Peter Augustine Lawler was a humanities professor’s humanities professor, a genial gadfly who could talk and write about contemporary politics and pop culture—he was a huge fan of director Whit Stillman and published articles such as “Disco and Democracy” and “Celebrity Studies Today“—as adroitly as he could lecture about Aristotle, Aquinas, Machiavelli, and Tocqueville.
When I arrived in the late 1990s, Dr. Lawler was already an institution at Berry College, a towering master of political philosophy who followed each droll punch line with a wry half-smile. He famously had an office so messy that it had to be excavated periodically by student assistants; meeting with him frequently involved him chatting amiably about all manner of subjects while poking through stacks of papers and books to find a journal article to loan out or a conference application to recommend.
In the many courses I took with him—including ancient and modern political philosophy, early American political thought, and constitutional law—I found myself in constant good-natured philosophical debates with him, which continued episodically from class to class (and sometimes even course to course), with me representing individual-liberty-loving libertarianism and him representing a virtue-prizing, postmodern Catholic conservatism. Occasionally, for fun (or because we’d strayed into territory with less established ideological footing), we’d reverse the roles and debate in favor of each other’s position—or at least in favor of each other’s values in virtue or individual liberty—with equal vigor.
We both enjoyed these debates tremendously, and I heard that he continued to debate me in absentia for a few years after I’d graduated in order to offer his students an alternative perspective. Engaging with Dr. Lawler is one of the reasons I found being a student at Berry College a far more intellectually challenging and rewarding experience than attending Harvard Law School a few years later.
Dr. Lawler served as one of my official advisers and a member of my senior honors thesis committee—I even borrowed the title of his textbook, American Political Rhetoric, for the label of my interdisciplinary major in “Political Rhetoric.” Characteristically, he also served as an informal mentor against his own interests, recognizing that I would enjoy the summer seminars put on by the classical liberal Institute for Humane Studies and pointing me in that direction even though he was much more closely aligned with the more conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute.
As a rather techno-wary, virtue-focused Straussian conservative, he served on President George W. Bush’s Council on Bioethics and published essays expressing grave concerns about what it means to be human—and virtuous—in a world upended by scientific progress.
In his later years, Dr. Lawler seemed to equate libertarians with techno-progressives and transhumanists, and viewed us as a more genuine threat to virtue than he did in my college days, but he nonetheless appreciated that libertarian thinkers keep conservative thinkers on their toes, once writing: “One reason I admire the newly confident libertarian jurisprudence is that it should serve to rouse conservatives from their dogmatic slumber full of dreamy imaginings based on the conviction that the war between the Founders (good) and the Progressives (bad) explains recent American political history.”
Dr. Lawler had recently been announced the new editor of ISI’s Modern Age. He was expected to appear in D.C. tomorrow for a celebration of his first issue as editor, along with a panel on “Being Conservative in the Year of Trump,” when word came that he had passed away last night, suddenly and unexpectedly, at age 65.
It is difficult to capture the essence of a man in a short essay—and impossible to cover every nuance of his life—but the Peter Augustine Lawler I knew was what conservative intellectuals should strive to be: an amiable family man, a deadpan jokester, and a thoughtful social commentator with a deep concern for the humanities and how the academy could create more virtuous individuals. Ultimately, the conservative project for which he advocated and theorized is one that should have broad appeal: a more virtuous community where human beings can live with a greater level of dignity and serve a higher purpose.
He was a treasure of incisive academic commentary about the contemporary world and a curator of carefully considered conservatism. We, his many students the world over, will miss him tremendously.
Dan Alban is a 2000 graduate of Berry College and now serves as a constitutional litigator at the Institute for Justice, a national public interest law firm.
