Arkes’ shortcomings

Amber Taylor makes excellent points about Hadley Arkes’ conservatism. Arkes is so strange. He can write something absolutely brilliant, like his The Return of George Sutherland—one of my favorite law books of all time, despite its shortcomings—and then come out and say the most absurd, ill-informed, unsophisticated, stereotypical, sloppy, fallacious things, that seem to capture all the worst things about conservatism in general. Arkes is a witty, intelligent, insightful, independent thinker. But sometimes and in some things absolutely out of his senses. (Little Ben Franklin quote there.)