Peter Lawler (academic)

Peter Augustine Lawler (July 30, 1951 – May 23, 2017) was Dana Professor of Government at Berry College. He taught courses in political philosophy and American politics. He was a 1973 graduate of Allentown College and earned a PhD from the University of Virginia.

He was executive editor of the quarterly journal Perspectives on Political Science and was a chairman of the politics and literature section of the American Political Science Association. He also served on the editorial board of the new bilingual critical edition of 's Democracy in America. Lawler also served on the editorial boards of several journals.

He wrote or edited 15 books. His Modern and American Dignity was the reason he was chosen the 2010 Georgia Author of the Year. His books--Postmodernism Rightly Understood, Aliens in America, Stuck with Virtue, and Homeless and at Home in America—have been widely and positively reviewed. His American Political Rhetoric (edited with Robert Schaefer, seventh edition) is used in introductory American government courses at a sizeable number of colleges and universities. He was the 2007 winner of the Weaver Prize for Scholarly Excellence in promoting human dignity to a broad audience.

Lawler has spoken at roughly a hundred American colleges and universities and published well over two hundred articles, chapters, and reviews in a wide variety of venues. Over the last year alone, he gave nearly 30 lectures at various institutions and conferences. He was the 2015 Ross Lence Master Teacher at Residence at the Honors College at the University of Houston.

Lawler wrote broadly from a Catholic intellectual tradition that emphasizes the importance of limits on unfettered personal autonomy in shaping well-lived lives, as well as the centrality of the love of truth in making sense of the human experience and knowing "who we are and what we are supposed to do." Lawler argued that moral anthropology suggests the possibility of God's existence and love. His influences include both Catholics such as Augustine, Pierre Manent, Thomas Aquinas, Pascal, Flannery O'Connor, and Walker Percy, as well as non-Catholic thinkers (especially Leo Strauss).

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