Ted V. McAllister

Ted V. McAllister
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Ted McAllister is a native of Oklahoma, now living in Moorpark, California with his wife, Dena, and his two children, Elisa and Luke. He yearns for his own chunk of land and for those bits of nature that please him, but not for farming or for unnecessary drudgery of the sort that involves physical labor.  He is an aesthetic agrarian, not a practicing one. Educated as an Intellectual and Cultural Historian at Vanderbilt University, he now teaches at Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy where he pursues with his students the enduring questions rather than the particular answers.  His book, Revolt Against Modernity:  Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, and the Search for a Post-Liberal Order launched him into the study of political philosophy, though his epistemological orientation is much shaped by his training as a historian.  Working presently on Walter Lippmann as well as a US History textbook, he expects soon to write a multi-volume history of the Baby-boomers.

Recent Essays

Civic Engagement and the “Native Country”

The modern liberation of the individual from the constraints of place constitutes as much a limitation as an emancipation. To put the claim bluntly,...

In Search of the Real Coolidge

Our interest in historical subjects says as much about our society as about the subjects themselves.  The growing interest in the life, thought and...

Public versus Government Schools

In an essay posted at the law and liberty blog I explored how Progressives seek to rear citizens--to create the kind of citizens well...

Whatever Happened to the Playful Ad Hominem?

Few things excited or engaged my mind as a child as much as Buckley’s playful ad hominem attacks, launched regularly at his guests on...

Nisbet, Austerity, and Progressive Community

Over at the Liberty and Law blog I am writing a series of essays in which I examine Robert Nisbet’s ideas in light of...

Cars, Individualism, and the Paradox of Freedom in a Mass Society

The automobile squared perfectly with a distinctive American ideal of freedom—freedom of mobility.

Rocky and the New Populism

Today we can easily forget how dark things looked in the 1970s and how much people feared that they might be living in the sunset years of our nation and its characteristic way of life. We forget how important patriotism and a belief in the goodness of the nation were to the health of the republic.

Iris Chang and the Delicate Art of Remembering

A proper remembering requires more than telling the facts or chronicling the plunder, rape, murder in Nanking; it requires that one explain the event.

Can the Left Govern?

Recently I was asked to participate in a symposium on Michael Berube's "The Left At War" for the journal "Politics and Culture."  I took...

Allan Bloom and Homogenizing Nature

What is the purpose of education?

Liberated From Community?

Was Nisbet wrong about the quest for community?

Pale Liberalism

It is time to reopen the questions about human nature, about human autonomy, about the desirability self-creation. Liberals should, in brief, broaden their horizons to ponder competing views of human flourishing.