Archive for the ‘News’ Category

James Madison and the Spirit of Self Government

Friday, July 16th, 2010

In the first study that combines an in-depth examination of Madison’s National Gazette essays of 1791-92 with a study of The Federalist, Colleen Sheehan traces the evolution of

Madison’s conception of the politics of communication and public opinion throughout the Founding period, demonstrating how “the sovereign public” would form and rule in America. Contrary to those scholars who claim that Madison dispensed with the need to form an active and virtuous citizenry, Sheehan argues that Madison’s vision for the new nation was informed by the idea of republican self-government, whose manifestation he sought to bring about in the spirit and way of life of the American people. Madison’s story is “the story of an idea” – the idea of America.

Buy it today.

Editorial Reviews

“the overall analysis is brilliant, and merits careful reading by anyone seriously interested in the ideas of our greatest political thinker.” -Jack Rakove

“This book constitutes the most important contribution to the scholarship on James Madison produced in recent memory. In it, Colleen Sheehan demonstrates that Madison’s ruminations on politics in the early 1790s and thereafter, and his activity as a politician in the early republic, need to be reinterpreted in light of his Auseinandersetzung with a group of late eighteenth-century French writers-including Mably, Moreau, Necker, Turgot, Condorcet, Chastellux, Dupont de Nemours, Le Trosne, Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Le Mercier de la Rivière, Volney, Mirabeau, Brissot de Warville, Barthélemy, and the like-who debated the significance of what Montesquieu had, in his Spirit of Laws, called communication, and who wrestled with the importance of a powerful phenomenon, more or less unknown in France until the second half of the eighteenth century, which they termed ‘public opinion.’” -Paul Rahe, Hillsdale College

“Sheehan’s insightful and incisive analysis of the thought of James Madison once again confirms for us his greatness as a political thinker and his importance as a proponent of popular republican government.” -Gordon Wood, Brown University

“Colleen Sheehan’s bold new book provides a corrective to the many myths of the Founding. It portrays James Madison, the father of the Constitution, as a man deeply concerned with the ideas of civic virtue, citizen character, and common purpose, albeit in the service of the truly republican principles of the Declaration of Independence.” -National Review

“….give us a handsome and worthwhile down payment on the more sustained analysis she promises. ” -Dr. Michael Zuckert

“Colleen Sheehan’s Madison is driven by an overarching concern: What would it take for this American population to become–and remain–a self-governing people? More was at stake than survival and prosperity. For Madison the new national community could flourish only if the people had good reasons for respecting themselves. Sheehan’s engaging account of America’s beginnings enlarges our understanding of the hopes and fears, successes and failures, not only of a notable man but of a generation of founders.” -Ralph Lerner, University of Chicago

In her excellent new study, Colleen A. Sheehan argues that James Madison is preeminent among the Founders in his insistence on the civic cultivation of public opinion.” -Richard M. Reinsch, The City Journal

“This well-written and engaging book situates James Madison as a spirited defender of popular government.” -George Thomas, Review of Politics

“…Sheehan’s book is a rich, well-written, and well-argued text on adison that any serious scholar of Madison and the founding of the United States must read.” -Richard K. Matthews, Journal of American History

“…James Madison and the Spirit of Republican Self-Government is an informed and intriguing addition to the literature on the American founders. The book will appeal to fans of Madison and to scholars of American political thought and the American founding.”
Canadian Journal of Political Science Graham G. Dodds, Concordia University

“This is a wonderfully provocative and morally engaged argument…the overall analysis is brilliant and merits careful reading by anyone seriously interested in the ideas of our greatest political thinker.”
Political Science Quarterly, Jack Rakove, Stanford University

“This well-written and engaging book situates James Madison as a spirited defender of popular government…Sheehan has elegantly and artfully recaptured neglected and forgotten elements of Madison’s thinking that all serious scholars of Madison will need to confront.”
The Review of Politics, George Thomas

Tags: Colleen Sheehan, Federalist Papers, James Madison, United State
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Executing Daniel Bright: Race, Loyalty, and Guerrilla Violence in a Coastal Carolina Community 1861-1865

Thursday, July 15th, 2010

by Barton Myers

Executing Daniel Bright

Book Description

On December 18, 1863, just north of Elizabeth City in rural northeastern North Carolina, a large group of white Union officers and black enlisted troops under the command of Brigadier General Edward Augustus Wild executed a local citizen for his involvement in an irregular resistance to Union army incursions along the coast. Daniel Bright, by conflicting accounts either a Confederate soldier home on leave or a deserter and guerrilla fighter guilty of plundering farms and harassing local Unionists, was hanged inside an unfinished postal building. The initial fall was not mortal, and according to one Union soldier’s account, Bright suffered a slow death by “strangulation, his heart not ceasing to beat for twenty minutes.”

Until now, Civil War scholars considered Bright and the Union incursion that culminated in his gruesome death as only a historical footnote. In Executing Daniel Bright, Barton A. Myers uses these events as a window into the wider experience of local guerrilla conflict in North Carolina’s Great Dismal Swamp region and as a representation of a larger pattern of retaliatory executions and murders meant to coerce appropriate political loyalty and military conduct on the Confederate homefront. Race, political loyalties, power, and guerrilla violence all shaped the life of Daniel Bright and the home he died defending, and Myers shows how the interplay of these four dynamics created a world where irregular military activity could thrive.

Myers opens with an analysis of antebellum slavery, race relations, slavery debates, and the role of the environment in shaping the antebellum economy of northeastern North Carolina. He then details the emergence of a rift between Unionist and Confederate factions in the area in 1861, the events in 1862 that led to the formation of local guerrilla bands, and General Wild’s 1863 military operation in Pasquotank, Camden, and Currituck counties. He explores the local, state, regional, and Confederate Congress’s responses to the events of the Wild raid and specifically to Daniel Bright’s hanging, revealing the role of racism in shaping those responses. Finally, Myers outlines the outcome of efforts to negotiate neutrality and the state of local loyalties by mid-1864.

Revising North Carolina’s popular Civil War mythology, Myers concludes that guerrilla violence such as Bright’s execution occurred not only in the highlands or Piedmont region of the state’s homefront; rather, local irregular wars stretched from one corner of the state to the other. He explains how violence reshaped this community and profoundly affected the ways loyalties shifted and manifested themselves during the war. Above all, Myers contends, Bright’s execution provides a tangible illustration of the collapse of social order on the southern homefront that ultimately led to the downfall of the Confederacy.

Microhistory at its finest, Executing Daniel Bright adds a thought-provoking chapter to the ever-expanding history of how Americans have coped with guerrilla war.

Buy it now.

Tags: American Civil War, Barton Myers, Civil War, Confederate States Army, Confederate States of America, Daniel Bright, North Carolina, Union Army
Posted in Fellows Publications, What's Hot | 1 Comment »

Michael Barone Speech to JMC SI Featured In “The American”

Wednesday, July 14th, 2010

Michael Barone’s address to the 2010 Jack Miller Center Summer Institute in Charlottesville, Virginia was cited as the inspiration for Mr. Barone’s most recent article in “The American,” the journal of the American Enterprise Institute:

We are once again—as in the days of the early republic and not in the heyday of the Progressives and the New Dealers—a republic of property owners.

“No person shall…be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.” So reads a portion of the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, part of the Bill of Rights passed by the First Congress and ratified by state legislatures, sponsored originally by Thomas Jefferson’s friend and political ally James Madison. It echoed, of course, Jefferson’s words in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Madison and Jefferson followed the tradition of John Locke, the British philosopher whose Two Treatises on Government was taken as the justification for the transfer of power known as the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89—the subject of my 2007 book, Our First Revolution: The Remarkable British Upheaval That Inspired America’s Founding Fathers. Locke believed that men could be free only if their lives, liberty, and property were protected by the rule of law. And he believed that only men with property could be relied on to self-govern.

Locke, therefore, thought that the responsibility for choosing legislators in representative government should be limited to property owners, as it was in elections to the House of Commons. In English counties, the franchise was limited to 40-shilling freeholders—owners of property that brought in two pounds a year. The franchise in the more numerous boroughs was limited in different ways, in some cases to the owners of specific pieces of property.

The American people, the property-owning majority, even in this time of economic distress, seem to be embracing instead a culture of independence, a culture as old as the republic itself.

The Founders anticipated a limited but broader franchise in America. They provided that senators should be chosen by legislatures, whose members were typically selected by a large electorate, and that members of the House should be chosen by voters with “the qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of the state legislature.”

