He has served as Charles Evans Hughes Professor of Jurisprudence at Colgate University and as a visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
His work has sought to show that human rights are by nature social,[4] that the separation of powers of our constitutional system cannot be maintained without an ethos of virtue [5] and that the roots of republican free government lie, not in a few phrases in the Declaration of Independence, but in a long tradition of thought and action by which our tradition of ordered liberty was developed.
[6] Frohnen has authored two books, Virtue and the Promise of Conservatism: The Legacy of Burke and Tocqueville and The New Communitarians and the Crisis of Modern Liberalism.
Frohnen, who serves as a senior fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal, was a legislative aide and speech writer for Republican Senator Spencer Abraham, and a member of the Board of the Philadelphia Society.
[9] He also distanced himself from “conservative” favoring of big business, criticizing what he has called “economic policies and political cronyism... enabling economic predators.” He considers himself a “pluralist” in the tradition of Alexis de Tocqueville, Edmund Burke, Robert Nisbet, Bertrand de Jouvenel, Russell Kirk, Alasdair MacIntyre, and others often labeled conservative but most concerned with reinvigorating a diversity of local associations as necessary for human flourishing and the taming of political power.