How and Why the West Has Lost Confidence in Its Foundational Political Principles

This is a chapter, not a book — the source list annotates the entry “Chapter in broader text” and links it to Religion, the Enlightenment, and the New Global Order (Columbia University Press, 2010), the edited volume it appears in. Pangle, a Straussian political theorist at Texas, argues that the West’s loss of confidence in its own founding principles is a philosophical event with traceable causes rather than a mood — that the grounds on which natural right was defended were abandoned before the principles themselves were.

The card records what the source list states. The chapter’s argument has not been read or summarized beyond that.

Why it’s on the list: It closes the natural-right sub-section, immediately after What is Political Philosophy? and a summary of Strauss — the sub-section’s arc runs from the tradition’s statement to the question of why it stopped persuading.

Where I saw it: Brendan McCord’s Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List, in the section on History of Political Philosophy and the Natural Right Tradition. Shared on X on March 9, 2026 and saved to Kyle’s “Books To Read” Apple Note. The full 211-entry transcription, with the four parts and sixteen sub-sections, is on The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List.

Connections

• The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List — the curriculum this card came from.
• Liberalism — the set of principles whose grounding the chapter is about.
• Leo Strauss — the tradition Pangle writes in; the same sub-section pairs him with Strauss’s own work.