The Founders had different ideas of the worthiness of commerce. Jefferson envisioned a republic of freeholding egalitarian farmers. Alexander Hamilton envisioned a republic on the path toward commercial and industrial preeminence. But Jefferson’s vision was a more accurate picture of the United States in the early years of the republic, where land was plentiful and labor scarce, where the large majority of white men were farmers and most of them owned the land they worked.

In this freeholders’ republic, it was natural to move toward universal manhood suffrage, to allow every white male adult to vote. Some states took longer than others to reach this goal—South Carolina still had the legislature choose its presidential electors until 1860. But the principle was widely accepted elsewhere: since almost everyone owned property, everyone should be allowed to vote. There was a danger, recognized by Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830s, that the poor would vote to strip the rich of their wealth and, in President Obama’s words to Joe the Plumber, “Spread the wealth around.”

The New Deal was an attempt to freeze an economy, then in a downward spiral, into one place.

Tocqueville pointed to another danger as well, the danger of what he called “soft despotism,” in which a seemingly benevolent government would channel citizens into docile obedience like a herd of sheep. But that danger seemed distant, even to Tocqueville, in an America whose dominant and more populist party, Andrew Jackson’s Democrats, opposed government spending on public works projects and feared the power of a central bank.

Up through the end of the 19th century there did not seem to be a significant tension between universal democracy and property rights. The Founders’ vision prevailed.

A New Vision Based on Fear

But that was no longer the case in 1910. By then, another vision was being advanced, the vision of the Progressives—the vision of Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, of political philosophers Herbert Croly and John Dewey.

The Progressives explicitly repudiated the Founders’ vision of limited government. They argued that government needed to redistribute property, to take money from one group of citizens to help others, and to regulate economic activity in ways previously considered unconstitutional. The Constitution, they said, was a “horse and buggy” document, suited perhaps to the simpler society of the 18th century, but dangerously out of date in a complex industrial society which could not expect ordinary citizens to make their way without government guidance and assistance. They were acting, they said, in the interests of the people. Their critics said they were acting out of hunger for power.

I want to advance another thesis: That they actually acted more out of fear than of benevolence. They feared revolution.

I want to advance another thesis: That Progressives actually acted more out of fear than of benevolence. They feared revolution.

They did not know what we know today: that revolution wasn’t going to occur in America, as it had so often in Europe (multiple times in France, in many European countries in 1848, and as recently as 1870-71). Revolution would transform Russia in 1917-18. In the chaos and violence that followed World War I, Marxist revolts broke out in cities as productive and sophisticated as Munich and Budapest; Benito Mussolini’s fascists marched on Rome. The Progressives did not take the Marxist view that revolution was inevitable, but they certainly believed it was possible; Theodore Roosevelt was quite explicit about this threat. And they believed it a serious menace, as avowedly Marxist socialist parties gained millions of adherents in the expanding electorates of Europe.

The Challenges of Urbanity

This is understandable if we go back to 1910, and look at the America the Progressives faced. It was increasingly an urban country with an increasingly industrial economy, a country where great masses of people did not own significant amounts of property.

The United States in 1910 had 92 million people—it would pass the 100 million mark in 1915. This seems like a small number to us, living in a nation of 310 million, but it was an enormous multitude to the Americans of that time, a huge increase over the 3.9 million recorded in the first Census just 120 years before, in 1790.

Alexis de Tocqueville pointed to another danger as well, the danger of what he called “soft despotism,” in which a seemingly benevolent government would channel citizens into docile obedience like a herd of sheep.

It was an America with huge and rapidly growing cities. New York City had 4.8 million people in 1910, nearly half of them in Manhattan—almost a million more than live there today—and half of those lived south of 14th Street. The subways were being built that would spread the city out in the next decade to Brooklyn and the Bronx, each of which gained more than half a million people in the decade, during which the population of New York City rose to 5.6 million. Behind New York in 1910 were Chicago with 2.2 million, Philadelphia with 1.5 million, and St. Louis, Boston, Cleveland, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and Detroit each with about half a million or more. Altogether, one out of eight Americans lived in these nine cities, America was rapidly moving to a time—reached by the 1920 Census—when a majority lived in cities.

And these cities were filling up with immigrants. In the 1900-1910 decade, America grew from 76 million to 92 million and welcomed some 9 million immigrants. Four million more would arrive in the next four years. More than half of America’s population growth came from immigrants, and for the first time many came from Eastern and Southern Europe, the vast majority of whom settled in big cities. It was a time when America’s giant factories employed great masses of immigrants. Henry Ford’s Highland Park plant was churning out hundreds of thousands of Model Ts—and Ford was organizing English and civics lessons for his workers, many of whom had little command of English.

In America, most farmers owned their farms. But most city dwellers did not own significant property at all. Most city residents rented rather than owned their homes; they cashed their paychecks for cash rather than have bank accounts; they depended on charity if they became disabled or widowed. It was the America of Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie—a very hard America (as I used the term in my 2004 book, Hard America, Soft America), an America with plenty of competition and accountability, but which could be very unforgiving of mistakes and misfortunes. Millions made their way upwards, but most never accumulated significant wealth. They lacked the stake in their communities and in the larger society that property provides.

The Obama Democrats came to power with an assumption that in times of economic distress Americans would be more amenable to or supportive of big government programs.

For the Progressives, this was scary. Who could tame the urban masses? The post-Civil War politicians who built Fort Sheridan and Great Lakes Naval Station located them near Chicago to stamp out revolution if it came. And indeed there was rioting in the streets of Chicago during the Pullman strike of 1893, when President Grover Cleveland superseded the governor of Illinois and mobilized federal troops.

The Progressives and their progeny, the New Dealers—whether acting out of benevolence, hunger for power, or fear—were paternalistic; but they were also precautionary. Give the masses work relief, Social Security, deposit insurance, a floor on wages and prices, they thought, and the masses will not revolt or be attracted to the totalitarian faiths advancing in the Old World—the Communism that many intellectuals championed, the fascism that Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote was “the wave of the future.”

The Progressives argued that economic freedoms were unimportant because ordinary people, lacking property, didn’t really have much economic freedom anyway. As such, property rights must be subordinated to human rights. It was better to guarantee people education, healthcare, food, housing—the domestic programs that Franklin Roosevelt advanced as victory in World War II neared in 1944 and 1945. Economic growth was a secondary concern at best. Roosevelt seems to have believed, as many Americans did at the time, that the era of economic growth was over and that the postwar years would see a return to economic depression. In any case, he was clearly focused on economic redistribution rather than growth.

The New Deal was an attempt to freeze an economy, then in a downward spiral, into one place. It envisaged not growth but stasis. It was widely believed that capitalism had failed and economic growth was a thing of the past.

Misreading History and the Progressive Overreach

Today we have a presidential administration and a congressional leadership which consciously seeks to expand the size and scope of government in the tradition set out by the Progressives and New Dealers. They came to power assuming that in times of economic distress Americans would be more amenable to or supportive of big government programs. This was a lesson they absorbed directly or secondhand from the great New Deal historians Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and James McGregor Burns, and from Franklin Roosevelt himself.

Progressives argued that government needed to redistribute property, to take money from one group of citizens to help others, and to regulate economic activity in ways previously considered unconstitutional.

But as I argued in my 1990 book, Our Country: The Shaping of America from Roosevelt to Reagan, and as Amity Shlaes argues differently in her book on the 1930s, The Forgotten Man, those lessons were misleading. It’s true that American voters in the 1934 and 1936 elections endorsed the policies of Franklin Roosevelt’s first term. But as the 1930s went on, opinion shifted. By 1937, most Americans opposed Roosevelt’s plan to pack the Supreme Court and were repelled by the sit-down strikes that resulted in unionizing the auto and steel industries. Majorities favored reducing government spending and controls, limiting the power of labor unions, and paring welfare programs—this was when the word “boondoggling” was added to the English language.

It is true that Roosevelt was re-elected in 1940 and that Democrats retained majorities in Congress. But polling suggests that if the 1940 election had been decided on domestic issues, the Republicans would have won. Roosevelt was nominated for a third term weeks after the fall of France, when Hitler and Stalin and Imperial Japan were allies in command of most of the land-mass of Eurasia—the closest the world has ever come to George Orwell’s vision in 1984. Roosevelt was an experienced and tested leader; the Republican candidate, though talented, was a former utility executive who had never held public office and had no experience in foreign or military affairs.

