David Lewis Schaefer
Biographic Data
| ID | 266376 |
|---|---|
| NAME | David Lewis Schaefer |
| GIVEN NAMES | David Lewis |
| FAMILY NAME | Schaefer |
| SIGNATURE | SCHAEFER D L |
| AFFILIATIONS | College of the Holy Cross |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 35 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 11 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 35 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1973 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Combating the Rot in America’s Law Schools
David Lewis Schaefer takes a different approach than Bruce Frohnen on Ilya Shapiro’s Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites, and finds that Shapiro has “performed an invaluable service” toward “the restoration of respect for law and for free intellectual inquiry.”
Guest Editor’s Introduction
Culture vs. Multiculturalism
In Defense of Constitutional Government: A Response to Erwin Chemerinsky’s Worse than Nothing
Introduction to the Symposium on Erwin Chemerinsky, Worse than Nothing: The Dangerous Fallacy of Originalism
La première circulation de la “Servitude volontaire” en France et au-delà
La première circulation de la “Servitude volontaire” en France et au-delà. John O'Brien and Marc Schachter, eds. Bibliothèque Littéraire de la Renaissance 92. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2019. 462 pp. €55. - Volume 74 Issue 3
The Games That Academics Play
Is Economic Inequality a Threat to American Constitutional Democracy
Montaigne: Founder of Modern Liberalism
In this essay David Lewis Schaefer summarizes and defends the argument set forth in his book The Political Philosophy of Montaigne (Cornell University Press, 1990; second edition 2019) that Michele de Montaigne's Essays (first edition, 1580) merits consideration as a founding text of modern political liberalism. After responding to the most extensive published critique of his interpretation (by James Supple) and citing other recent studies that h…
Agrarian (In) Equality (and Dependency) vs Commerce and Liberty: Reconsidering the Relation between Constitutional Government and Economic Inequality in the American Republic
This essay provides a critique of two recent books, by professors of law and political science, respectively, which argue that the economic inequality now found in the United States threatens the survival of free government: Ganesh Sitamaran’s The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution and Clement Fatovic’s America’s Founding and the Struggle over Economic Inequality. In each case I argue that the authors’ claim depends on an erroneous applicati…
Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century: Economic Analysis or Tract for the Times
I argue that the French economist Thomas Piketty's 2014 (American) bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century is not the treatise of economic analysis that its author purports it to be, but is rather a work of political partisanship making claims about the supposedly inevitable increase in the share of national income deriving from capital as opposed to labor—to the point where Chinese bankers or Middle Eastern oil sheiks might own “everythin…
Fair Howsing? Robert Howse on Strauss and Straussians
Robert Howse's Leo Strauss Man of Peace performs a valuable service in vindicating Strauss against scurrilous charges coming from the academic Left in recent decades that he was an antidemocratic warmonger, rather than (as Strauss described Socrates) a seeker of peace, though not a pacifist. Unfortunately, Howse initially pursues his goal by launching a variety of unfounded criticisms of some of Strauss's most prominent students, accusing them of…
Yoram Hazony and Leo Strauss on the Relation between Philosophy and Revelation
This essay challenges Yoram Hazony's ostensible correction of Leo Strauss's account of the tension between philosophy and revelation in Hazony's book The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture. While Hazony persuasively demonstrates the value of the Hebrew Bible, notably the half that he calls the “History of Israel,” as a work of rational political theory, emphasizing the difference in function between the Torah and the Christian “New Testament” (which …
Guest Editor's Introduction
Discourse on Voluntary Servitude
Estienne de La Boétie. Discourse on Voluntary Servitude. Ed. James B. Atkinson. Trans. James B. Atkinson and David Sices. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2012. xlviii + 46 pp. $7.95. ISBN: 978–1–60384–839–8. - Volume 66 Issue 2
A Review of “Never Enough”: William Voegeli. (New York and London: Encounter Books, 2010)
Recovering, Restoring, and Renewing the Foundations of American Public Administration: The Contributions of Herbert J. Storing
Public administration continues to face an identity crisis that turns on the question of whether the animating principles of the discipline are to be discovered in the political foundations of a given regime, or whether they are to be found in more universal and transcendent principles of scientific management. Herbert J. Storing reframed the identity crisis as a problem arising from America's constitutional system of governance. In doing so, he …
Procedural Versus Substantive Justice: Rawls and Nozick
This paper critically assesses the “procedural” accounts of political justice set forth by John Rawls in A Theory of Justice (1971) and Robert Nozick in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974). I argue that the areas of agreement between Rawls and Nozick are more significant than their disagreements. Even though Nozick offers trenchant criticisms of Rawls's argument for economic redistribution (the “difference principle”), Nozick's own economic liberta…
A Common Law Theory of Judicial Review: The Living Tree, By W. J. Waluchow
Books in review
Montaigne, Tocqueville, and the Politics of Skepticism
Political Philosophy and the Human Soul: Essays in Memory of Allan Bloom. Michael Palmer , Thomas L. Pangle
Leo Strauss and American Democracy: A Response to Wood and Holmes
