Joshua Gregor

Joshua Gregor is International Relations Assistant at the Acton Institute. Before coming to Acton he received a BA in philosophy from the Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum in Rome and an MA in linguistics from Indiana University.

Posts by Joshua Gregor

December 04, 2018

A free and virtuous society: Lessons from Les Misérables

Interpreting works of literature is always a dicey task—it’s all too easy to find the conclusions we want to find and turn authors into spokesmen for our own ideas. In these reflections on Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, I don’t claim that what I say is necessarily what Hugo himself intended. Continue Reading...
November 28, 2018

Demographic decline: Ben Franklin’s two cents

Not one of Benjamin Franklin’s better-known works, but one worth reading nonetheless, is a brief 1751 essay called Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, &c. Franklin covers a lot of ground in just a few pages, and brings up quite a few ideas worth commenting on, but I wanted to highlight one paragraph and its relevance for the “birth dearth” we see in the West today. Continue Reading...
October 29, 2018

Jaime Balmes: A Liberal-Conservative?

This article is written by  León M. Gómez Rivas and translated by Joshua Gregor. It was originally published by RedFloridaBlanca and is republished with permission.   It was with great pleasure that I received the invitation to contribute to this brief commemorative series on a great Catalonian—and therefore Spanish—thinker of the 19th century. Continue Reading...
October 17, 2018

The Spanish tradition of freedom in the 16th and 17th centuries

The following article is written by Angel Fernández Álvarez and translated by Joshua Gregor. This October 31, I will give a conference entitled The Spanish School of the XVI and XVII Centuries at Harvard University, in order to explain in detail the “institutional framework” and the principles of growth upheld by the late Spanish scholastics. Continue Reading...
October 12, 2018

Jaime Balmes: constitutional politics at the service of conciliation

This article is written by  Josep Mª Castellá Andreu and translated by Joshua Gregor. It was originally published by RedFloridaBlanca and is republished with permission. Nineteenth-century Spanish constitutionalism is usually interpreted as a pendulum swinging between liberal or progressive constitutions and moderate or conservative ones. Continue Reading...