Cryptozoology in the Medieval and Modern Worlds

Historians of rural societies should consider using folklore sources in order to understand rural families in nineteenth-century France. A source like the stories collected from seventy-year-old Nannette Lévesque by the judge Victor Smith offers a very different viewpoint to depictions of such families by historians. Nannette was extremely poor, and spent her life moving between the mountain village where she was born in the Massif Central and the town of Saint-Étienne. Her stories call into question the reality of family “strategies” and the control of women by patriarchal authority, posited by some scholars of rural French family life.     

THE IMPACT OF MARGINAL BUSINESS TAXES ON STATE MANUFACTURING

We estimate the impact of manufacturer business taxes on value added during the 1990s for 15 manufacturing sectors in 20 U.S. states. When the tax climate is properly measured as the potential liability arising from new investment in a state, we estimate that a 10 percent reduction in the effective tax liability is associated with a 3.5 to 5.3 percent increase in value added for the state's targeted manufacturing industry. When we isolate the value of industrial incentives from the basic tax system in our theoretically preferred marginal tax measure, we find that a 10 percent reduction in liability achieved by way of lowering taxes is associated with a 4.5 percent increase in value added while an equivalent reduction achieved by way of increasing incentives is associated with only 1.2 percent industrial growth, the latter elasticity not statistically different from zero.     

Conservatives,Liberals, and the Free Exercise Clause

Mark Lilla's summons to recover Hobbes's "art of intellectual separation" is stillborn. Lilla acknowledges the tendentiousness and theoretical inadequacy of Hobbes's approach, yet he falls back on that very strategy, refusing the real task of reconciling political and religious goods.     

Tocqueville on Pantheism,Materialism, and Catholicism

Abstract

It is widely acknowledged that Leo Strauss was an extraordinary scholar and teacher who strove to open up forgotten vistas of philosophical inquiry. Gigantic controversy rages, however, about the sorts of political and social changes, if any, that he hoped to promote. The fire has been fueled by the alleged contributions of Straussians to the Iraq War—and by the publication of Strauss's 1933 letter that commended “fascist, authoritarian, and imperial” principles. This article reviews and then updates the assessments proffered in my 2009 book (Straussophobia) about the state of the “Strauss Wars.” Critics such as Shadia Drury continue to embarrass themselves in prestigious venues, but newer voices are using innovative strategies to argue that Strauss was attempting to undermine the principles of American democracy. Whereas William Altman relies on “esoteric interpretations” of Strauss's writings, Alan Gilbert illuminates Strauss's behind-the-scenes efforts regarding policy disputes. Although I maintain that Gilbert and especially Altman have made invaluable contributions, I argue that they both overreach.