Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, Preface

Professor Andrew Norris

Department of Political Science

University of California, at Santa Barbara

“Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and

The Myth of Lost Origins”

March 29^th, Monday, 4:00 P.M.

Roosevelt University

Sullivan Room (2^nd floor)

430 S. Michigan Avenue

Chicago

For further information contact Professor Stuart D. Warner at 312.218.5955

.
Transcript

Intro:                 The Jack Miller Center for Teaching America’s Founding Principles and History presents Dr. Gordon Wood, one of our nation’s preeminent scholars on the American Revolution.  Dr. Wood discusses America’s founding fathers with Dr. Michael Andrews.

Dr. Andrews:     I’m here with Gordon Wood, one of our country’s leading scholars on the American Revolution and founding eras.  Gordon is the Alva O. Way Professor Emeritus at Brown University.  He is also the author of numerous seminal works on early American history, including The Creation of the American Republic which won the Bancroft Prize in 1970 and Radicalism of the American Revolution which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993.  Welcome Gordon.

Dr. Wood:         Thank you.

Dr. Andrews:     I’d like to ask you a few questions about early American History.  The American Revolution has long been viewed as one of the signal events in the development of the modern west, the Declaration of Independence, after all, seems to closely reflect the writings of the political philosopher, John Locke, a thinker who is regarded by many as one of the main figures in the development of modern liberalism.  In the past, however, you’ve written the founders to the contrary, were not modern men so much, but representatives of classical republicanism and I’m wondering if you could elaborate on that.

Dr. Wood:         Well, I think the historical profession had emphasized the Lockean liberalism, the individual rights, the individualism so to speak of separate Americans, … and the classic notion of the public good, the Commonwealth had been neglected.  So, I wanted to redress the balance.  The founders, I think, expected the leaders to be more like themselves, more or less heroic individuals with the classical kind of conception of leadership.  You’re not going to be in government to make money out of it.  You’re not trying to exploit office for the sake of your own careers.  You’re supposed to be devoted to the public.  And, by the early 19^th century the politicians, in that term they’re not statesmen, they are politicians running for office and doing things that the founders would’ve found objectionable.  Log rolling, horse trading, all of the things that we consider to be the staples of American politics were not something that the founders expected.  They didn’t want that kind of politics.  They expected people not to run but to stand for office.  They did not anticipate electoral politics as it emerged in the 19^th century or that we have today.

Dr. Andrews:     This transition from a more Republican to a more liberal culture is also closely paralleled by the transition from a more aristocratic to a more democratic culture.

Dr. Wood:         Yes, that’s right because the classical republican notion depended on leaders who was disinterested, who were virtuous, who were capable of sacrificing the private interest.  And, as society became more democratic, that aristocratic notion fell away and was unable to sustain itself.

Dr. Andrews:     I’m wondering if you could discuss further the transition from an aristocratic to a more democratic society by talking about Benjamin Franklin.  Was not Franklin one of the first great examples of the modern notion of the self-made man?

Dr. Wood:         The conception of the self-made man, with Franklin at the center of it is really an invention of the 19^th century.  Businessmen in the 1820s and 30s needed a hero to justify their rise and they could not find that hero in Jefferson or Washington, or after all, aristocratic slave holders.  But, they could find it in the printer, Franklin.  And, they saw in Franklin, the printer who had made it, the kind of person that could justify their rise and they made… they turned him into the self-made man. The exemplar of that kind of rise.

Dr. Andrews:     But, wasn’t Franklin’s first great act of self-making an attempt to try to transform himself into a British aristocrat?

Dr. Wood:         Well, he wants to become a gentleman.  He starts out as a printer.  He’s a very wealthy man.  But, as long as he’s still a printer… even if he’s running a shop with 20 employees, he is looked down upon by the gentry because he has to work for a living.  And, labor was held in contempt.  It had been held in contempt since the beginning of classical times.  From antiquity on.  So, Franklin has to retire.  He does at the age of 42, 1748, he retires from his business in a very elaborate kind of ceremony.  He has a coming out portrait painted.  He becomes a gentleman and he never works again a day in his life.  Now, he participated in science.  He participated in public life.  But, he’s not working as a businessman.  His money is coming to him through all kinds of investments.  He was very self consciously becoming a gentleman and that was a big distinction that we’ve almost totally lost.

