The Jack Miller Center will convene our second  Summer Institute, July 26 – August 7, in Chicago, Il. Our first Chicago Summer Institute will bring together some of the nation’s leading junior scholars. The program includes faculty mentors from the fields of Political Science, History, and Economics, as well as workshops focusing on academic career development. For more information or participant nominations, contact Emily Koons.

2010 Theme

Chicago

Liberty and Enterprise: The American Founding and the Birth of the Modern Commercial Republic

The American Constitution stands as one of the great achievements of modern philosophical and political thought.  There had been prior forms of free government in the West, from the Roman Republic, to the short-lived democratic city states of ancient Greece, to the constitutional monarchy of Great Britain.  The Framers were keen students of the strengths and weaknesses and triumphs and failures of earlier attempts to establish and perpetuate a free system of government.  Yet even as Founders readily acknowledged their indebtedness to the great thinkers and statesmen of the Western tradition, they also believed that they were creating something unprecedented, a “new order for the ages” – a new regime that was both a reflection of and a departure from its historical antecedents.  Nowhere was this departure more evident than in the Founders embrace of commerce and the free market.

For much of European history, commerce was viewed as a servile activity, something that occupied the lower classeAs, or “middling sorts”, but which was beneath the dignity of an aristocratic ruling class.  In establishing a new constitutional and commercial order, the Founders had to contend not only with past critics who doubted the practicality and wisdom of extending political freedom to ordinary citizens, but also with a substantial body of thinking which held that commercial activity and the pursuit of material gain undermined a people’s commitment to the public good.   Indeed, one of the unique features of the American Founding was not only that its leading figures defended both free government and the free market, but that they also believed that liberty and commerce, far from being incompatible, were mutually reinforcing features of life in a flourishing free society.

To be sure, the Founders themselves often disagreed among themselves on any number of issues regarding the constitution and economic affairs.  At this year’s summer institute we will engage the debate the Founders themselves engaged in.  What are the necessary elements of both free political institutions and a free market, and are they in fact mutually reinforcing or at times in tension with one another?  Does the pursuit of material gain seamlessly promote the public good, or is it at times in tension with the public good?  And what institutions and institutional restraints did the Founders envision would be necessary to manage such tensions and promote political stability, and economic prosperity, while protecting individual liberty?  Does a system of self-government and free enterprise depend on certain moral preconditions such as honesty, trustworthiness, a respect for the rule of law and a sense of fair play, and what is the origin of such virtues?  And has the great expansion of the state in the 19^th and 20^th centuries preserved individual liberty and promoted prosperity, or does it represent an unnecessary or even dangerous departure from the original vision of the Founders?

Program Goals

The Jack Miller Center seeks to advance the teaching of America’s founding principles and the broader traditions of Western Civilization on College Campuses around the country.  The Summer Institutes are an integral part of our overall mission.  Each summer institute brings together twenty-five faculty members and advanced graduate students from around the country for seminars, workshops and lectures led by many of our country’s leading scholars, educators and public intellectuals. Our goal at the summer institutes is to assist in the cultivation, support and professional advancement of the next generation of college and university professors.

Morning Seminars

Our seminars offer the most promising young scholars in the humanities and social sciences the opportunity to reflect upon and discuss the enduring ideas, issues and questions from the American past and the traditions of Western Civilization, as a means of deepening and enriching their knowledge of our history and institutions.  Led by our summer institute teaching faculty, the morning seminars allow for a robust and thoughtful discussion of the central ideas, thinkers, and texts from our history.  Each member of our summer institute teaching faculty will offer a combination of primary and secondary source readings, or original research, that explore different aspects of this year’s theme.  Participants will have the opportunity to engage the presenter and each other in a discussion of the day’s topic in an atmosphere of civility and intellectual freedom.  Morning seminars are designed not only to give the participants an opportunity to deepen their thinking concerning the central ideas of the American past, but also to develop new ideas for original research and fresh approaches to the questions that have long animated discussions of American society.  In addition, the seminars offer participants the chance to observe the teaching methods of some of the most respected scholars in higher education.

Afternoon Workshops

Our afternoon workshops are designed to assist faculty members with their professional advancement, with a particular focus on teaching, publishing, and securing tenure.  Members of our institute teaching faculty lead workshops focusing on the development of intellectually engaging courses dealing with the key ideas, themes, and events from the American past, in addition to leading workshops on effective teaching methods.  Other workshops, led by the directors of academic presses, focus on building successful book proposals and successfully navigating the editorial approval process.

Lectures

In addition to the seminars and workshops, each summer institute will feature a number of luncheon and dinner lecturers, delivered by leading academics, educators, political commentators and prominent public officials.

Each summer institute also offers our participants ample opportunities for informal discussion with our institute faculty and with one another, and time for reading, reflection and study.