Most Americans have accumulated—or will, during the course of their working years, accumulate— significant amounts of wealth.

The Obama Democrats today believe they have progressed toward the goals Roosevelt outlined for domestic policy in his last year as president, and are puzzled by the adverse public reaction to their programs. But the America we live in is a very different country from the America the Progressives and New Dealers knew and, in part, because of the impact of some of the public policies set in place by the New Dealers and their opponents.

Those policies—as modulated by the Republican Congress in 1947 and 1948, which eliminated wage and price controls, cut taxes, limited the powers of labor unions, and rejected public housing programs—helped to produce the postwar prosperity which neither the New Dealers nor their political opponents predicted. The housing policies of the New Deal helped to make a majority of Americans homeowners while the bipartisan G.I. Bill of Rights, shaped in large part by the American Legion, enabled millions to attend college. These policies helped produce the postwar prosperity that neither Roosevelt’s admirers nor most of his opponents anticipated.

And when macroeconomic policies produced the stagflation of the 1970s, politicians, Democratic as well as Republican, embraced deregulation, which squeezed out huge costs in transportation and communication. This reduced the costs of life’s necessities, which enabled more Americans to accumulate significant wealth over a working lifetime.

John Locke believed that men could be free only if their lives, liberty, and property were protected by the rule of law. And he believed that only men with property could be relied on to self-govern.

We live now in a moment where it is clear that some of these policies went too far. Policies to increase homeownership helped produce the housing-price crash of 2007. Poorly understood innovations in finance led to the financial crisis of 2008. The resulting recession is painful and is, I believe, being prolonged by the economic policies of the Obama Democrats.

But the fact is that we are once again, as in the days of the early republic and not in the heyday of the Progressives and the New Dealers, a republic of property owners. Most Americans have accumulated—or will, during the course of their working years, accumulate— significant amounts of wealth. And that is why, I believe, American voters seem to be rejecting the policies of the Obama Democrats. Those policies, rooted in the Progressive and New Deal tradition, are designed to encourage a culture of dependence. It is the “soft despotism” of which Tocqueville warned us 175 years ago. The American people, the property-owning majority, even in this time of economic distress, seem to be embracing instead a culture of independence, a culture as old as the republic itself.

The major political development of the last 17 months has been an inrush of hundreds of thousands or even millions of Americans into political activity, an inrush symbolized by but not limited to the tea party movement. It is fascinating to me that the tea partiers have adopted the language and in some cases even the costumes of the Founders. While the Progressives’ descriptions of a “horse and buggy” Constitution and their sense that giant auto factories and steel mills were the harbinger of the future seem tinny and out of date, the language of the Founders continues to resonate with the clear timbre of a silver spoon tapping a crystal glass. The majority of the American people seem to firmly agree with the Founders’ insistence that no one should be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. And so we can take satisfaction that most of our fellow citizens in our freeholders’ republic still hold these truths to be self-evident.

This article is based on a speech delivered at the Jack Miller Center Summer Institute, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia.

“No person shall…be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.” So reads a portion of the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, part of the Bill of Rights passed by the First Congress and ratified by state legislatures, sponsored originally by Thomas Jefferson’s friend and political ally James Madison. It echoed, of course, Jefferson’s words in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Madison and Jefferson followed the tradition of John Locke, the British philosopher whose Two Treatises on Government was taken as the justification for the transfer of power known as the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89—the subject of my 2007 book, Our First Revolution: The Remarkable British Upheaval That Inspired America’s Founding Fathers. Locke believed that men could be free only if their lives, liberty, and property were protected by the rule of law. And he believed that only men with property could be relied on to self-govern.

Locke, therefore, thought that the responsibility for choosing legislators in representative government should be limited to property owners, as it was in elections to the House of Commons. In English counties, the franchise was limited to 40-shilling freeholders—owners of property that brought in two pounds a year. The franchise in the more numerous boroughs was limited in different ways, in some cases to the owners of specific pieces of property.

Continue Reading Here

Tags: American Enterprise Institute, civic education, Jack Miller Center Summer Institute, James Madison, Michael Barone, The American, Thomas Jefferson, United States Constitution
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Northwood University’s Forum for Citizenship and Enterprise Completes First Year of Programming

Tuesday, July 13th, 2010

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MIDLAND, MI – Northwood University has launched an academic center dedicated to the principles and habits of liberty, ethical conduct and free enterprise. The Forum for Citizenship and Enterprise inaugurated its first year of programming in the 2009-2010 academic year thanks to a generous seed money grant provided by the Jack Miller Center for Teaching America’s Founding Principles and History. Professor Glenn Moots, who is serving as director for the Forum, plans a full schedule of events for the 2010-2011 academic year thanks to a grant from the Atlas Economic Research Foundation.

The Forum’s new lecture series brought two distinguished speakers to campus. In October 2009, Professor Richard Gamble addressed a large audience about the English roots of American liberty. Gamble is the Anna Margaret Ross Alexander Chair in History and Political Science at Hillsdale College. He is author of The War for Righteousness and editor of The Great Tradition: Classic Readings on What It Means to Be an Educated Human Being. In April 2010, Professor Carl Richard spoke to an audience of campus and community members about the influence of the Greeks and Romans on America’s constitutional framers. Richard is professor of history at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and author of a number of books addressing America’s relationship to the ancient classics including Greeks and Romans Bearing Gifts and The Founders and the Classics.

The Forum also began ongoing faculty and student reading groups. Faculty discussed selections from Professor Gamble’s The Great Tradition. Students debated a variety of themes from C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters.

Professor Moots is planning an expanded schedule of events for 2010-2011, including bringing more speakers to campus, expanding faculty and student book groups, scheduling more community events, and planning an academic conference in the summer of 2011.

In the 2010-2011 academic year, the Forum will shift focus to the intersection of economics with history. Integrating history, political science, economics and philosophy is in keeping with the liberal arts core that supplements Northwood’s specialty business programs. “We cannot teach our students about limited government, free enterprise or individual responsibility without the context of these four subjects,” Professor Moots said. “The intent of the Forum is to strengthen our delivery of the Northwood Idea in ways that have not been done before. We want our students and everyone in the Northwood community to be better citizens and better people. This will make them better business people, too.”

Teaching students the “tradition of freedom” is Northwood’s first outcome for its graduates and has been part of its mission since its founding in 1959. Dr. Moots hopes that the success of the Forum will help Northwood achieve further recognition as a leader in teaching this tradition. “Partnering with organizations such as the Jack Miller Center and the Atlas Foundation are very important for moving the Forum forward. Their support is a vote of confidence in Northwood’s future. Our increased commitment to teaching the tradition of freedom will be met with enthusiastic support from Northwood’s donors and friends. Their loyalty, along with new partnerships, will advance the work of the Forum and the Northwood Idea.”

Northwood’s Forum joins a number of prestigious partners who have partnered with the Jack Miller Center or the Atlas Foundation to create similar university programs and centers of academic excellence. Notable partners include Ivy League institutions such as Brown and Harvard, public universities such as University of Virginia and Michigan State University, and private colleges and universities such as Rhodes College, Villanova University and Grove City College.

About the Atlas Economic Research Foundation

The Atlas Economic Research Foundation serves as a catalyst and connector to link free-market organizations and individuals to the ideas, people and resources they need to promote a free society. Based in Washington D.C., and founded by the late Sir Antony Fisher, Atlas believes that economic prosperity and human flourishing are best achieved by advancing institutions grounded in free markets, rule of law and limited government. Since 1981, Atlas has been instrumental in creating and nurturing an international network of free-market public policy institutes; free market university-based academic centers and a cadre of individuals committed to achieving a free society. Atlas’s partners are active in the United States and on every continent across the globe. Atlas accepts no government funding and is not endowed. Its operations, including the grants it provides to think tanks in the U.S. and around the world, are financed entirely through gifts from individuals, philanthropic foundations and corporations. Atlas has received the highest rating from Charity Navigator for its financial stewardship. More information is available at http://atlasnetwork.org/.

About Northwood University

Northwood University is committed to the most personal attention to prepare students for success in their careers and in their communities; it promotes critical thinking skills and personal effectiveness, and the importance of ethics, individual freedom and responsibility.