Dr. Andrews:     Stories often speak of the significance of the moment when Washington turned his sword over to Congress.  Why was that moment so significant?  And, why did King George III of Britain declare that if Washington turned his sword over to Congress “he would be the greatest man in the world”?

Dr. Wood:         Who in history, what successful general had ever done such a thing?  Except maybe, you could go back to Cincinnatus, which is in the mists of time, an ancient mythical hero.  But, otherwise, we go from Caesar to Cromwell to Marlboro to William of Orange, all of those successful military leaders expected political rewards commensurate with their military victories.  And, here’s Washington saying – no.  I’m leaving.  I’m going back to Mt. Vernon to my farm.  And, it just electrified the world.  They couldn’t believe it.  How could you give up power.  How does anyone give up power at the height of his success?  Nobody else had done that in recent history.  Certainly not since Cromwell.  So, that’s what George III is saying.  He just can’t believe that a person would give up power so easily as Washington did.

Dr. Andrews:     Would it be possible for a figure like George Washington to reappear in the American political scene?

Dr. Wood:         There’s no possibility of us having a Washington.  We live in a very different world.  Much more democratic world than Washington’s world.  It’s very unlikely that anyone like him would appear again.

Dr. Andrews:     You’ve written recently on the state of the historical profession.  Why is that so many popular works of history so often seem to be written by non-academics, like David McCullough?

Dr. Wood:         I think this is especially true of the early American period of the revolution which has been abdicated by professional historians that are much more interested in writing monographs for one another to advance the discipline which is a legitimate concern.  To move into new areas, to work on women when they’ve been neglected, to work on slavery if it hasn’t been, and that’s the kind of monograph that’s being written, but I do think that historians have an obligation at the same time as they’re advancing the discipline to reach out to the general public.  To tell them the story of the country’s history.  Of what’s happened.  How we got to be the way we are.  We’re not physics.  We’re not the kind where you can write your papers for each other.  We need to reach out to the general public and I think that most historians simply aren’t doing that.  They are caught up in issues that concern them and are not necessarily the issues that concern the general public.  As a consequence, that whole area of political, biographical, constitutional history has been filled by non PhD’s and it’s not just McCullough, there’s a whole host of people who do not have PhD’s who have invaded, so to speak, and made a lot of money writing good popular history.

Dr. Andrews:     Thank you so much Gordon.

Dr. Wood:         Thank you.

[Music Out]

After the most partisan election in the history of the United States of America, the new President made a direct appeal to the unique aspects of the American mind:

“During the contest of opinion through which we have passed the animation of discussions and of exertions has sometimes worn an aspect which might impose on strangers unused to think freely and to speak and to write what they think; but this being now decided by the voice of the nation, announced according to the rules of the Constitution, all will, of course, arrange themselves under the will of the law, and unite in common efforts for the common good.” (Thomas Jefferson, 1801)

The Jack Miller Center asked Pulitzer-Prize winning historian, Gordon S. Wood, to give us an historical perspective on the most divisive campaign in American history:

*

Thomas Jefferson

In 1801 Thomas Jefferson had just been elected president after a hard-fought and bitter campaign between the Federalists and the Jeffersonian Republicans. It was in fact one of the most tumultuous and vicious electoral campaigns in American history. The Federalist press had tagged Jefferson with every epithet they could think of–a coward, a radical, an atheist, and, most alarming, the leader of a gang of Jacobins who were trying to take over the American government and make it a satellite of revolutionary France. For their part the Republicans gave as good as they got, accusing the Federalists of trying to foist an English-style monarchy on America. Never in American history has the press been as abusive and as vituperative as it was in the electoral campaign of 1800.

All this newspaper scurrility took place in the wake of the Sedition Act of 1798, by which the Federalist-controlled Congress had attempted to curb the Republican press’s vitriolic attacks on President John Adams and other Federalist leaders. The Federalists had become convinced that elective republican governments could not allow the press to abuse their political leaders and undermine their capacity to rule. How could John Adams exercise his authority as president if he were victimized, as he put it, by “the most envious malignity, the most base, vulgar, sordid, fish-woman scurrility, and the most palpable lies” that had ever been leveled against any public official?

