Modern Age - Fall 2015 - 119

REVIEWS

The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America was
widely reviewed and sold 30,000 copies. It remains, arguably,
one of the greatest synthetic works on politics, ethics, religion,
and theology written by an American, and fit for comparison to
the works of Reinhold Niebuhr and Jacques Maritain. In fact, it
marks a key point of transition for Neuhaus from the Protestant
"Christian realism" of Niebuhr toward the Catholic, natural-law
neo-Thomism of Maritain, Etienne Gilson, and John Courtney
Murray-and toward Vatican II and Pope John Paul II.
Though still writing as a Lutheran in The Naked Public Square,
Neuhaus had emerged as a New York intellectual, writing wittily and well about deep matters, and combining earnestness
and urbanity, conviction and scholarship, in a way that would
characterize his writing for the rest of his life. With wide learning
and great power, he makes the classic, metaphysical, natural-law
argument that there is a permanent moral order that transcends
all positive law, which derives its just authority from conformity
to that moral order.
He is with Locke and Blackstone against Bentham; with Lincoln against Douglas and Justice Taney; with Maritain, C. S. Lewis,
and J. C. Murray against Justice Holmes and John Dewey. Legal
positivism or "pragmatism" is ultimately amoral and dangerous-
whether exemplified by the antebellum South or its subsequent
Jim Crow segregation, or Nazism, or South African apartheid, or
communist "people's republics," or in the abortion license of Roe
v. Wade (1973).
Neuhaus had come to the view, also memorably argued by
Harry V. Jaffa in two great books on Lincoln, that the U.S. political
system is the "last, best hope of mankind," because its founding documents and institutions have separated, balanced, and
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Modern Age - Fall 2015

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