Private, nonprofit and accredited, Northwood University specializes in managerial and entrepreneurial education at three full-service, residential campuses located in southern Florida, mid-Michigan and northern Texas. Adult Degree Programs are available in eight states with many course delivery options including online. The DeVos Graduate School offers full-time, evening and industry specific master’s degree programs for entrepreneurs and executives in Michigan, Texas and Switzerland. The Alden B. Dow Center for Creativity and Enterprise on the Midland, Michigan, Campus specializes in creative thinking and innovation development. International education is offered through terms abroad and in Program Centers in Switzerland, China, Malaysia, Bahrain and Sri Lanka. Northwood University also operates the Margaret Chase Smith Library in Maine.

Tags: Civics Education, Education, Forum for Citizenship and Enterprise, Jack Miller Center, Northwood University
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Roosevelt University to Conduct High School Teachers Academy on the History and Principles of the American Founding

Monday, July 12th, 2010

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Chicago, July 12, 2010—Roosevelt University will conduct its first Summer Academy for High School Teachers, July 12-16. The Summer Academy, a collaborative effort by Roosevelt University’s Montesquieu Forum for the Study of Civic Life and the Jack Miller Center for Teaching America’s Founding Principles and History, is designed to foster a discussion among high school teachers about the history and principles of the American Founding.

The program is a one-week series of lectures, workshops and seminars for Chicagoland high school teachers. It is modeled after the successful faculty development summer institutes for college professors that the Jack Miller Center conducts in association with leading universities and colleges. The Summer Teachers’ Academy on the American Founding is a program of the Jack Miller Center’s Chicago Initiative, a collaborative effort among university faculty, foundation experts, and private donors in the greater Chicago area to advance the education students need to be become engaged and thoughtful citizens.

The curriculum of the Teachers’ Academy is based on original texts and documents central to the formation of the United States and its institutions. The theme is Liberty & Constitutionalism: Five Founding Freedoms. More specifically, the conversation will focus on “The Conditions of Freedom,” “Freedom of Speech,” “Liberty, Property, & the Pursuit of Happiness,” “Freedom from Fear,” and “Freedom of Conscience.” Each session will be guided by a nationally recognized scholar on the American Founding: Ralph Lerner (University of Chicago); Peter Onuf (University of Virginia); Michael Zuckert (University of Notre Dame); Jessica Choppin Roney (Ohio University); and Mary Jane Farrelly (Brandeis University).

“Twenty-one high school teachers from a variety of Chicago and suburban high schools (including Jones College Prep, Grayslake Central, Niles North, Hinsdale, Riverside-Brookfield, Marian Catholic and Curie) will spend a ‘summer school’ week focused on the history of the founding of the United States,” said Lynn Weiner, dean of Roosevelt’s College of Arts and Sciences. “As a result, the education of hundreds of area high school students will be enriched and broadened this fall.”

About Roosevelt University

Roosevelt University is a national leader in educating socially conscious citizens for active and dedicated lives as leaders in their professions and their communities. The University’s student-centered faculty and staff inspire academically qualified students from diverse backgrounds and all ages to benefit from rigorous higher education and professional development opportunities in the dynamic Chicago metropolitan environment. Deeply rooted in practical scholarship and principles of social justice expressed as ethical awareness, leadership development, economic progress and civic engagement, Roosevelt University encourages community partnerships and prepares its diverse graduates for responsible citizenship in a global society.

http://www.roosevelt.edu

About the Montesquieu Forum for the Study of Civic Life, Roosevelt University

The Montesquieu Forum is supported by the Jack Miller Center and Roosevelt University. Its principal purpose is to facilitate and further the study of the classical and European heritage informing the American founding period. The American Founding did not spring out of a vacuum. It took as its foundations the writings of thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Polybius, Plutarch, Francis Bacon, Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, as well as the Bible. By offering programs on such works, the Forum aims to encourage a deepened understanding of the principles of the American Founding, both in the students at Roosevelt University and the general public. http://legacy.roosevelt.edu/cas/hahp/montesquieuforum/index.html

Tags: Civics Education, High School Civics, High School Teachers, Jack Miller Center, Montesquieu Forum, Roosevelt University
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Educational Decline?

Friday, July 9th, 2010

There are more students attending college than ever before. If we measure the number of degrees and professional certificates earned in the U.S. it appears that we have the most

Graduation

educated generation in American History. But what if we looked at the students themselves:

“They come with polished resumes and perfect SAT scores. Their grades are often impeccable. Some elite universities will deny thousands of high school seniors with 4.0 grade point averages in search of an elusive quality that one provost called “intellectual vitality.” The perception is that today’s over-achieving, college-driven kids have it — whatever it is. They’re not just groomed; they’re ready. There’s just one problem.” (from boston.com)

A new study made by Professors at University of California at Riverside and Santa Barbara shows that the time students spend preparing for class has decreased by almost half. That’s right, since 1961 the percentage of the population receiving college degrees has increased, … but students may be learning less.

Why do students study less?

Here are the popular theories making their way around the internet:

Professors are apathetic. The have to publish too much and assign less and less.

Too many part-time faculty.

More students are working during school.

Students do not have the attention span to read.

… but there are more and more explanations.

There is probably no single factor that accounts for the decrease in class preparation, but all of the explanations above have one thing in common. None address the subject matter of contemporary college courses. While it is true that the decrease in average study was true for students of all majors, it is unclear what changes have taken place for all majors. Is education approached differently than it used to be?

In terms of Civic Education, the decrease in study time is alarming indeed. Several colleges have even eliminated the study of politics altogether. At the very moment when citizens are being called upon to make judgments that affect their lives, the knowledge they possess seems to be diminishing.

What is to be done? Find out what you can do to enhance Civic Education.

Tags: civic education, Education, Higher Education, Jack Miller Center, University of California Riverside, University of California Santa Barbara
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Revolutionary Negotiations: Indians, Empires, and Diplomats in the Founding of America

Wednesday, July 7th, 2010

By Leonard J. Sadosky

Revolutionary Negotiations

Book Description

Revolutionary Negotiations examines early American diplomatic negotiations with both the European powers and the various American Indian nations from the 1740s through the 1820s. Sadosky interweaves previously distinct settings for American diplomacy–courts and council fires–into one singular, transatlantic system of politics.

Whether as provinces in the British Empire or as independent states, American assertions of power were directed simultaneously to the west and to the east–to Native American communities and to European empires across the Atlantic. American leaders aspired to equality with Europeans, who often dismissed them, while they were forced to concede agency to Native Americans, whom they often wished they could ignore. As Americans used diplomatic negotiation to assert their new nation’s equality with the great powers of Europe and gradually defined American Indian nations as possessing a different (and lesser) kind of sovereignty, they were also forced to confront the relations between the states in their own federal union.Acts of diplomacy thus defined the founding of America, not only by drawing borders and facilitating commerce, but also by defining and constraining sovereign power in a way that privileged some and weakened others. These negotiations truly were revolutionary.

Buy it now.

Tags: British Empire, Diplomacy, Ethnicity, History, Indigenous, Indigenous peoples of the Americas, Leonard Sadosky, Native American, United States
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The Pious Sex: Essays on Women and Religion in the History of Political Thought

Sunday, July 4th, 2010

By Andrea Radasanu

The Pious Sex

Book Description

This collection of original essays examines the relationship between women and religion in the history of political thought broadly conceived. This theme is a remarkably revealing lens through which to view the Western philosophical and poetical traditions that have culminated in secular and egalitarian modern society. The essays also give highly analytical accounts of the manifold and intricate relationships between religion, family and public life in the history of political thought, and the various ways in which these relationships have manifested themselves in pagan, Jewish, Christian and post-Christian settings.

