Natural law is one of those momentous, civilization-forming ideas of which no one can be ignorant and yet claim to be educated. By this standard, our universities produce very little education. Not only have most graduates heard next to nothing about natural law, but the little that they have heard is mostly wrong.
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Americans are often said to be obsessed with their Constitution. So be it. Another old saw is that history is written by the winners. That one is not so benign. For all we know, the losers might have been partly right. I think they were.
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We often assign our students writings by the American Founders, men like Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, James Madison, James Wilson, and Alexander Hamilton. Curiously, though, we rarely assign most of the works that shaped and influenced their own minds. This is a pity, because these works shed so much light on what they were trying to do when they initiated the American experiment in self-government.
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Dr. Budziszewski (Ph.D. Yale, 1981) is a professor in the Departments of Government and Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. An authority on natural law, he is especially interested in moral self-deception -- how we tell ourselves that we don't know what we really do. He also studies problems that arise at the four-way intersection of political and ethical philosophy and theology, for example the status of natural law in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam; the relation between faith and reason; the problem of religious toleration; the incoherence of liberal "neutrality"; and whether the old saw that civil society is more secure on the "law but solid" ground of selfishness than on civic virtue is true or false (can we really have a better government than we deserve?).
Author of numerous articles in both scholarly and popular periodicals, Dr. Budziszewski also has numerous books to his credit, including Written on the Heart: The Case for Natural Law (1997, winner of a 1998 book award from Christianity Today), The Revenge of Conscience: Politics and the Fall of Man (1999), What We Can't Not Know: A Guide (2003), Evangelicals in the Public Square (2006), and The Line Through the Heart: Natural Law as Fact, Theory, and Sign of Contradiction (2009). His newest work, On the Meaning of Sex, will be published in November 2011 by ISI Books.
