Glenn Tinder, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts, is an undervalued treasure.(While We're At It)(Liberty: Rethinking an Imperiled Ideal)(Book review)

First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life, April, 2008 by Neuhaus, Richard John

Glenn Tinder, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts, is an undervalued treasure. He has published with some regularity in these pages, and his 1986 book, Political Thinking: The Perennial Questions, is a standard reference deserving of its reputation as a classic.

Yet Tinder is a demanding author who requires of his readers an intellectual steadiness of purpose similar to his own. This is evident again in his latest work, Liberty: Rethinking an Imperiled Ideal (Eerdmans). In his intensely Augustinian insistence upon human sinfulness and the limits of history, Trader contends against every form of political utopianism premised upon unearned certitudes. Liberty is known in the "unsheltered life" of historical contingency...

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