Ongoing Support

In addition to the honorarium for attending the summer institute, Miller Summer Institute Fellows may be eligible to receive funds to conduct campus programming to further education in American Founding Principles.  New Miller Center Fellows can become eligible for our subsequent appointments as Annual Miller Center Fellows.  Miller Center Staff and its Academic Council are committed to assisting all Miller Fellows, whenever possible, with publishing, securing grants from public and private sources, recruitment of participants for on-campus programming, securing employment, and facilitating contacts and developing relationships with other faculty members and past Miller Fellows.

UoC

JMC Summer Institute will attend a publishing workshop conducted by the Editorial Director of  University of Chicago Press. Topics included aspects of a successful proposal, internal review procedures, and clear academic style.

• An alumnus of the University of Chicago, John Tryneski is Editorial Director for the Social Sciences and Paperback Publishing at the University of Chicago Press, one of the premier American university presses.
• John oversees five acquisitions editors who contribute to the approximately 300 books published by Chicago each year.
• He joined the Press in 1975 and has personally sponsored over 500 books for publication.
• He continues to acquire new books in politics, political thought and theory, and in the interdisciplinary field of law and society.

Faculty Bio:

Thomas Pangle

• Holds the Joe R. Long Chair in Democratic Studies at the University of Texas at Austin
• Earned a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and completed a dissertation that was published in revised form by the University of Chicago Press as “Montesquieu’s Philosophy of Liberalism: A Commentary on the SPIRIT OF THE LAWS”
• Held the University Professorship in the Dept. of Political Science at the University of Toronto and a visiting professorship at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris
• Has authored nine books and numerous journal articles, and edited four volumes on topics in political philosophy; his most recent text, The Theological Basis of Liberal Modernity in Montesquieu’s “Spirit of the Laws”, was published in 2010. Other works include a study of political theory’s dialogue with the Bible and an introduction to the teaching of Leo Strauss

• Lisa Walenceus

From University of Notre Dame: Faculty News, General News, and Research

Michael Zuckert, Nancy Reeves Dreux Professor of Political Science and former chair of Notre Dame’s Department of Political Science, will receive the Association for the Study of Free Institutions (ASFI) Award for Distinguished Scholarship on the Nature of a Free Society at the association’s annual conference in May 2010 at Princeton University.

According to Carson Holloway, executive director of ASFI, “Michael Zuckert—with his outstanding work on the political thought of John Locke, on the American founding, and on the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment, among many other topics—is a worthy recipient of this award.”

ASFI inaugurated the annual honor not just to recognize a single work of scholarship but to recognize a scholar whose entire body of work is characterized by intellectual excellence and attention to the foundations of a free society, its character, or the challenges that it faces.

“Michael Zuckert is one of America’s most eminent scholars of American political thought and constitutional studies,” Michael Desch, current department chair, notes. “In addition, he has been a real leader here at Notre Dame in building one of the nation’s preeminent programs in that area, at the undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctoral levels. He richly deserves this award both in recognition of his own scholarship on free institutions and also for what he has contributed to building a community of younger citizens and scholars who’ll follow in his footsteps.”

In addition to accepting the award, Zuckert will deliver the AFSI conference’s keynote address, titled “Natural Law, Natural Rights, and the American Republic.”

“Of course, I consider it a great honor to be given the AFSI award,” Zuckert says. “I have devoted my scholarly life to trying to understand better the nature of human freedom and a free society, and it pleases me very much that my work has struck some as contributing to that task in a positive way.”

Co-sponsored by the University of Nebraska at Omaha, the Bouton Law Lecture Fund, and Princeton’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, the 2010 AFSI conference will feature scholars from the social sciences and humanities speaking on the influence of natural law thinking on the American founders, the role of natural law and natural rights in post-founding American history and politics, the place of natural law in American jurisprudence, and the compatibility of the doctrine of natural rights with prudence and community.

Zuckert’s scholarship focuses on political philosophy, American constitutional law and theory, and American political thought. Author of Natural Rights and the New Republicanism, The Natural Rights Republic, and Launching Liberalism: On Lockean Political Philosophy, he most recently co-edited The Anti-Federalist Writings of the Melancton Smith Circle with Derek Webb in 2009. He co-authored and co-produced the public radio series Mr. Adams and Mr. Jefferson: A Nine Part Drama for the Radio and was senior scholar for Liberty!, a six-hour public television series on the American Revolution. He also was lead scholar for two other PBS series, one on Benjamin Franklin and another on Alexander Hamilton.

The theme for this year’s two Jack Miller Center Faculty Development Summer 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. Not only did the leading figures of the American Founding defend individual liberty and the free market, but they also believed that liberty and commerce were mutually reinforcing features of life in a flourishing free society.

UVA Sunrise

The two-week institutes are the entry point for young professors and graduate students to participate in the Jack Miller Center’s network of more than 350 scholars committed to a rigorous, intellectually diverse and innovative approach to strengthening undergraduate education in America’s founding principles and history and Western civilization.

Led by some of the nation’s leading scholars in history, political thought 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.

“Participants in our summer institutes typically come from the humanities and social sciences,” said Dr. Michael Andrews, vice president for academic programs at the Jack Miller Center. “The theme for this year has been specifically crafted to appeal to a broader range of scholars working in political theory, American history, constitutional law, and economics, allowing us to increase the interdisciplinary reach of our program.”

