Larry Arnhart

Who is Larry Arnhart?

Larry Arnhart is a Presidential Research Professor of Political Science at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois. His areas of teaching and research include the history of political philosophy, biopolitical theory, and American political thought. Arnhart is the author of five books and more than thirty peer-reviewed articles.

He has a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago in 1977, an M.A. in Political Science from the University of Chicago in 1974, and a B.A. in Politics from the University of Dallas in 1971.

In the Department of Political Science at Northern Illinois University, Arnhart teaches in the fields of political theory and biopolitics.

Arnhart is best known as a scholar in the history of political philosophy and as a proponent of "Darwinian natural right," "Darwinian conservatism," and "Aristotelian liberalism." He argues that the tradition of ethical naturalism from Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas to Alasdair MacIntyre can be supported by a Darwinian account of ethics as rooted in human biological nature, which combines liberty and order, freedom and virtue.

In defending Darwinian naturalism, Arnhart has debated the proponents of "intelligent design theory" by suggesting that they employ a purely negative rhetoric of criticizing Darwinian evolutionary theory, while offering no positive theory of exactly where, when, and how the "intelligent designer" intervenes in nature to create "irreducibly complex" mechanisms.