Larry P. Arnn, Author at Imprimis

Hillsdale’s Mission and the Politics of Freedom

Larry P. Arnn | November 2023

Hillsdale has always been broadly partisan on behalf of freedom. Indeed we are required by the College’s charter document, written in 1844, to offer “sound learning” of the kind needed to preserve the blessings of “civil and religious liberty and intelligent piety in the land.” In the early decades of Hillsdale’s history, that meant opposing slavery. In recent decades, it has meant opposing the centralization of comprehensive power that corrodes our Constitution and undermines our American way of life.

Education as a Battleground

Larry P. Arnn | November 2022

The political contest between parents and people who make an independent living, on the one hand, and the administrative state and all its mighty forces on the other, is the key political contest of our time.

The Way Out

Larry P. Arnn | November 2021

We have these rights because we were born with them sewn by God into our nature, and we cannot find our earthly fulfillment without them. If we put these facts together as a people, we will have recovered the understanding that produced the American Revolution. We will stop these current predations upon our rights. We will bring this overwhelming government back where it belongs, under the control of the people.

Orwell’s 1984 and Today

Larry P. Arnn | December 2020

We can see today the totalitarian impulse among powerful forces in our politics and culture. We can see it in the rise and imposition of doublethink, and we can see it in the increasing attempt to rewrite our history.

Thoughts on the Current Crisis

Larry P. Arnn | March/April 2020

Going forward, our best leaders will eschew political gamesmanship and work to control our borders, fix our public health agencies, and end our dependence on China and other foreign countries for goods that are essential to our national health and security. We must prepare ourselves to face the next pandemic without surrendering our way of life.

Four Pillars: Educating for America

Larry P. Arnn | December 2019

Colleges today are increasingly collections of hostile identity groups, each clamoring against the crimes of the other. Students are not invited to step outside themselves, to step outside their own time, and to look at things as they have been understood by the best over time. If they did that, they would then learn and grow not by invention but by discovery.

Do We Need Our Country Anymore?

Larry P. Arnn | December 2018

From this history we learn that it is not the nation-state, but the kinds of nation-states that matter. From the birth of political philosophy in ancient Athens, it has been understood in the West that the difference between good and bad regimes, just as between lives lived well and lives lived badly, is all-important.