Government and International Studies

DR. PETER LAWLER
Dana Professor of Government

B.A., Politics, Allentown College, 1973
M.A., Government, University of Virginia, 1975
Ph.D., Government, University of Virginia, 1978
At Berry since 1979.

Contact Information:
Office: Evans 115
Telephone: (706) 233-4085
E-mail: plawler@berry.edu

Biography

Peter Augustine Lawler is Dana Professor of Government at Berry College. He teaches courses in political philosophy and American politics and has won several awards from Berry for doing so.

He is executive editor of the acclaimed quarterly journal, Perspectives on Political Science and has been chair of the politics and literature section of the American Political Science Association. He also serves on the editorial board of the new bilingual critical edition of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and on the editorial boards of six journals. He is a member of the Society of Scholars at the Madison Center at Princeton University, and was the George Washington Professor on the American founding for the Society of Cincinnati for the state of Georgia.  He is also a member of President Bush’s Council on Bioethics.

He has written or edited a dozen books.  His most recent include Postmodernism Rightly Understood, Aliens in America: The Strange Truth About Our Souls, Stuck with Virtue: The American Individual and Our Biotechnological Future, and Homeless and at Home in America.

His American Political Rhetoric (edited with Robert Schaefer) is used in introductory American government courses at a sizeable number of colleges and universities. The fifth edition is now in print.

Lawler has published more than 200 scholarly articles, chapters, and reviews. His work has appeared in such scholarly journals as the Review of Politics, Government and Opposition, The South Atlantic Quarterly, The International Philosophical Quarterly, American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, Gravitas, Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, The Clarion Review, Polity, Journal of Politics, Modern Age, Public Integrity, The Intercollegiate Review, Presidential Studies Quarterly, The Public Interest, The City Journal, Perspectives on Political Science, Perspectives on Politics, Orbis, First Things, First Principles, The Good Society, The New Atlantis, and Society. He is also published in more popular magazines such as The Weekly Standard, Current, The City, The Claremont Review of Books, Culture II, The University Bookman, The American Enterprise, Crisis, The American Spectator, The National Review, National Review Online, and The Mars Hill Audio Journal.

Some of his recent publications include “American Political Christian Realism” (in E. Patterson, ed., Christianity and Power Politics Today); “Modern and American Dignity (in Human Dignity: Essays Commissioned by the President’s Council on Bioethics); “Tocqueville on Greatness and Justice” (in C. Holloway, ed., Magnanimity Ancient and Modern; “Locke, Our Great Founders, and American Political Life” (in B. Frohnen and K. Grasso, eds, Defending the Republic: Constitutional Morality in the Age of Crisis); “American Nominalism and Our Need for the Science of Theology” (in B. Cowan, ed., Gained Horizons); “Manliness, Religion, and Our Manly Scientists” (in Society, April/May, 2008);  “Our Crisis of Self-Evidence” (in Society, August/September, 2008); “1968 in Context: Scarcity and Decade Analysis” (in The Intercollegiate Review, Fall, 2008); “On Brague’s Law of God” (Modern Age, Winter 2009); “Nations, Liberalism, Science” (The New Atlantis, Winter, 2009); “Our Hero Socrates” (in N. Ranasinghe, Socrates and the Underworld; “Tocqueville on Federalism as an American Accident” (in L. Ward and A. Ward, eds., Ashgate Companion to Federalism).

Lawler has given invited lectures at over 75 colleges and universities. He has received a large number of grants from both the Liberty Fund and the Earhart Foundation, as well as numerous other foundations.  He also appeared on numerous television and radio programs throughout the country. 

The Bradley Institute for the Study of Christian Culture has named Lawler the recipient of the 2007 Richard M. Weaver Prize for Scholarly Letters.  The Ingersoll Prizes were created to “honor authors and scholars of abiding importance who cherish the ideals of civic order and human dignity, and to bring their works to the wider attention of readers throughout the world.”  Recent winners include “culture wars” sociologist James Davison Hunter, historian Paul Johnson and philosopher and cultural critic Roger Scruton.  Other past recipients include Shelby Foote and E.O. Wilson.