The Interview: Dr. Mark Blitz on Reason and Politics
The American Mind
The Claremont Institute
4.6 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 17 May 2021
⏱️ 64 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this newly revived occasional series, Ryan Williams, President of The Claremont Institute, interviews prominent scholars in the Claremont Institute's orbit. Dr. Mark Blitz, the Fletcher Jones Professor of Political Philosophy at Claremont McKenna College, joins Ryan to discuss his new book, Reason and Politics: The Nature of Political Phenomena—a searching discussion of questions at the heart of both America’s regime and her present crisis. Ryan and Mark discuss prudence, the common good, and how American public life could regain its sanity.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome everyone to not the roundtable, but rather the interview, what we're going to call the |
| 0:05.4 | interview. One of the podcasts here at the American Mind, our roundtable is our weekly podcast, |
| 0:11.7 | where we cover the news, cover the latest at the intersection of ideas and politics. |
| 0:18.8 | But back when we first started podcasting, we were doing occasional interviews with scholars from |
| 0:24.3 | the Claremont orbit about their books or about important topics, and we're going to revive that. |
| 0:30.1 | So I'm your host, Ryan Williams, president of the Claremont Institute, publisher of the Claremont |
| 0:34.6 | Review Books and the American Mind. And this is the first of what we hope will be many interviews |
| 0:40.4 | forthcoming. This is with Mark Blitz, an old friend of mine, a teacher of mine at the graduate |
| 0:46.7 | school, an old friend of Claremont, and an expert in political philosophy, or really the great |
| 0:53.2 | works of political philosophy over the last couple thousand years. He's a scholar of Heidegger, |
| 0:59.0 | of Nietzsche, of Hegel, of Plato, of Aristotle, you know, basically take any great thinker from |
| 1:04.2 | the Western canon. A truly great thinker from the Western canon, and Mark has plumbed the depths. |
| 1:10.3 | He has a new book out called Reason and Politics, and this is my conversation with him. He gets into |
| 1:16.2 | some concepts that are foundational to our public life together and to our regime here in America, |
| 1:22.3 | whether it's freedom or the common good or many concepts that have been much on the minds of |
| 1:28.1 | conservatives and even the new right these days. So I wanted to use the book as a jumping off point |
| 1:33.2 | to talk about some pressing issues. And this is truly an original book, an original book of philosophy, |
| 1:40.5 | and but it's accessible at the same time. Mark has a great gift of taking words and concepts in |
| 1:46.1 | their normal and everyday sense and then building on those and helping us to understand them and |
| 1:50.8 | their depth and what they mean for reason and politics. So I hope you like the interview and |
| 1:55.5 | look forward to many more. |
| 2:05.5 | Welcome, Mark. Thanks for coming in to talk with me about your new book, Reason and Politics, |
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