This month our topic is a recent essay by Jenna Silber Storey and Benjamin Storey called “Political Speech in Divided Times,” first published in National Affairs in Fall of 2022. The essay is a reflection on the particular character of political speech and its authors make use of the work of the contemporary French political philosopher named Pierre Manent. The books by Manent most relevant to this essay are The Metamorphosis of the City and Beyond Radical Secularism.

We are pleased to have one of the authors join us for this conversation, Jenna Silber Storey. Jenna and I discuss what makes political speech distinctive and how and why our capacity for this kind of speech seems to have been lost. We discuss Manent’s articulation of the character of political speech and also his attempt to actually engaged in this enterprise using the example of Muslim immigration in his home country of France. We end by trying to untangle the differences between political speech and ideological speech.

Jenna Silber Storey is a senior fellow in the Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies department at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where she concentrates on political philosophy, civil society, classical schools, and higher education. Dr. Storey is concurrently a research fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, and a Tocqueville scholar at Furman University.

Dr. Storey is the coauthor, with her husband, Benjamin Storey, of Why We Are Restless: On the Modern Quest for Contentment (Princeton University Press, 2021). Together, the Storeys are working on another book titled The Art of Choosing: How Liberal Education Should Prepare You for Life.

Dr. Storey’s work has been published in media outlets such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, National Affairs, the Boston Globe, National Review, the New Atlantis, the Claremont Review of Books, and First Things.