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Tags: Andrea Radasanu, Political philosophy, Politics, Religion, Religion and Spirituality, Religious Studies
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Politics Reformed: The Anglo-American Legacy of Covenant Theology

Friday, July 2nd, 2010

By Glenn A. Moots

Politics Reformed

Book Description

Many studies have considered the Bible’s relationship to politics, but almost all have ignored the heart of its narrative and theology: the covenant. In this book, Glenn Moots explores the political meaning of covenants past and present by focusing on the theory and application of covenantal politics from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Moots demands that we revisit political theology because it served as the most important school of politics in early modern Europe and America. He describes the strengths of the covenant tradition while also presenting its limitations and dangers. Contemporary political scientists such as Eric Voegelin, Daniel Elazar, and David Novak are called on to provide insight into both the covenant’s history and its relevance today. Moots’ work chronicles and critiques the covenant tradition while warning against both political ideology and religious enthusiasm. It provides an inclusive and objective outline of covenantal politics by considering the variations of Reformed theology and their respective consequences for political practice. This includes a careful account of how covenant theology took root on the European continent in the sixteenth century and then inspired ecclesiastical and civil politics in England, Scotland, and America. Moots goes beyond the usual categories of Calvinism or Puritanism to consider the larger movement of which both were a part. By integrating philosophy, theology, and history, Moots also invites investigation of broader political traditions such as natural law and natural right. “Politics Reformed” demonstrates how the application of political theology over three centuries has important lessons for our own dilemmas about church and state. It makes a provocative contribution to understanding foundational questions in an era of rising fundamentalism and emboldened secularism, inspiring readers to rethink the importance of religion in political theory and practice, and the role of the covenant tradition in particular.

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Tags: Bible, Calvinism, David Novak, Glenn Moots, Political philosophy, Political Science
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Jack Miller Center Summer 2010 Quarterly Report

Wednesday, June 30th, 2010

Message from the Chairman
Chicago Civic Education Roundtable
Michael Barone to be Featured Speaker at JMC Summer Institute
Conference on Jewish Law and America’s Founding Principles at DePaul College of Law
Interview with Prof. James Ceaser, University of Virginia
Guest Essay by Mr. Richard Cline, “Economic Freedom”
JMC Begins Audio CD, Podcast Series
Understanding the Presidency
Vision into Action

Message from the Chairman

Preserving Liberty, by Mr. Jack Miller

Growing up, I never gave much thought to the importance of learning history. At that time in my life, it seemed to be nothing more than an exercise in remembering dates and names. But, later, I learned that it is about so much more. I found that among the great lessons and wisdom to be discovered from history are ideals, a philosophy of how one should live one’s life, and about what works and what doesn’t work in creating a free society where each individual can achieve to their own highest potential.

I learned that the freedom and opportunities our country afforded me are what allowed me to build a successful company and accumulate wealth. It was an America where, if you worked hard and focused, you could achieve to the best of your ability. Over time, I began to understand that the principles established in the American Founding made that possible. Concepts such as “all men are created equal and they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” and that governments are formed to protect those rights. These were the great promises pronounced in the Declaration of Independence and made into law in the Constitution.

As I read more, I began to learn that America’s founding principles and history were not being taught at most colleges and universities. This alarmed me. How, I thought, can people fulfill their roles and responsibilities as leaders and citizens without understanding the foundations of a free society? The principles on which our country is founded, I felt must be taught and transmitted to each generation or they will be forgotten and our liberty will be lost. I want my grandchildren to have the same opportunities I’ve had in life, so it occurred to me that more than just money, the best thing that I could leave my grandchildren would be the kind of country I grew up in.

So, in 2004 I began working with professors to find a way to strengthen education in America’s heritage. After several successful pilot projects my team of former college professors and foundation experts and I launched the Jack Miller Center for Teaching America’s Founding Principles and History. The JMC is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to enriching education to better prepare students to be good citizens. Our primary focus is on increasing the number of young scholars who are committed to a career in teaching America’s founding principles at the undergraduate college level.

We do that by providing the resources young professors need to expand their own knowledge, teach their students, and advance their careers. We have a growing network of nearly 400 scholars on 171 campuses that support one another in this endeavor. Specifically, we offer post-doctoral fellowships, publishing assistance, lecture series, seminars and summer faculty development institutes; and we support many professor-initiated programs on college campuses that enrich the teaching of America’s history and the founding principles. Students learn more than just dates and names, but, more importantly, the ideas behind the principles, the ideas that gave us the great gift of liberty.

In my retirement, I am devoting a good deal of my time and money to this project. I am also reading far, far more than I ever did in school, learning more about the brilliant people who were our founding fathers and the thinking behind the legacy they left us.

I believe that if our citizens are taught and understand our history and the principles on which our country is founded, our free republic will thrive. However, as Thomas Jefferson said, “If you want to be both free and ignorant, you want what never was and never will be.”

Several studies in recent years document that too many Americans, including those who make our laws, are uninformed about our nation’s heritage. Robust teaching of our founding principles and history is a critical need. These principles are the birthright of every American, regardless of political persuasion. I believe that each of us should embrace an America that fulfills the promises in our Declaration of Independence, and while those promises have not yet been fully realized, that inspired document should be our guiding beacon. Let us not be like Alice in Wonderland when she came to a fork in the road and asked the White Rabbit which road to take. “Where do you want to go,” he asked. “I don’t much care,” replied Alice. “Then it doesn’t matter which road you take,” replied the White Rabbit.

We know where we want to go, so it is important which road we take. Our founding principles and history can guide us. Let us not throw away the “gift of liberty” we were given because of ignorance of our history.

Editor’s note: Mr. Miller’s essay was the lead story in the spring edition of the National History Club’s newsletter distributed to some 25,000 teachers and students in middle and high school across the United States. To learn more about the National History Club, please visit: http://www.nationalhistoryclub.org/

Mr. Jack Miller

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Chicago Civic Education Roundtable

Judge Marjorie Rendell and Judge Diane Wood

Forty-eight Chicago area civics education advocates, philanthropists and educators convened at the Standard Club on May 13 for the Chicago Civic Education Roundtable, conducted by the Jack Miller Center and the Constitutional Rights Foundation Chicago. The event addressed the key issues, efforts and needs to improve civics education and the importance of students acquiring substantive knowledge in American institutions and traditions.

“In our efforts to strengthen higher education, we want to stimulate conversation among the various levels of education to encourage a civics education pathway from lower school to high school to college to citizenship,” stated JMC president Mike Ratliff. “Our hope is that by communicating across levels, a coherent experience is provided to students that results in the wise and engaged citizen we all want”.

Marjorie Rendell, the first lady of Pennsylvania, a judge on the United States Third Circuit Court of Appeals and one of the nation’s leading advocates for civic education, was the featured speaker at the event. She was introduced by her good friend Diane Wood, a judge on the United States Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. In her remarks, Judge Rendell shared with the Chicago area participants some of the successful programs and efforts being conducted in Pennsylvania to strengthen civics education at the K-12 level. Her message stressed the need for cooperation among leaders in government, business, non-profits, associations and schools to work together to return the focus on civics as a central mission of education.

Panelists on behalf of K-12 education included Carolyn Pereira, executive director of the Constitutional Rights Foundation Chicago; Mabel McKinney-Browning, American Bar Association; Adam Case, Chicago Public Schools; and Robin Steans, executive director of Advance Illinois. Panelists for higher education included JMC president Mike Ratliff; Lynn Weiner, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Roosevelt University; Harold Krent, Dean of Law at IIT Kent School of Law; and Peter Nardulli, director of the Cline Foundation. Panelists for the Capstone Panel, addressing “Where do we go from here?” included Judge Rendell; James Ceaser, professor of politics at the University of Virginia, John Sirek of the McCormick Foundation, and Harvey Gross, high school history teacher at Chicagoland Jewish High School.

More information on Judge Rendell’s efforts in civic education in Pennsylvania may be found at www.penncord.org. For more information on the Constitutional Rights Foundation Chicago, visit their website at www.crfc.org.

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Michael Barone to be Featured Speaker at JMC Summer Institute

Political analyst and journalist Michael Barone will be the featured speaker at the Jack Miller Center’s Faculty Development Summer Institute in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Barone is best known for being the principal author of The Almanac of American Politics, a biennial reference work published by the National Journal covering members of Congress and state governors. Barone is also a regular commentator on elections and political trends for the Fox News Channel and is a senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner. He is based at the American Enterprise Institute as a resident fellow.

He is the author of several books, including, most recently, Our First Revolution: The Remarkable British Upheaval that Inspired America’s Founding Fathers (Crown Publishers, 2007), a history of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and how it led to the American Revolution.

Barone earned a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University in 1966 and a law degree from Yale Law School in 1969, where he was a member of the Yale Law Journal.

The Jack Miller Center conducts two faculty development institutes every summer in partnership with leading universities and colleges. The two-week institutes are the entry point for young professors and graduate students to participate in the Jack Miller Center’s growing network of nearly 400 scholars committed to a rigorous, intellectually diverse and innovative approach to strengthening undergraduate education in America’s founding principles and history.

