Acton Commentary

November 18, 2015

Acton and Burke: For The Conservative Wisdom of History and Tradition

“It was the genius of the English political system to adhere to the facts of English history,” says Gertrude Himmelfarb in this week’s Acton Commentary. What Lord Acton particularly admired in the later Edmund Burke was his empirical philosophy of politics, his refusal to give way to the metaphysical abstractions, the a priori speculations, that had been insinuated into public life by the rationalists of the French Revolution. Continue Reading...

October 22, 2015

The frontier spirit of ‘The Martian’

A new film set on Mars taps into the quintessential American story, says Dylan Pahman in this week’s Acton Commentary. After the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man to travel to outer space in 1961, Nikita Khrushchev remarked, “Gagarin flew into space, but didn’t see any god there.” Continue Reading...

October 14, 2015

There is No Such Thing as ‘The Poor’

“With the news this week that Angus Deaton of Princeton University had won the economics Nobel,” says Victor V. Claar in this week’s Acton Commentary, “the question of how best to help the poor in developing nations takes on a greater level of urgency.” Continue Reading...

September 30, 2015

The Economic Reeducation of Pope Francis?

It may be too early to tell, says Kishore Jayabalan in this week’s Acton Commentary, but has Francis has learned something about economics from his American critics? Can we dare to say that Francis has learned something about economics from his American critics? Continue Reading...

September 16, 2015

The Bright Side of Sharia Law

Why aren’t church leaders who are so quick to condemn capitalism, asks Rev. Jerry J. Pokorsky in this week’s Acton Commentary, decrying Big Government bureaucracy? The warnings of recent papal teachings on questions of social justice rarely – if ever – identify the dangers of a highly bureaucratized central government. Continue Reading...

September 09, 2015

The Francis-Trump Populist Nexus

Populism makes for strange bedfellows, says Kishore Jayabalan in this week’s Acton Commentary. “Take Pope Francis and Donald Trump, for instance. They are certainly populists of very different sorts, but there is one issue that unites them – both are harsh critics of economic globalization.” Continue Reading...

September 02, 2015

The Moral Dimension of Work

“The world is not a parsimonious place, in spite of the dogmas of the ecologists,” says James V. Schall in this week’s Acton Commentary. Our most unsettling economic problems are actually not economic but moral—moral ones that cannot be simply passed on from generation to generation. Continue Reading...

August 26, 2015