Although Leo Strauss spent the better part of his scholarly career in the United States, his name remained essentially unknown in this country during his lifetime outside the rather restricted academic circles of political science and Judaic studies. Only in recent years — owing, positively, to the best-selling status achieved by a book by one of his students, Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind ; and negatively, to several critical review…
Theodore J. Lowi and the Administrative State
Despite its author's lip service to such traditional principles of liberal constitutionalism as the rule of law and separation of powers, the system of "juridical democracy" advocated by Theodore Lowi in his influential book The End of Liberalism actually represents a considerable departure from the intentions of the American founders. Its true ancestry lies rather in the political science of Woodrow Wilson, who sought to subordinate apolitically…
Reply to Theodore J. Lowi
Political Philosophy and the Human Soul: Essays in Memory of Allan Bloom. Michael Palmer , Thomas L. Pangle
Montaigne's Political Skepticism
In this article, David Schaefer attempts to show that Montaigne was the intellectual ancestor of many characteristic aspects of modern thought. The liberty, prosperity, and comfort we enjoy as citizens of a liberal, commercial society derive to a large extent from the success with which Montaigne and his philosophical successors persuaded men to put their earthly well-being ahead of pretensions to divinity, salvation, or glory. Here the author ex…
The Good, the Beautiful, and the Useful: Montaigne's Transvaluation of Values
Historians of political thought have failed to appreciate the importance of Montaigne's Essays as a major work of modern political philosophy. The neglect of the Essays as a political book is traceable to a widespread belief that Montaigne's thought is too fluctuating and unsystematic to embody a coherent and profound political teaching.This study challenges the prevailing interpretation of Montaigne's thought by analyzing his critique of the cla…
Theodore J. Lowi and the Administrative State
Despite its author's lip service to such traditional principles of liberal constitutionalism as the rule of law and separation of powers, the system of "juridical democracy" advocated by Theodore Lowi in his influential book The End of Liberalism actually represents a considerable departure from the intentions of the American founders. Its true ancestry lies rather in the political science of Woodrow Wilson, who sought to subordinate apolitically…
Wisdom & Morality: Aristotle's Account of Akrasia
This article explores the problem of moral and criminal responsibility through an examination of Aristotle's account in Book VII of the "Nicomachean Ethics" of the relation between practical reason and moral unrestraint ("akrasia"). The author seeks to explain Aristotle's surprising agreement with the Socratic thesis that no one does wrong knowingly. Though what generally passes for practical wisdom seems, in Aristotle's account, to be independen…
Economic Scarcity and Political Philosophy: Ancient and Modern Views
The history of political philosophy exhibits two fundamentally opposed responses to economic scarcity. The classical view, exemplified by Aristotle's Politics, accepts scarcity as an inevitable feature of human existence, but endeavors to direct at least some individuals toward a life of virtue that transcends the concern with economic acquisition. Aristotle rhetorically exaggerates nature's beneficence to humans in order to facilitate this goal.…
Montaigne's Political Reformation
Moral Theory” Versus Political Philosophy: Two Approaches to Justice
John Rawls's book A Theory of Justice1 has been widely looked to not only as a substantive account of the meaning of justice, but also as a model of the procedure by which the requirements of justice may be determined. Rawls terms his mode of approach to justice “moral theory,” and apparently subsumes the traditional discipline of political philosophy under this more inclusive science. At the same time, he claims that his approach is Socratic in …
Federalism and the First Amenment
FEDERALISM AND THE FIRST AMENMENT Get access David L. Schaefer David L. Schaefer Temple University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Publius: The Journal of Federalism, Volume 3, Issue 1, Spring 1973, Pages 31–55, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.pubjof.a038270 Published: 01 January 1973
Moral Theory” Versus Political Philosophy: Two Approaches to Justice
John Rawls's book A Theory of Justice1 has been widely looked to not only as a substantive account of the meaning of justice, but also as a model of the procedure by which the requirements of justice may be determined. Rawls terms his mode of approach to justice “moral theory,” and apparently subsumes the traditional discipline of political philosophy under this more inclusive science. At the same time, he claims that his approach is Socratic in …
Montaigne's Political Skepticism
In this article, David Schaefer attempts to show that Montaigne was the intellectual ancestor of many characteristic aspects of modern thought. The liberty, prosperity, and comfort we enjoy as citizens of a liberal, commercial society derive to a large extent from the success with which Montaigne and his philosophical successors persuaded men to put their earthly well-being ahead of pretensions to divinity, salvation, or glory. Here the author ex…
The Good, the Beautiful, and the Useful: Montaigne's Transvaluation of Values
Historians of political thought have failed to appreciate the importance of Montaigne's Essays as a major work of modern political philosophy. The neglect of the Essays as a political book is traceable to a widespread belief that Montaigne's thought is too fluctuating and unsystematic to embody a coherent and profound political teaching.This study challenges the prevailing interpretation of Montaigne's thought by analyzing his critique of the cla…
The New Egalitarianism: Questions and Challenges
Montaigne's Political Reformation
Equal Opportunity and Justice
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Of Cannibals and Kings: Montaigne's Egalitarianism
