What caused the near collapse of Wall Street?  Who created the policy of “Too big to fail”?  Why was Goldman Sachs treated differently than Lehman Brothers?  What explains the AIG bailout?  For answers to these and related economic questions, the public is invited to attend a lecture by Nicole Gelinas, the Searle Freedom Trust Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, who will speak on her recently published book, After the Fall:  Saving Capitalism from Wall Street and Washington (Encounter 2009).The lecture will be delivered by Ms. Gelinas in the Banquet Room of the Alexander Hamilton Institute on Saturday, 30 October, at 4:00 PM. A reception and book signing will follow her lecture, which is co-sponsored by Encounter Books and the National Association of Scholars.

A graduate of Tulane University, Ms. Gelinas is also a contributing editor of City Journal. She has written numerous essays and opinion pieces on financial and business issues for the Wall Street JournalNew York Times,Boston HeraldNew York Post, and many other major newspapers.  She holds the position of Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) charterholder and is a member of the New York Society of Securities Analysts (NYSSA)-currently known as CFA Society New York.

Professor Waller Newell of Carleton University will follow on Sunday evening at 7:30 pm in the Science auditorium at Hamilton College with a lecture “The Code of a Man:  Love, Courage, Pride, Family, and Country.”  Professor Newell is Professor of Political Science and Philosophy and co-director of the Centre for Liberal Education and Public Affairs at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada.

Men of the millennial generation have been pitied, pathologized, and protested by the chattering class as immature, benighted, and even dangerous. Lost in much of this pop psychology about “the end of men” is a foundational understanding of traditions of manly virtue. Along withHarvey Mansfield’s Manliness, the work of Professor Waller Newell reclaims these traditions.

Francis Fukuyama wrote of Newell’s anthology that What Is A Man?violates all of the norms of political correctness by reminding us that men have specific virtues – virtues that are neither the watered-down qualities of niceness and compassion, nor aimless and violent aggression. This rich anthology will be an eye-opener for many, but particularly for the young men who are most confused about how they are to act in life.”

Professor Newell describes his The Code of a Man as “a broad and open-minded, but at the same time morally rigorous, exploration of the manly virtues drawn from the speculative, historical, and literary treasures.”  The answer to the current agony of manliness, according to Newell, “is to return neither to a primordial Mother Goddess nor to primeval fantasies of male shamanism and campfire dances.Responsible and satisfying friendships between men an women can only be lost in the pursuit of a sectarian and rejectionist ‘gender identity.’ Indeed, we need to aim for the highest fulfillment of which all people are capable– moral and intellectual virtues that are the same for men and women at their peaks– while recognizing the diverse qualities that men and women contribute to this human endeavor for excellence. We need a sympathetic re-engagement with traditional teachings that stress that while men and women share a capacity for the same highest virtues, their passions, temperaments, and sentiments can differ, resulting in different paths to those common pinnacles.”

Professor Newell’s lecture will launch a sustained conversation among citizens of Hamilton– women and men– about manliness properly understood. This important conversation will be sponsored and hosted by the Alexander Hamilton Institute and the AHI Undergraduate Fellows along with Libertas Americana Project and the Dean of Faculty’s Office, Hamilton College.