Georgia Writers Association

Peter Lawler
Peter Augustine Lawler is Dana Professor of Government at Berry College in Mount Berry, Georgia. He's also been the George Washington Distinguished Professor of the American Founding for the state of Georgia.

He is executive editor of the acclaimed scholarly quarterly Perspectives on Political Science and a member of the President's Council on Bioethics.

Lawler has written or edited a dozen books and over two hundred scholarly and popular articles and chapters on a wide variety of subjects.

He was the 2007 winner of the Weaver prize for scholarly letters, which carries a $25,000 award. That prize is for having widely influential writing for the cause of human liberty and dignity. Previous winners include James Davison Hunter, E.O. Wilson, and Walker Percy.

Lawler's The Restless Mind: Alexis de Tocqueville on the Origin and Perpetuation of Human Liberty (1993) is widely regarded as one of the two or three best books ever written on the theoretical dimension of Tocqueville's thought.

His Postmodernism Rightly Understood: The Return to Realism in American Thought (1999), which includes path-breaking analyses of Walker Percy as a philosopher, has had considerable influence in redefining postmodernism as a sort of recovery of Thomistic realism against modern constructionism.

His Aliens in America: The Strange Truth about Our Soul (2002), a starred featured selection of ALA's BOOKLIST, was very widely and positively reviewed and made several "best" lists.

His Stuck with Virtue: The American Individual and His Biotechnological Future (2005) is a collection of essays he wrote on technology and biotechnology as defining features of American lives. It also has been widely and positively reviewed and is used in a good number of college classes.

In addition, Lawler has also edited five collections of essays on Alexis de Tocqueville, public administration, and other topics. He's also put together a text for introductory American government—American Political Rhetoric—that's going through five editions and is used in a number of colleges and universities. He has written a book-length introduction to an edition of the neglected American classic, Orestes Brownson's The American Republic.

Lawler has lectured at more than sixty colleges and universities and has appeared often on radio and TV.