Led by some of the nation’s leading scholars in history, political thought, literature and economics, institute fellows participate in seminars that examine the central ideas, original documents and great questions arising from the American and Western experience. In addition, participants attend afternoon workshops that assist them in developing courses, securing tenure, publishing, and long-term professional advancement.

The 2010 summer institutes will be held Charlottesville, Virginia in partnership with the University of Virginia’s Program on Constitutionalism and Democracy, June 14 through 26 and in Chicago, July 26-August 7. The theme for this year’s institutes is “Liberty and Enterprise: The American Founding and the Birth of the Modern Commercial Republic.” Promising young scholars will focus on many of the questions the Founders themselves discussed and debated concerning America’s political and economic institutions.

This is the sixth year that these “intellectual boot camps” have been conducted by the Jack Miller Center.

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Conference on Jewish Law and America’s Founding Principles at DePaul College of Law

Founding a Nation/Constituting a People: American and Judaic Perspectives

L to R: Prof. Stephen Resnicoff, Prof. Roberta Kwall, Dr. Dov Zakheim, Mrs. Goldie Miller, Mr. Jack Miller

The Center for Jewish Law & Judaic Studies (JLJS) at DePaul University College of Law hosted a conference on May 13 to compare and contrast the fundamental conceptual underpinnings of the founding principles of the American Republic with those of Judaism. The conference was supported by the Jack Miller Center for Teaching America’s Founding Principles and History. The Miller Center’s support was funded by a $75,000 gift from a leading Chicago philanthropic foundation that wishes to remain anonymous. DePaul is one of the nation’s leading Catholic universities.

The conference attracted scholars from leading universities from around the world including the University of Toronto, the University of Virginia, Emory University, Bar Ilan University, Yeshiva University, the University of Chicago and DePaul University.

“Founding a Nation/Constituting a People was the first major law school conference designed to explore the relationships between the fundamental values of America’s founding fathers and the foundational values of Judaism,” said Professor Steven Resnicoff, co-director of the Center for Jewish Law & Judaic Studies at DePaul University College of Law. “The symposium brought together world class Jewish and secular scholars in law, political science, economics, and philosophy to examine these issues and to inspire further scholarship in this extremely important area. The JLJS is proud to be the vanguard for this scholarship and is truly grateful to the Jack Miller Center for support of this endeavor.”

The conference featured three panel discussions:

Fundamentals of Governance;

Fundamentals of Economic Rights and Arrangements;

Fundamentals of Individual Rights, Liberties and Responsibilities.

“I started this inquiry because I wanted to discover whether there was some connection between America’s founding principles and Biblical Judaic law. As a result of this conference and in a one-on-one discussion with one of the panelists, I am convinced that there is a solid connection,” said Jack Miller. “They go hand in hand. In fact, I believe that the teachings in the Torah contain many of the concepts that inspired our founders as they crafted our wonderful founding documents.”

About 100 people attended the conference summary, which was open to the public. Professor Resnicoff provided a summary of the panel discussions followed by the keynote lecture, Nation Building, Ancient and Modern: The Biblical Model for the American Experience, by Dr. Dov Zakheim, a former United States Undersecretary of Defense and a prominent Jewish scholar.

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Interview with Prof. James Ceaser, University of Virginia

Professor James Ceaser, a leading scholar in American politics, is the founder and director of the Program on Constitutionalism and Democracy at the University of Virginia. He has worked closely with Jack Miller and his team since 2004 and currently serves as the chairman of the Jack Miller Center’s Academic Advisory Council.

Professor Ceaser recently visited with the Miller Center’s Mike Deshaies, vice president of communications and development, to talk about his highly regarded program, including his very popular course with students “The American Political Tradition.”

Mike Deshaies: Why is it important for students to study America’s founding principles in history?

Prof. James Ceaser

James Ceaser: John Adams once remarked, “We began the dance,” and by the dance he didn’t mean the samba or the mamba or the waltz. He meant that Americans began modern constitutional government, and this is something I think that students and Americans should be proud of. Therefore, to go back and consider the whole founding exercise of how to write constitutions, what the ends of governments are, that’s a real treasure, and what we find is that when students have the opportunity to learn about such things they learn to cherish that treasure.

MD: How has the American Tradition course been received by students on campus?

JC: Well, since I don’t teach it directly, I think I can answer frankly. We’ve had 500 students or more take it in the last four years. The courses have filled up every time with lots of students seeking slots and waiting for the next year to get in. The evaluations, which I’m privy to see, have been extremely favorable. The reports of outside observers who have looked at the course have been even more favorable than that. I think it’s really been a great success and one that has had a real impact on the University of Virginia.

MD: To what do you attribute the success of the course?

JC: Several reasons. First, I attribute the success of the course to the material. It gives students a chance to have a genuine, critical encounter with their tradition, beginning with the founding and going all the way up to thinkers in the modern age. Second, the instructors—all of whom have been Miller Center fellows and have attended the Miller Center faculty development summer institutes—are really the key. They’re the ones in dialogue with the students. Third, the form of the course; smaller seminars where discussion is favored. And finally, the atmosphere. At the university, we try and teach the courses in the rooms that Jefferson himself was the architect of, and I think that gives the students a feeling that they’re engaged in a real important project in an atmosphere and setting that’s conducive to the course.

MD: Why are so many other universities interested in developing similar courses based on your syllabus?

JC: I think they’ve become interested for two reasons. Many people have been asking of universities, “What are you doing about the education of citizens?” And so this has led some universities to look for opportunities to add courses to their curriculum that addresses this question. And then, just as important, is the fact that the Jack Miller Center itself has been encouraging young academics to think of teaching these kinds of courses, which is not the normal sort of course in the disciplines as they’ve been structured thus far. So you have both a supply and a demand, and I think that’s going to be the avenue for success.

Mr. Mike Deshaies

MD: What is it about the syllabus that connects with students, faculty and administrators?

JC: For the students, I think it’s something that comes as a kind of surprise to them. They know about America from their high school courses. They know that there’s something that’s important, but they’ve never really studied, in most cases, the theories of American constitutionalism and the theories put forth by leading thinkers of Political Science throughout our history. And so it’s a kind of a surprise when they encounter the depth of this, and the fact that this depth includes not only the support of these institutions, but critical engagement with them. So I think this is the trick, that they find in their tradition itself something that’s interesting to them academically.

For faculty, I think it’s the opportunity to teach students — and now I’m speaking of the faculty who teach the course — a course that engages them as citizens and isn’t simply an academic exercise, but brings to bear their existing political prejudices and disposition and subjects them to critical analysis, and allows the students to rethink these things in terms of our tradition.

And for administrators, the few who have become occupied with this, I think it’s a chance to respond to those in the community who are asking institutions of higher education to do a better job of considering civic education.

MD: What are your future plans for building the program in Constitutionalism and Democracy?

JC: Well, it’s important to focus on what we’re doing right now and continue to do it well. This isn’t an effort to create an empire or to build a cartel; it’s to continue to do this course in this way for these students. That having been said, I think it’s possible to expand the number of students who are taking this course by adding additional fellows. There’s a demand for the course, and if we could supply more slots, that would be to the credit of the university and to the benefit of the students.

In addition, I think there’s something to be said for doing more to take this course to other campuses. We could bring in professors from other universities to see how it’s done at the University of Virginia, perhaps even asking some to come and teach at the University of Virginia for one semester and then to take the model of the course back to their own colleges and institutions.

I think that today, across all of higher education there is a need for students to have an opportunity to engage in what’s called civic education, which is the education of citizens and statesmen. It’s not officially part of our curricula today. It was once in the past, and while it can’t substitute for the disciplines of political science, it’s an important function that should be taught, especially at the introductory level, and I think this is a need which citizens are feeling and higher education should fulfill it.

MD: What makes you most proud about the outcomes you see from the success of this course?

JC: Well, I’d like to use the word ‘gratified’ rather than ‘proud,’ but gratified to see students who, regardless of their ideological disposition, are changed after they encounter the American Political Tradition. Even if they should disagree with large parts of the American tradition they have a renewed respect for it.

And, you know, with education, it’s not what they learn today, I’ve found over the years, that’s so important. You plant a seed and fifteen or twenty years later the students will come back, whatever their profession, to some of these ideas, and that will be a source of their inspiration later in life.

