Conservatism in Theory and Practice

An outline of the freshman seminar I’ll be teaching at Penn this fall

President Ronald Reagan and William F. Buckley Jr. (left) laugh heartily on February 21, 1983, at a reception honoring National Review, the conservative magazine Buckley founded in 1955. (Getty Images)

Mid-August is when most professors begin to turn with harried intensity to the task of putting syllabi together for classes that will need to be taught just a couple of weeks down the road. At the moment, I’m preparing for a freshman seminar this fall with the same title as this post: “Conservatism in Theory and Practice.” Since that topic, like elements of my lecture course last spring on modern political theory, interacts with the subjects I write about quite often at this Substack, I thought my subscribers might be interested to hear how I’m organizing the class.