Center for Constructive Alternatives

This fourth and final CCA of the 2018-19 academic year will explore two films widely regarded as Churchill’s favorites and two Churchill biopics in their historical context.

Since the Communist Revolution of 1949, China has emerged as a world power that poses a threat to the West. This first CCA of the 2019-2020 academic year will consider the history, culture, and challenge of China.

The idea of socialism is ancient. Organized socialist movements took form in Europe in the nineteenth century, and socialism emerged as a dominant political ideology in many places around the world by the twentieth century. This second CCA of the 2019-2020 academic year, co-sponsored by the Ludwig von Mises Lecture Series, will consider socialism, its practice over time, and its resurgence today.

Xenophon wrote that a successful general “must be resourceful, active, careful, hardy, and quick-witted; he must be both gentle and brutal, at once straightforward and designing, capable of both caution and surprise, lavish and rapacious, generous and mean, skillful in defense and attack.” This third CCA of the 2019-2020 academic year will consider the lives and characters of some of America’s greatest generals.

Asked who were the greatest American film directors, Orson Welles answered: “John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford.” The recipient of a record four Academy Awards for Best Director, Ford’s career extended from the earliest days of Hollywood through the 1960s. This fourth CCA of the 2019-2020 academic year will focus on Ford’s westerns, and consider what they reveal about our country and ourselves.