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Economic Freedom

Guest Essay, by Mr. Richard Cline

“The Constitution only guarantees the American people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself.” – Benjamin Franklin

Mr. Richard Cline

The concepts of free will and freedom that make democracy work are the same ones that make market based economic systems work. Market economies unleash the forces of choice and initiative embedded in the human will. This leads to creativity and innovation in the utilization of resources; the organization of human, intellectual, and financial capital; and the efficient interchange of ideas and products. As a result of these dynamics, mankind’s material well-being and store of knowledge expand.

In market based economic structures, people are generally free to choose what to do with their time and money. It is this freedom that empowers the individual exercise of human will, and it is the legitimate exercise of free will, on the part of both consumers and producers, that provides for “spontaneous coordination” that leads to the efficient utilization of resources and to the array of choices available in the marketplace. Individuals take risks that create goods for general use, choices for market participants, and rewards for the risk takers. While economic freedom includes the freedom to fail, failures fall by the wayside and create lessons for the attentive. Competition from others’ free economic activity forces productivity and change that, however painful for some in the short run, enhance overall societal welfare.

In a planned economy, a central bureaucracy makes the decisions that structure and direct the economy. Instead of individual initiative and the flexible, quick and spontaneous coordination of the marketplace, the central agency develops rigid multi-year plans that allocate resources, determine the types and quantities of goods to be produced, and set wages and prices. This requires that the bureaucracy have compulsive power and all-encompassing historical and real-time information across extensive geography, a daunting challenge.

Just as important, economic improvement over time requires initiative and innovation, and these always involve risk. But in a centrally planned, command economy, the risk-reward ratio is decidedly negative. Because of the central agency’s reach and power, the consequences of missteps have the potential to be colossal, and thus the risks are enormous.

Consequently, risks are avoided. Initiative in the central agency is stifled, resulting in less choice and fewer opportunities for individuals. Initiative in individuals is stifled not only by the absence of incentives but by compulsion from central directives. The disincentives result in economic stagnation and lower levels of productivity. Prices set for political reasons misdirect resources.

Essential to the functioning of markets is freedom to make choices about use of scarce resources, to set prices that recognize cost, and to profit from employment of labor and capital. This becomes the “unseen hand” in Adam Smith’s free marketplace that works not only in a short-term transactional sense; more broadly, instead of just drifting along with reliance and dependence on a system or central decision maker, people in a free economic environment see others benefiting from the results of their independent actions. As the awareness of benefits from initiative and self-direction spread, the ripples from the aggregation of these perceptions accumulate. The upshot is that they increasingly stimulate more initiative and progressively energize the economic vitality of the overall society.

Market based systems recognize that using free will in the pursuit of self-interest is intrinsic; they do not try to change human nature. Instead, they harness self-interest, and the interplay of free will in the marketplace produces societal benefit.

Some are uncomfortable about markets because they feel markets’ self-serving character does not embody or promote man’s “better instincts.” But if market activity produces broad outcomes that are positive, as economic theory and history prove, so what? If exercise of free will within a market system adds up to better overall outcomes despite disparities in wealth distribution, incomes, and so on, the results are good even though the motivation may be selfish. And government, when franchised by popular will, can play a constructive role by reining in self-interest that becomes destructive.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. The positive economic consequences of a shift in direction toward freer, capitalistic markets are on display today particularly in India and China. The best argument in support of market based systems is that they work, while idealistic economic systems may work for a while but inevitably fail to achieve their promised success.

Market based systems have their own problems. First, they are often perceived to be unfair because some individuals prosper more than others. While “all men are created equal” in a political sense, they have differing levels of intelligence, ability, determination, tolerance for risk, and awareness of opportunity. Some people are just luckier than others. Not everyone begins at the same starting line. Consequently, there are economic winners and losers, and there is not equality of outcomes. This can create envy, animosity and resentment.

Such unhappiness tends to be tolerated because the blend of political and economic freedom is broadly appealing. While not always rationalized, there is a perception that the overall market system works to produce widespread benefits. Even though they may not be “well off,” individuals perceive that they have the chance to do something about it by choosing to seek their own destinies.

Moreover, because they have political power, the economically disadvantaged and people of whatever economic status who are concerned about societal welfare and economic “fairness” use the political system to soften the sharp edges of disparity in economic opportunity, market power and outcome by providing for an economic safety net. While there is a limit to the degree of economic inequality that can be tolerated, such political adjustments generally maintain acceptance of the economic system even under such tremendous strain as experienced during the “Great Depression.”

A second important problem with free markets has to do with the effects of the “Creative Destruction” that competition and innovation produce. While change to adapt and grow in democratic, free market societies is essential to economic progress and allows the reallocation of capital and human resources to more creative and productive uses, it can cause severe hardship for those directly affected by it. Moreover, the reality or the perception of threat from economic restructuring can be large enough to cause general anxiety that results in a political shift in governmental power toward economic security at the sacrifice of economic liberty.

This drive for economic security is expressed in laws that provide job protection, work rules, industry favoritism, competitive barriers, trade restraints, government pensions and the like. When these preferences for economic security become excessive and ingrained in the culture, a downward spiral ensues in which that society becomes more vulnerable to competitive inroads from without, which make it increasingly difficult to achieve either economic progress or the desired insulation from change. Said another way, to the extent a culture sacrifices economic freedom for economic security, it is more likely in the long run to have neither.

The search for balance between the desires for economic security that provides comfort and for economic freedom that provides vitality and growth is a continuing challenge for democratic governments. The comparison between “Old Europe,” with its reluctance to modify entrenched welfare state economic policies, and the emerging capitalist economies of China, India and other developing nations is relevant here. The key for democratic societies is to make sure, in a globalized and competitive world, that the cost for growth in economic security is kept within bounds that the increase in society’s productivity, wealth and competitive position can afford. Mankind’s inherent desire for liberty to express will freely in economic activities is the best long run guarantor that a reasonable balance can be achieved and maintained, but the issue is ever present.

A third big problem with totally free markets has to do with the accumulation of entrenched economic power. Those who succeed by acting in their own self-interest (which is implicit in a market system) sometimes use their economic success in ways that protect their interests by denying the opportunity for success to others. Market position can be used by economic “winners” to deny access to the market by newcomers and to act for self-benefit in abusive ways that hurt less advantaged participants. This undermines the type of spontaneous coordination that provides for the efficiency of market-based systems and undermines their legitimacy.

But this is not irremediable and it underscores the compatibility of democratic political orders with market-based economies. Overreaching on the part of economic winners results in political pressures to check their behavior. New laws are enacted and the economic players then operate within those legal guidelines. In other words, a new set of mutual adjustments occurs to restore the legitimacy of the system and to resurrect the dynamism of the market.

Democratic market based economic systems are progressive and dynamic but they are not perfect. Sometimes the needed adjustments do not occur. Sometimes the political appeal of security checks economic vitality. However, because market systems empower free will embedded in human nature, they survive as engines of progress and produce better economic outcomes than idealistic systems imposed to eliminate all such imperfections.

Richard Cline is the founder of The Richard G. and Carole J. Cline Center Cline Center for Democracy at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The Cline Center, established in 2004, works to enhance societal welfare through democracy, free enterprise and the rule of law, enhance the capacity of democracy to advance societal welfare. He is also Chairman of Hawthorne Investors, Inc., a private management advisory and investment firm he founded in 1996. Mr. Cline is the former chairman and CEO of Nicor, Inc., and Jewel Companies, Inc., and also served as chairman of Hussman International, Inc. He was chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago from 1992 to 1994. Mr. Cline is a member of the Jack Miller Center’s Chicago Initiative Advisory Board.

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Jack Miller Center Begins Audio CD, Podcast Series

The Jack Miller Center Audio Interview Series, now available on CD and downloadable podcast on the JMC Web site, includes interviews with renowned scholars and public officials commenting on a wide variety of subjects concerning America’s founding principles and history. In addition to distribution via CDs and the JMC Web site, the series will be available via Apple’s iTunes service beginning this month.

“Jack Miller pointed out to me recently that he enjoys listening to recordings of speeches on public policy issues when he’s in the car and suggested that we produce a series of recorded interviews on CD discussing the American founding and issues relating to higher education in the United States,. I thought it was a great idea,” said Mike Deshaies, vice president for communications and development at the Jack Miller Center. “This addition to our JMC communications platform will allow people to listen to some interesting and unique insights into America’s heritage during their daily commute.”

