Ed Hagenstein

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Ed Hagenstein, of Medanales, New Mexico, is author of The Language of Liberty: A Citizen’s Vocabulary (Rootstock, 2020) and co-editor of American Georgics: Writings on Farming, Culture, and the Land (Yale University Press, 2011). With an interest in woodworking, Hagenstein also wrote Craft in Common: 30 Years at the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship (Crow Hill Press, 2023). He is also author of the forthcoming book Through a Glass Darkly: In Search of a Constitutional Future, due out from RealClear Publishing in the fall of 2025.

Recent Essays

Away From Politics with Kathleen Raine (Then Back Again)

Ed Hagenstein - December 6, 2024

Are we capable of that on a scale that will regenerate our political life? Perhaps not, at least for now, but we can take heart from the knowledge that, over the long course of human events, peoples have built cities that embodied high civic ends.

I Sing of Shoes and the Man

Ed Hagenstein - August 3, 2022

But the dark events of that afternoon have remained with me and have prompted a question that I have often wrestled with, fruitfully, I think, but never to a clear decision: Lacking a proper foundation in kickball, what sort of culture, if any at all, could flourish in a Newton, Massachusetts?

Water and Wood: An Artistic Parable

Ed Hagenstein - June 17, 2021

Ed Hagenstein reflects on Makoto Fujimura's metaphor for cultural engagement and suggests that cultural renewal starts with the essential resources all around us.

Max Picard’s Silence

Ed Hagenstein - November 30, 2020

Perhaps, without silence for a reference point—something out there that reminds us of our place in the big order of things—the masters of information feel free to shade, obscure, or otherwise manipulate their messages.