns a teacher, lawyer, poet, soldier, planter and adoptive father. We discuss Percy’s portrait of the class dynamics of the south, race relations, the emergence of populist political...
Feb 06, 2023•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 20
With this episode Enduring Interest inaugurates a new occasional series on chapters or parts of great books which tend to be ignored or not much talked about. Matt Dinan is back to discuss a series of brief and fascinating chapters in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics on the social virtues: gentleness, friendliness, truthfulness and wittiness. Check out Matt’s essay “Be Nice,” first published in the Fall 2018 issue of The Hedgehog Review, where he touches on some of these virtues. Matt is an associ...
Dec 23, 2022•52 min•Ep. 19
Our subject for this episode is Albert Murray’s South to a Very Old Place. Part memoir, part travelogue, part dialogue with a range of interlocutors, this book is remarkable for both its variety and depth. Murray travels from Harlem to New Haven and then down south to Tuskegee and Mobile and beyond. Murray chats with the likes of Robert Penn Warren and Walker Percy and meditates on the themes of home, history, place, and myth. Our guest and I discuss Murray’s life and the peculiar nature of this...
Nov 17, 2022•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 18
In 1931 George S. Schuyler (1895-1977) published his novel Black No More: Being an account of the strange and wonderful workings of science in the land of the free, A.D. 1933-1940. It’s a satirical romp that takes up the race obsessions of various constituencies in the United States in the early part of the twentieth century. The book is deeply funny and the humor is meant to provoke some serious thought about the costs and consequences of the racialist thinking that Schuyler thought infected al...
Oct 19, 2022•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 17
Ralph Ellison wrote one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, Invisible Man. He was also a gifted essayist and in this episode we discuss two essays in particular: “The Little Man at Chehaw Station” and “What America Would be Like Without Blacks.” The former was first published in The American Scholar in the Winter 1977/78 issue. In my view it’s one of the finest meditations on American identity ever written. That latter first appeared in Time magazine in April of 1970. They both appe...
Sep 06, 2022•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 16