Hence with the Sedition Act of 1798 the Federalists in Congress made it a federal crime to “write, print, utter or publish. . . any false, scandalous, and malicious writing”  that brought the president or members of Congress “into contempt or disrepute, or to excite against them, or either or any of them, the hatred of the good people of the United States.”

Americans believed in freedom of the press and had written that freedom into their Bill of Rights. But they believed in it as Englishmen did, who meant by it, in contrast to the French, no prior restraint or censorship of what was published. Under English law, people were nevertheless held responsible for what they published.  If a person’s publications were slanderous and calumnious enough to bring public officials into disrespect, then under the common law the publisher could be prosecuted for seditious libel. The truth of what was published was no defense; indeed, it even aggravated the offense. Furthermore, under the common law judges, not juries, had the responsibility to decide whether or not a publication was seditious.

Although the Sedition Act horrified the Republicans, it was actually a liberalization of the English common law of seditious libel that continued to run in the state courts. Under the new federal statute, which resembled the liberal argument John Peter Zenger’s lawyer had used in 1735, the truth of what was said or published could be admitted as a defense, and juries could decide whether or not a particular piece was libelous and seditious.

The Republicans were in no mood to accept the Federalists liberalization of the common law. In the debate over the sedition law that spilled into the early nineteenth century several Republican libertarian theorists, including George Hay of Virginia and Tunis Wortman of New York, rejected both the old common law restrictions on the liberty of the press and the new legal recognition of the distinction between truth and falsity of opinion that the Federalists had incorporated into the Sedition Act.  While the Federalists clung to the eighteenth century’s conception that “truths” were constant and universal and capable of being discovered by enlightened and reasonable men, the Republican libertarians argued that opinions about government and governors were many and diverse and their truth could not be determined simply by individual judges and juries, no matter how reasonable such men were.  Hence, they concluded that all political opinions–that is, words as distinct from overt acts–even those opinions that were “false, scandalous, and malicious,” ought to be allowed, as Jefferson put it in his First Inaugural Address, to “stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”

The Federalists were dumbfounded by these arguments. “How … could the rights of the people require a liberty to utter falsehood?” they asked.  “How could it be right to do wrong?”   It was not an easy question to answer, neither then nor later.  “Truth,” the Federalists said, “has but one side and listening to error and falsehood is indeed a strange way to discover truth.”  Any notion of multiple and varying truths would produce “universal uncertainty, universal misery,” and “set all morality afloat.”  People needed to know the “criterion by which we may determine with certainty, who are right, and who are wrong.”

Most Republicans felt they could not deny outright the possibility of truth and falsity in political beliefs, and thus they fell back on a tenuous distinction, developed by Jefferson in his First Inaugural Address, between principles and opinions.  Principles, it seemed, were hard and fixed, while opinions were soft and fluid; therefore, said Jefferson, “every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle.” Individual opinions did not seem to count as much as they had in the past and thus could be permitted the freest possible expression.

What ultimately made such distinctions and arguments comprehensible was the Republicans’ assumption that opinions about politics were no longer the monopoly of the educated and aristocratic few.  Not only were true and false and even malicious opinions equally to be tolerated, but everyone and anyone in the society should be equally able to express them.  Sincerity and honesty, the Republican polemicists argued, were far more important in the articulation of ultimate political truth than learning and fancy words that had often been used to deceive and dissimulate.  Truth was actually the creation of many voices and many minds, no one of which was more important than another and each of which made its own separate and equally significant contribution to the whole.  Solitary opinions of single individuals may now have counted for less, but in their statistical collectivity they now added up to something far more significant than had ever existed before, something that the New York Republican Tunis Wortman referred to as “the extremely complicated term Public Opinion.”

