James Bowman

Resident Scholar

Mr. Bowman is well known for his writing on honor, including his book, Honor: A History and “Whatever Happened to Honor,” originally delivered as one of the prestigious Bradley Lectures at the American Enterprise Institute in 2002, and republished (under the title “The Lost Sense of Honor”) in The Public Interest.

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James Bowman is a Resident Scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

Mr. Bowman is well known for his writing on honor, including his book, Honor: A History and “Whatever Happened to Honor,” originally delivered as one of the prestigious Bradley Lectures at the American Enterprise Institute in 2002, and republished (under the title “The Lost Sense of Honor”) in The Public Interest.

Among the other publications to which he has contributed are Harper’sThe Public InterestThe Washington PostThe Wall Street JournalThe Daily and Sunday Telegraph of London, The Weekly Standard and National Review.

He has worked as a freelance journalist, serving as American editor of the Times Literary Supplement of London from 1991 to 2002, as movie critic of The American Spectator since 1990 and as media critic of The New Criterion since 1993. He has also been a weekly movie reviewer for The New York Sun since the newspaper’s re-foundation in 2002.

Mr. Bowman received B.A. degrees from Lebanon Valley College in Pennsylvania and the University of Cambridge in England, where he also did graduate study and received an M.A. in 1979.

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A Lesson in Wrongology

James Bowman

On the media’s humility, or lack thereof.

Articles

The New Criterion / September 1, 2022

Reality Check

James Bowman

To a greater extent than ever, those on both sides of the political fence, and even those sitting on it, are only talking and writing to and for people who already agree with them.

Articles

The New Criterion / June 28, 2022

World-Shaking Events

James Bowman

It took Protestant Christianity hundreds of years to create and inculcate in ordinary people the idea of the kind of middle-class respectability and decency that Bertie Wooster was always at odds with.

Articles

The New Criterion / April 28, 2022

For the Sake of Argument

James Bowman

Our politics is now a clash of rival dogmas rather than anything our grandfathers would have recognized as argument.

Articles

Claremont Review of Books / April 1, 2022

Real Science

James Bowman

Scientists turned politicians automatically become politicians first, scientists after.

Articles

The New Criterion / March 15, 2022

Vulgar Chants

James Bowman

The media’s unofficial commissars of the Left have to keep the pressure up on behalf of ideological conformity in order to hold the “woke” coalition together—no matter how disconnected from reality they may be.

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Volte-face

James Bowman

Democrats and the media continually urge Americans to get ourselves onto “the right side of history” — which, paradoxically, also means leaving history itself behind us in our inevitable progress towards the progressively promised land. The right side of history turns out to be the one that’s turned away from it.

Articles

Boom and Gloom

James Bowman

The mess the Boomers made will long be with us.

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Jane Austen on Film

James Bowman

In a lecture hosted by the Center for Constructive Alternatives at Hillsdale College, EPPC Resident Scholar James Bowman surveys film adaptations of the works of Jane Austen.

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Hillsdale College / April 15, 2021

Experts in Spate

James Bowman

The coronavirus, together with the measures chosen to deal with it, has been a disaster for pretty much everybody else, but it has been a godsend to the American media and their long-running anti-Trump “narrative.”

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Polite Fictions

James Bowman

The very existence of polite fictions — such as the fiction that impeachment had arisen out of the disinterested concern of public-spirited Democrats to preserve constitutional norms and not as a squalid partisan affair — comes about because we are aware of the absurdity of regarding them as the firmly established truths they pretend to be.

Articles

Ripley’s Believe It or Else

James Bowman

The extremely low opinion, so the pollsters tell us, which Americans hold of the media could never bode well for an institution founded on the extremely high opinion the media hold of themselves.

Articles