2010 Theme

Thousands of individuals across the United States have already received the JMC Quarterly Report.  If you would like to receive the electronic or print editions version of the newsletter, please send an email to Nathan Fortner at nfortner@gojmc.org.

The Center for Jewish Law and Judaic Studies (JLJS) at DePaul University College of Law (Chicago) will host 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,  Founding a Nation /Constituting a People, is supported by the Jack Miller Center for Teaching America’s Founding Principles and History thanks to a $75,000 gift from a leading Chicago philanthropic foundation that wishes to remain anonymous.

The conference has attracted scholars from leading universities in the United States and Israel who will present papers and participate in several panel discussions on:

• Fundamentals of Governance;
• Fundamentals of Economic Rights and Arrangements;
• Fundamentals of Individual Rights, Liberties and Responsibilities.

“This is the first major law school conference designed to explore some of the primary fundamentals of American institutions with respect to prominent values found in the Jewish heritage,” said Professor Steven Resnicoff, co-director of the JLJS. “The day-long symposium will bring 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 extremely proud to be the vanguard for this scholarship and is grateful to the Jack Miller Center for support of this endeavor.”

At 4:00 p.m. the conference will conclude with a reception at the Standard Club in Chicago that is open to the public (to register please visit: www.law.depaul.edu/jljs).  A summary of the panel discussions by Professor Resnicoff will be followed by the keynote lecture, Nation Building, Ancient and Modern: The Biblical Model for the American Experience, by Dr. Dov Zakheim, a prominent Jewish scholar and former United States Undersecretary of Defense.

Papers to be presented and discussed at the conference include (links to Word 2007 .docx files):

• “The American Founders and the Fundamentals of Governance” by Michael Zuckert
• “Creating a New State” by Dov Zakheim
• “The Coase Theorem and Jewish Law” by Aaron Levine
• “Rights and American Constitutional Identity” by Gary Jeffrey Jacobsohn
• “‘Culture Matters’: Deuteronomy, Culture and Collective Governance” by Joshua Berman

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Professor Carl J. Richard, Professor of History at the University of Louisiana (Lafayette), will be speaking at Northwood University’s Griswold Lecture Hall at 5:30 pm on Tuesday, April 6. He will address how the ideas of the Greeks and Romans inspired America’s Founding Fathers. Time for questions and answers will follow. Professor Richard’s talk is sponsored by Northwood’s Forum for Citizenship and Enterprise. Faculty, students, staff, and members of the local community are encouraged to attend.

Richard is author of many books on America’s relationship with the ancient world including The Golden Age of the Classics in America: Greece, Rome, and the Antebellum United States (Harvard University Press, 2009); Greeks and Romans Bearing Gifts: How the Ancients Inspired the Founding Fathers (Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2008); Twelve Greeks and Romans Who Changed the World (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003); and The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome, and the American Enlightenment (Harvard, 1994). He has also been published in Journal of the Early Republic and The Historian.

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Protecting liberty is the perpetual task of an engaged citizenry.

“Students need to think about the meaning of liberty so they can appreciate the sacrifices that have been made in the past and those that will be needed to protect that liberty in perpetuity,” says Professor Elizabeth Busch, who along with her husband, Professor Nathan Busch, are the founders and directors of the Center for American Studies at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Va.

“The study of America’s foundations inspires the healthy intellectual exchange of ideas

that, as Tocqueville observed, is necessary for the protection of individual liberty,” says Busch. “The defense of America—what it is and what it should be—depends upon the ability of citizens to form a coherent vision and understanding of America. Such a vision can only be achieved after one has thought critically about America’s experiment in democracy, self-governance, and individual liberties.”

The Center for American Studies at Christopher Newport University is one of the 34

Elizabeth Kaufer-Busch

Partner Programs supported by the Jack Miller Center across the United States. Many of the programs were launched with help from the Jack Miller Center. The Miller Center provides seed money for the establishment of these academic centers. Once established, JMC faculty partners take the initiative to raise additional funds to grow their program, with the Miller Center providing ongoing support for development of academic programs.

“These academic centers have institutionalized the study of America’s founding and have often become major players in the development of the core curricula, academic programs and in the hiring of university faculty. The Jack Miller Center’s annual center-building conferences provide invaluable insight into what it takes to get an academic center up and running and how to identify fundraising opportunities,” explains Professor Elizabeth Busch.

After garnering seed money from the Miller Center, Elizabeth and Nathan Busch applied for and received a $500,000 “We the People” Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. “The drafting of our successful proposal was inspired by the lessons learned during the Miller Center Summer Institute and the center-building conferences,” Elizabeth Busch says.

Professor Busch has recently published an edited volume exploring contemporary American life entitled Democracy Reconsidered as well as an article on the recent history of Feminism and popular culture: Ally McBeal to Desperate Housewives: a brief history of the postfeminist heroine.(Report)