The Needy Immigrant, Nationalism, Globalism, and the Universal Destination of Goods

[A letter replying to this article, as well as the author’s response to that letter, may be found here.—The Editors.]

The current debates on immigration between liberal globalists on the one hand and populist nationalists on the other raise fundamental questions about the nature of political community and solidarity. Neither side offers satisfactory answers to these questions. Immigration naturally raises such fundamental questions, since the extent to which new members are admitted to a community varies widely depending on how that community understands and sustains its own internal unity. Thus a nomadic tribe, living in easily breachable tents, and depending on close bonds of trust will approach the integration of strangers differently than a city-state with stone houses, locking doors, speculative philosophy, and law courts. Continue reading “The Needy Immigrant, Nationalism, Globalism, and the Universal Destination of Goods”

by John Francis Nieto

The following paper was read at the conference “The Idea of a Village,” May 2016. A video of the lecture can be found here.

We of the twenty-first century look for the village in legend and folk tale, to some extent in history and there, much more as we look back, less and less as we come forward. This is no accident, for reasons I will go on to point out. This fact and a few others make much of what I am about to say seem ‘abstract’ and ‘ideal’. Yet what I say here about the village is utterly ‘practical’ and ‘realistic’. Man cannot—I propose—have healthy familial life and just political order unless these take root and find support in village life. Continue reading “Nature and Art in the Village”