Religion and America’s politics of peoplehood

"During my first year of graduate school in 1975, Professor Harvey C. Mansfield led a discussion section for graduate students in a survey course on the history of political thought. There he argued that there was a “hole in the center of liberalism,” by which he meant that a political philosophy whose central tenet was to permit people maximum freedom to pursue self-defined ends did not contain and probably could not contain standards to guide the best uses of that freedom."(...