So we’re again coming up on that unwelcome anniversary, that of the death of Peter Augustine Lawler, 5/23/2017. Six years now without his friendship, thought, and leadership.
In a post a couple years back, I explained how Peter led the first Post-Modern Conservative website, the group-blog that ran from 2010-2016, hosted at First Things, and then at National Review Online, and how his own thought was both distinctive, and the origin of the post-modern conservative tag. That post focused on Lawler’s own books.
This post, by contrast, is about the thinkers and books which most shaped Lawler, and according to his own report. I will simply link to one of Lawler’s own posts, which he wrote for the NRO version of the blog, titled “Authors Who Shaped ME.”
Peter’s list begins with Tocqueville, second-place is held by Pascal, Percy’s third, and last but not least, is Peter’s middle-name namesake, old Augustine. A list of 40, with an addendum making it 41, and without the work of indicating which were the most important books for him by each respective author.
Naughtily for a Strauss-influenced scholar, Plato only comes in at 34, and is the only author given a qualification—Peter says he’s influenced by him “pretty selectively.”
He felt compelled to add Rousseau as an influence at 41, after some readers objected. He added him as an author who like Rorty and Bloom held “normative views” he strongly disagreed with, but to whom he nonetheless owed important intellectual debts.
Interesting to see him distancing himself from the main views of Rorty and Bloom, and also without taking the care to include Nietzsche in his mention of such influences I strongly disagree with. I guess he was more anti-Bloom than I have previously appreciated!
Also notable is the absence of Aquinas from the list, given the many other Catholic authors, and given the way his initial presentation of his theory of “Postmodernism Rightly Understood” said that this theory—especially as it was prefigured in Walker Percy’s thought—had a certain a kinship with Thomism(see the index of Postmodernism Rightly Understood). That might have been an oversight, as with the omission of Rousseau, but obviously, Peter’s thought and writing style always had much more in common with Augustine and Pascal than with Aquinas.
Great tribute, wish I had known his work. That's the way an office is supposed to be! 🙏
Really appreciate all 3 of these posts on Lawler. I was blessed to study under Heinrich Rommen and be in the Govt. Dept graduate school at Georgetown in the early 1960s.... I can't say enough of how I appreciate Lawler's work and his spirit of humility and brilliance combined. THANK YOU.