Education
He has a Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science from the University of Chicago in 1977, an Master of Arts
He has a Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science from the University of Chicago in 1977, an Master of Arts
In Political Science from the University of Chicago in 1974, and a Bachelor of Arts 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 has debated the leading advocates of intelligent design—Michael Behe, William Dembski, John West, Jonathan Wells, and Richard Weikart—all of whom are fellows of the Discovery Institute.
John West has written a book attacking Arnhart — Darwin"s Conservatives: A Misguided Quest.
He suggests that Darwinian biology sustains conservative social thought by showing how the human capacity for spontaneous order arises from social instincts and a moral sense shaped by natural selection in human evolutionary history. Recently, Arnhart finished writing the fourth edition of his book Political Questions: Political Philosophy from Plato to Pinker.
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 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 conservatism, Arnhart tries to persuade conservatives that Darwinian science supports the conservative belief that social order arises not from rational planning but from the spontaneous order of instincts and habits. He has also developed a Darwinian argument for classical liberalism. He is working on a new book — The Cosmic Evolution of Darwinian Liberalism.
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.