This year, the Tocqueville Program will continue its examination of three fundamental forms of human association: love, friendship, and politics. While love and friendship have long been thought essential to human happiness, politics has been derided as “the systematic organization of hatreds.” In our time, politics so understood threatens to crowd out all other modes of human association: our personal loves have become partisan issues, and friendship across party lines seems increasingly rare.

Understanding this danger, wise lawgivers have long paid the closest attention to love and friendship, which can check partisanship and even supersede the pursuit of distributive justice. In our bitterly divided political moment, can we attain a more elevated understanding of politics by understanding it in the light these other forms of human association?

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2018-2019 Lecturers

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2017-2018 Lecturers