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.
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’s, The Public Interest, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The 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.
Groovin’ on the Shock
James Bowman
The media’s dismay at the prospect of Donald Trump in the White House was understandable, but it certainly wasn’t as if that was all downside for them.
Articles
The New Criterion - December 2016 issue / January 12, 2017
After the Fact
James Bowman
In journalism today, bias is giving way to mere advocacy because the political culture has again become (rhetorically, at least) revolutionary — which is the only way so establishment a figure as Hillary Clinton can claim to be the candidate of “change.”
Articles
The New Criterion - October 2016 issue / November 3, 2016
The End of the News
James Bowman
The media, so alert to hypocrisy in every other way, are blind to their own hypocrisy — as well as that of the elite that they represent and that Donald Trump has remained remarkably, perhaps suicidally consistent in running against.
Articles
The New Criterion - September 2016 issue / October 5, 2016
Scandals and Experts
James Bowman
The secret of Donald Trump’s success for so long as he has had it has been the same as Rob Ford’s was before he lost it to mere media celebrity: he makes people who are not of the governing class and who have no hope of joining it feel that he is on their side against those who appear to be arrogating to themselves a right to govern.
Articles
The New Criterion - May 2016 issue / June 9, 2016
Politics Without Honor
James Bowman
Progressives have become the captives of their own conceit — not just that their political views are the only correct ones but that they are the only moral ones.
Articles
The New Criterion - April 2016 issue / May 3, 2016
A Man or a Mouse?
James Bowman
In responding to Donald Trump, why would conservatives, especially, want to associate themselves with a tactic so often and so successfully used against themselves?
Articles
The New Criterion - March 2016 issue / April 13, 2016
The King of Tastelessness
James Bowman
It is no accident that Donald Trump comes to the task from the world of reality-TV — a world that has been built on the essential insight that, in the age of non-judgmentalism, every claim to moral authority, implicit or explicit, produces an equal and opposite counter-claim. Only someone with the wiliness of a Kardashian can make this work for him, and the signs so far indicate that Mr. Trump has what it takes.
Articles
The New Criterion - February 2016 issue / March 3, 2016
Manners Makyth Man
James Bowman
One of the many legacies of revolutionary Marxism to the progressive left and, through it, to the popular culture, is the belief that manners are a bourgeois relic that have no place in a world which prizes personal authenticity above all.
Articles
The New Criterion - January 2016 issue / February 3, 2016
A Topos of Chaos
James Bowman
The media’s own hunger for scandal and political wickedness (also known as “extremism”), and not the extremism itself, is largely responsible for the sense of political “chaos” at the heart of our government.
Articles
The New Criterion - December 2015 issue / January 12, 2016
On Their Honor
James Bowman
A way to look at dueling, then and now.
Articles
The Weekly Standard - October 5, 2015 issue / October 7, 2015
