Is all human community parasitic?

June 12th, 2019 | 4 min read

That is the claim made by Dan Hugger in a recent post at the Acton Institute. Hugger, picking up on the French-Ahmari debate, argued that my framing of the debate—that liberalism ultimately fails because it both relies on other social norms and institutions to shape citizens and tends to erode those norms and institutions over time without replacing them—fails because ultimately no political system produces good citizens because that isn’t the job of political systems:

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Jake Meador

Jake Meador is the editor-in-chief of Mere Orthodoxy. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Commonweal, First Things, Books & Culture, National Review, Comment, Books & Culture, and Christianity Today. He is a contributing editor with Plough and a contributing writer at the Dispatch. He lives in his hometown of Lincoln, NE with his wife and four children.