UPDATE: Unfortunately, we will have to reschedule the Kellogg Lecture in Jurisprudence. We apologize for the inconvenience, but we will announce when the event has been rescheduled on our blog, In Custodia Legis.
Join us for the 2025 Frederic R. and Molly S. Kellogg Biennial Lecture in Jurisprudence! Dr. Robert George will be the featured speaker of the event on October 9 at 3 p.m. EDT. His lecture will be titled, “Why Liberal Secularism Fails.” This event will be available in-person and online. The in-person lecture will be held in the Library’s Jefferson building in room LJ-119. This event is free, but registration is required.
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To attend online, please click here.
Dr. George provided the following summary of his lecture:
Liberal secularist ideas have been dominant in academic political philosophy and philosophy of law in the United States and other Western nations for more than half a century. The theories of philosophers such as John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, and Jurgen Habermas have been at the center of the discussion. These theories seek to identify principles of justice to guide the making of law and policy in ways that would prescind from judgments drawn from religious or other “comprehensive” views.
I agree that what the late Professor Rawls called “the fact of reasonable pluralism” is indeed a fact: under conditions of freedom (which I agree are valuable conditions) it is natural and to be expected that reasonable people will arrive at different judgments regarding important questions pertaining to human nature, the human good, the source or sources of human dignity, and human destiny. So that generates the question: How do people with such fundamental differences live in peace and at least some significant measure of harmony and cooperation despite their differences? Rawls’ project was largely an effort to answer that question—a question that I think needs to be answered. I will argue that he and others who share his basic liberal secularist outlook don’t, however, answer it satisfactorily, though they make a heroic effort.
The problem, I will argue, is that there is no satisfactory solution available that is consistent with liberal secularism’s basic outlook and the strictures thinkers such as Rawls, Dworkin, and Habermas themselves maintain must be met by a sound theory of justice. Unavoidably, or so I will argue, their own theories violate those strictures, typically (as former Kellogg Lecturer Michael Sandel has shown) by smuggling into their theories of justice judgments of the sort they claim are out of bounds—judgments drawn from liberal secularism considered precisely as a “comprehensive view.”
I will propose that an alternative account of justice to the one offered by liberal secularism can (and should) accept, even gladly accept, pluralism and reject the illiberalism that so-called “post-liberals” seem to be willing to embrace. Rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater, a better theory will put the best of liberalism—especially its championing of equal human dignity and basic civil liberties (freedom of religion, speech, press, and assembly; due process; equal protection)—on a more secure intellectual/philosophical footing than the one offered by liberal secularism. Such a theory needn’t (and in circumstances of religious pluralism shouldn’t) be in any way sectarian, much less theocratic. To reject secularism (as an ideology) is not to embrace sectarianism (or religious establishmentarianism). Nor, as I say, is it jumping off the cliff into illiberalism.
I will argue that the best way to come to terms with the big question generated by “the fact of reasonable pluralism” is via a system of republican democracy (ideally one with something like our Madisonian system of checks on power) rather than a system that tries to eliminate as a basis for policy decisions judgments drawn from “comprehensive views,” i.e., fundamental understandings (be they formally secular or religious) of human nature, the human good, human dignity, and human destiny. The stakes of politics are, I’ll contend, unavoidably high. I understand the impulse to “lower them,” as liberal secularism has proposed or purported to do, but there isn’t really a way of doing that. So, we have to find a way to live together in peace—and to cooperate with each other as fellow citizens—despite the fact that we have high-stakes disagreements.
About Dr. George
Robert P. George holds Princeton University’s celebrated McCormick Professorship of Jurisprudence and is Founder and Director of Princeton’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.
He has served as Chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and as a presidential appointee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and the U.S. President’s Council on Bioethics. He has also been the U.S. member of UNESCO’s World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology. He was a Judicial Fellow at the Supreme Court of the United States, where he received the Justice Tom C. Clark Award.
A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Swarthmore College, he holds the degrees of M.T.S. and J.D. from Harvard University and the degrees of D.Phil., B.C.L., D.C.L., and D.Litt from Oxford University, in addition to twenty-three honorary doctorates. He is a recipient of the U.S. Presidential Citizens Medal, the Honorific Medal for the Defense of Human Rights of the Republic of Poland, the Canterbury Medal of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, the Bradley Prize for Intellectual and Civic Achievement, the Barry Prize of the American Academy of Sciences and Letters, and Princeton University’s President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching.
He is Of Counsel to the law firm of Robinson & McElwee and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
About the Kellogg Lecture Series
The Kellogg Biennial Lecture in Jurisprudence presents the most distinguished contributors to international jurisprudence, judged through writings, reputation, and broad and continuing influence on contemporary legal scholarship. Previous Kellogg lecturers have been Ronald Dworkin, Joseph Raz, Amartya Sen, Michael Sandel, Jeremy Waldron, Martha Nussbaum, and Jeffrey Stout.
The series is endowed through the generosity of Frederic R. and Molly S. Kellogg.
Frederic Rogers Kellogg was born in Boston and attended Harvard College and Harvard Law School. He served as an assistant U.S. attorney and later as an adviser to Attorney General Elliot L. Richardson during the Watergate crisis. He later earned a doctorate in jurisprudence at George Washington University and published two books on Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. A former Fulbright senior scholar in Poland and Brazil, and Sir Neil MacCormick fellow at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, he is currently a visiting professor at the Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil.
Molly Shulman Kellogg was born in Dallas, Texas, and grew up in Kilgore, Texas. She graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 1963 and moved to Washington, D.C., where she served for 30 years as executive assistant to Congressman J.J. “Jake” Pickle of Austin. She serves on the General Henry Knox Museum board in Thomaston, Maine.
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