It is paradoxical that an author whose thought is widely recognized to have had a profound influence on such revolutionary thinkers as Locke, Bayle, and Rousseau should be regarded as having himself been an extreme conservative in questions of political practice. Yet such is the almost unanimous judgment of contemporary scholars on Michel de Montaigne. While Montaigne endeavored in the Essays to question radically the grounds of all accepted beli…
Economic Scarcity and Political Philosophy: Ancient and Modern Views
The history of political philosophy exhibits two fundamentally opposed responses to economic scarcity. The classical view, exemplified by Aristotle's Politics, accepts scarcity as an inevitable feature of human existence, but endeavors to direct at least some individuals toward a life of virtue that transcends the concern with economic acquisition. Aristotle rhetorically exaggerates nature's beneficence to humans in order to facilitate this goal.…
Theodore J. Lowi and the Administrative State
Despite its author's lip service to such traditional principles of liberal constitutionalism as the rule of law and separation of powers, the system of "juridical democracy" advocated by Theodore Lowi in his influential book The End of Liberalism actually represents a considerable departure from the intentions of the American founders. Its true ancestry lies rather in the political science of Woodrow Wilson, who sought to subordinate apolitically…
Reply to Theodore J. Lowi
Wisdom & Morality: Aristotle's Account of Akrasia
This article explores the problem of moral and criminal responsibility through an examination of Aristotle's account in Book VII of the "Nicomachean Ethics" of the relation between practical reason and moral unrestraint ("akrasia"). The author seeks to explain Aristotle's surprising agreement with the Socratic thesis that no one does wrong knowingly. Though what generally passes for practical wisdom seems, in Aristotle's account, to be independen…
Leo Strauss and American Democracy: A Response to Wood and Holmes
Although Leo Strauss spent the better part of his scholarly career in the United States, his name remained essentially unknown in this country during his lifetime outside the rather restricted academic circles of political science and Judaic studies. Only in recent years — owing, positively, to the best-selling status achieved by a book by one of his students, Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind ; and negatively, to several critical review…
Political Philosophy and the Human Soul: Essays in Memory of Allan Bloom. Michael Palmer , Thomas L. Pangle
Books in review
Montaigne, Tocqueville, and the Politics of Skepticism
Procedural Versus Substantive Justice: Rawls and Nozick
This paper critically assesses the “procedural” accounts of political justice set forth by John Rawls in A Theory of Justice (1971) and Robert Nozick in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974). I argue that the areas of agreement between Rawls and Nozick are more significant than their disagreements. Even though Nozick offers trenchant criticisms of Rawls's argument for economic redistribution (the “difference principle”), Nozick's own economic liberta…
A Common Law Theory of Judicial Review: The Living Tree, By W. J. Waluchow
Recovering, Restoring, and Renewing the Foundations of American Public Administration: The Contributions of Herbert J. Storing
Public administration continues to face an identity crisis that turns on the question of whether the animating principles of the discipline are to be discovered in the political foundations of a given regime, or whether they are to be found in more universal and transcendent principles of scientific management. Herbert J. Storing reframed the identity crisis as a problem arising from America's constitutional system of governance. In doing so, he …
A Review of “Never Enough”: William Voegeli. (New York and London: Encounter Books, 2010)
Discourse on Voluntary Servitude
Estienne de La Boétie. Discourse on Voluntary Servitude. Ed. James B. Atkinson. Trans. James B. Atkinson and David Sices. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2012. xlviii + 46 pp. $7.95. ISBN: 978–1–60384–839–8. - Volume 66 Issue 2
Yoram Hazony and Leo Strauss on the Relation between Philosophy and Revelation
This essay challenges Yoram Hazony's ostensible correction of Leo Strauss's account of the tension between philosophy and revelation in Hazony's book The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture. While Hazony persuasively demonstrates the value of the Hebrew Bible, notably the half that he calls the “History of Israel,” as a work of rational political theory, emphasizing the difference in function between the Torah and the Christian “New Testament” (which …
Guest Editor's Introduction
Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century: Economic Analysis or Tract for the Times
I argue that the French economist Thomas Piketty's 2014 (American) bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century is not the treatise of economic analysis that its author purports it to be, but is rather a work of political partisanship making claims about the supposedly inevitable increase in the share of national income deriving from capital as opposed to labor—to the point where Chinese bankers or Middle Eastern oil sheiks might own “everythin…
Fair Howsing? Robert Howse on Strauss and Straussians
Robert Howse's Leo Strauss Man of Peace performs a valuable service in vindicating Strauss against scurrilous charges coming from the academic Left in recent decades that he was an antidemocratic warmonger, rather than (as Strauss described Socrates) a seeker of peace, though not a pacifist. Unfortunately, Howse initially pursues his goal by launching a variety of unfounded criticisms of some of Strauss's most prominent students, accusing them of…
Political science (32 works) · Law (28 works) · Politics (21 works) · Sociology (21 works) · Philosophy (20 works) · Law (18 works) · Epistemology (14 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Law and economics (9 works) · Economics (7 works)