This is the anniversary of the birth of the patron of PoMoCon, Peter Lawler, and so we’re beginning the second series of podcasts we’re doing in his honor. After talking to public intellectuals–you can find all the links below–I turn to talking to the people closest to PoMoCon, in its First Things and National Review incarnations, as well as now at the American Cinema Foundation. I talk to my friend Paul Seaton, who teaches politics and philosophy at St. Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore, who’s known Peter more than 30 years and can speak to his intellectual journey.

So here’s the fifth interview in my series in remembrance of Peter Lawler — today, I talk with Dan Mahoney, America’s foremost authority on the thought of Solzhenitsyn, and the author of several other important books, especially on the greatest French thinkers and statesmen of the last two centuries, some of whom he’s translated. (You can find his books on his Amazon page.) We talk about American individualism, the troubles of democracy, and Peter’s Christian reflection on what it means to be a person — both individual and relational, both homeless in this world and at home, in community, with that homelessness…

So this is the second in our series on the late professor of political philosophy and public intellectual Peter Lawler. Today, I talk with my friend Richard Reinsch, the editor at Law & Liberty, and co-author of Peter’s last book, A Constitution In Full, an attempt to retrieve the complex American history that made for the middle-class nation, especially to retrieve the complement to our excessive individualism–our relational being.