“Podcasting has taken hold as a major method of information distribution in the last few years, and continues to be a popular method of media consumption among internet users,” said Deshaies. “This new series will give consumers of podcasts quality content centered on the American founding. With this in addition to our CD releases, the widest possible audience will be reached.”

The first volume of the JMC Interview Series, featuring discussions with renowned Abraham Lincoln scholar Allen Guelzo, is now available. The CD contains six different interviews conducted by Dr. Michael Andrews, vice president for academic programs at the JMC, with Professor Guelzo who discusses the origin, presidency and legacy of Abraham Lincoln. For a free copy of this CD, please contact Nathan Fortner at nfortner@gojmc.org.

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Understanding the Presidency

A Pathway Essay by Benjamin Kleinerman

At the center of our politics and a lightning-rod for all of our political controversy, the American presidency has somehow managed not to command the same scholarly attention as it has political attention. There have been countless great books written about individual presidents: Lord Charnwood’s biography of Abraham Lincoln stands out above the rest. But books on the American presidency as an institution are much less common and, as a whole, much less good. That being said, those few that do stand out also stand above nearly every book that has been written on American politics more generally.

Harvey Mansfield’s Taming the Prince: The Ambivalence of Modern Executive Power (Johns Hopkins, 1993) is the best book on the executive branch, although it is a challenging read. In the first place, Mansfield’s book is an unsurpassed intellectual history of the concept of the modern executive. By showing the extent to which the modern executive emerges as a theoretical invention that allows free governments to maintain their security even as they also preserve their freedom, Mansfield manages to capture the essence of the constitutional problem posed by executive power. In the wake of the controversies surrounding the Bush administration, Mansfield’s book gives us insight into both sides of the debate. The republican (not R) opponents of a strong executive emerge as concerned with the rule of law over and against the danger of the quick-acting and power-hungry executive; the proponents of a strong executive, including Mansfield himself, emerge as concerned with the inefficiencies and insufficiencies of the rule of law on its own—inefficiencies and insufficiencies that can and must be corrected by the executive with a taste not just for power but also for grandeur. This book’s own grandeur lies, among many other things, in its ability to be a partisan in the debate in a manner that can teach the rest of us what true partisanship actually looks like.

Much less ethereal than Mansfield’s Taming the Prince, Jeffrey Tulis’s The Rhetorical Presidency (Princeton, 1988) also stands out for its insight into the presidency and into the nature of American politics more generally. If I had to choose only one book to recommend to someone who wanted to understand American politics, I would choose The Rhetorical Presidency. Tulis begins with a brilliant exposition of the founders’ understanding of presidential power within a system of separated powers. It concludes with an equally brilliant investigation of the political dilemmas that have been created by the twentieth-century transformation of the presidency into the rhetorical mouth-piece of the people. Although Tulis considers the “original intent” of the founders, he is not an ordinary “originalist.” In other words, he does not suggest that America is failing because the current presidency does not live up to the founders’ intent. Instead, Tulis suggests that the founders’ intentions persist in the constitutional forms and formalities of both the presidency and the system of separation of powers, although these constitutional forms and formalities rest uncomfortably with the twentieth century post-Woodrow Wilson transformation of presidential power. Having taught this book on many occasions, I can say that its most outstanding virtue is the extent to which it opens students’ eyes not just to the dilemmas inherent in the modern presidency but to those that inhere in all of modern American politics.

Nearly every recommender of important books on the presidency is almost compelled to include Richard Neustadt’s Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents: The Politics of Leadership from Roosevelt to Reagan (Free Press, 1991). Although Neustadt has been rightly criticized by many scholars, including both Tulis and Mansfield, for over-emphasizing persuasion and under-emphasizing the formal powers of command involved in the office, the book still stands high on my shelf if for no other reason than its immensely readable account of the unique political situations our “modern presidents” have faced and their differing responses to them. The book is better than its thesis. It is good for its perceptive and enjoyable account of politics. It is written by a man with both a taste for political life and an insider’s insight into the world of which he writes. In fact, as scholars have pointed out, his political accounts tend to reveal how important the powers of command are as supplements to the powers of persuasion that his thesis emphasizes. For anyone seeking to understand the politics of presidential administration, Neustadt’s book is still in a class of its own.

If Neustadt’s book emphasizes persuasion too much, Edward Corwin’s The President: Office and Powers (NYU, 1984) offers an antidote. To say that Corwin places exclusive emphasis on the formal or institutional aspects of presidential power would be unfair to the nuanced understanding contained within this book. Corwin explores a variety of the aspects of presidential power, illustrating both their nature and their use by surveying historical precedents and Supreme Court cases. As a scholarly apparatus, Corwin’s book is irreplaceable (I say that as someone who has regrettably just lost his tattered copy of this out-of-print book). Where Neustadt brings an insider’s perspective to the workings of the presidency, Corwin, who is not just a scholar but one of our greatest and most thoughtful constitutional scholars, offers us a broad and perspicacious view of the presidency.

Finally, Stephen Skowronek’s The Politics Presidents Make (Harvard, 1997) offers one of the most fascinating, though somewhat inaccessible, accounts of the sources for presidential authority over the course of American history. Developing a theory of what he calls “political time,” Skowronek is able to account for both the success of “reconstructive” presidents like Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, and FDR and the failure of “disjunctive” presidents such as John Quincy Adams, James Buchanan, and Herbert Hoover. His guiding question is as ambitious as the scope of the book. Examining the history of the presidency from Jefferson to Clinton, Skowronek aims to explain why some presidents have the political authority to exercise the full range of their powers while others do not. In aiming to answer this question, Skowronek ends up providing us with more: he gives us a thoughtful, though much too reductionist, political history of the United States.

Skowronek’s book appropriately finishes this list because it best captures the difficulties of writing about the presidency as an institution as opposed to writing about individual presidents. Skowronek aims to create a theory capable of explaining when and why presidents are successful in upsetting an established political order and successfully creating a new one. Skowronek aims to create a theory that explains the immense individual variation during the history of the presidency. This theory is oddly enough predicated on the fact that the presidency attracts those who want to do more than just to hold office; they want the fame that can only come from, in the words of Alexander Hamilton, planning and undertaking “extensive and arduous enterprises for the public benefit.” Skowronek’s theory tends to reduce presidential success to their respective place in “political time.” In other words, he downplays the importance of individual prudence. Although this makes some sense in the context of more typical political ambition, i.e. Mayhew’s book, The Electoral Connection (Yale, 2004), on the ambition of members of Congress is sensible in its reductionism, it is much more problematic in an office that attracts the highest types who possess the greatest stage on which to exercise and display their political prudence. To a far greater degree than any other institution in American government, presidential success or grandeur depend on any given president’s individual ability to navigate the political world in which he finds himself.

Benjamin Kleinerman is an Assistant Professor at James Madison College at Michigan State University and the author of a newly acclaimed study entitled The Discretionary President: The Promise and Peril of Executive Power (Kansas, 2009). If you are interested in purchasing the books listed here, a portion of all proceeds of sales made through the JMC Book Store at www.jackmillercenter.org support the educational efforts of the Jack Miller Center.

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Vision into Action

The success of the Jack Miller Center’s mission to enrich civic education for college students depends on the support of visionary leaders who share our belief that the foundation of a thriving democracy is a citizenry educated in the ideas and principles of the American founding. If you are one of these leaders and would like to support the Jack Miller Center, please contact Mike Ratliff, president, at 484-436-2065 or mratliff@gojmc.org.

For copies of the JMC’s 2008-2009 biennial report, Working Together to Strengthen Civic Education; five year development plan, The Way Ahead; Chicago Initiative brochure; and the Jack Miller Center video, please contact Nathan Fortner at 484-436-4423, or nfortner@gojmc.org.

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Tags: Benjamin Kleinerman, Economic freedom, Jack Miller Center, Newsletter, Quarterly Report, Richard Cline, Summer 2010
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By Leonard J. Sadosky

By Andrea Radasanu

By Glenn A. Moots

Contents

Message from the Chairman

Preserving Liberty, by Mr. Jack Miller

Chicago Civic Education Roundtable

Michael Barone to be Featured Speaker at JMC Summer Institute

Conference on Jewish Law and America’s Founding Principles at DePaul College of Law

Interview with Prof. James Ceaser, University of Virginia

Economic Freedom

Guest Essay, by Mr. Richard Cline

Jack Miller Center Begins Audio CD, Podcast Series

Understanding the Presidency

A Pathway Essay by Benjamin Kleinerman

Vision into Action