Because American society was not the kind of organic hierarchy with “an intellectual unity” that the Federalists had wanted, public opinion in America, argued Wortman, the most articulate of the new Republican libertarians, could no longer be the consequence of the intellectual leadership of a few learned gentlemen.  General public opinion was simply “an aggregation of individual sentiments,” the combined product of multitudes of minds thinking and reflecting independently, communicating their ideas in different ways, causing opinions to collide and blend with one another, to refine and correct each other, leading toward “the ultimate triumph of Truth.” Such a product, such a public opinion, could be trusted because it had so many sources, so many voices and minds, all interacting, that no privileged individual or group could manipulate or dominate the whole.

This vast, impersonal, and democratic idea of public opinion, said Federalist Theodore Sedgwick in disgust, “is of all things the most destructive of personal independence and of that weight of character which a great man ought to possess.”  But no matter, it was the people’s opinion, and it could be trusted because no one controlled it and everyone contributed to it.  Despite the Federalist warning that a government dependent exclusively on public opinion was a mere “democracy,” in which “opinion shifts with every current of caprice,” there was no turning back.  In no country in the world did public opinion become more awesome and powerful than it did in the increasingly democratic America of the early Republic.

*

This essay is drawn from the forthcoming Oxford History of the Early Republic, Empire of Liberty. Several of Professor Wood’s current books in print are available in our JMC Book Store.

By KATIE DAWSON

Ten panelists from three different continents spoke about one influential Frenchman.

Alexis de Tocqueville scholars from around the world gathered in the Indiana Memorial Union Walnut Room on Friday  to celebrate the publication of a bilingual, French and English, edition of “Democracy in America.”

“The best work on American democracy was written by a Frenchman,” said Aurelian Craiutu, IU associate professor of political science and director of the Tocqueville program.

Started in 2009, Craiutu’s new program promotes the teachings and ideas of Tocqueville’s interpretation of American democracy. The program offers numerous courses and lectures devoted to Tocqueville’s studies and theories of America.

“This conference is one of the most important events the Tocqueville project will have this year,” Craiutu said.

Many of the panelists from the conference helped compile information for the new edition.

“I realized when I started looking at the Tocqueville papers that I could give him another opinion by showing information that was not shared before,” said Eduardo Nolla of Universidad San Pablo in Madrid, Spain, who helped gather information for the new edition.

The information that Nolla assembled in large part was collected from Yale University, where most of Tocqueville’s documents are located.

“In the book we made sure to include his travel notes, his letter that he wrote to his friends and family, the drafts of his book and his manuscripts,” Nolla said.

Tocqueville, a French political thinker, came to America in the early 1800s to study and document how and why democracy works. The result is his two-volume book “Democracy in America.”

Mark Yellin, an employee of the book’s publisher, the Liberty Fund, came to the conference not only because he has worked with many of the panelists but because he said he was impressed that IU was willing to put on a conference dealing with Tocqueville.

“It is so complex to put something like this together,” Yellin said. “It’s a beautiful volume that took 10 years to create.”

JMC Editor: The conference was co-sponsored by the Jack Miller Center.

MARK TWAIN ON THE PAGE AND

ON THE STAGE

March 11, 2010

3:15–5:15 Panel: Will Persons Attempting to Find Political Thought in the Fiction of Mark Twain Be Shot? (Bunche Hall, Room A170)

Gregg Camfield, University of California, Merced.  “Mark Twain on the Necessary Crime of Free Speech”

Harry Jaffa, Claremont McKenna College and Claremont Graduate School.  “Tom Sawyer: Hero of Middle America”

Barry Kraft, actor dramaturg, lecturer.  “‘The Killing of Strangers’—Mark Twain and the Agony of War”

Susan McWilliams, Pomona College. Discussant

5:30-6:30 Lecture: Huck Finn and the Lingering Specter of Aristocracy in America

Paul Cantor, Clifton Waller Barrett Professor, University of Virginia.

8:00-9:30 Dramatic Reading: Mark Twain & Friends: A River Journey (Law School Building, Room 1457).  Details are on the facing page.

UCLA Center for the Liberal Arts and Free Institutions

UCLA Law School

Interact Theatre Company

present

Mark Twain & Friends: A River Journey

An Entertainment from the Writings of Mark Twain

Edited, Structured for the Stage, and Additional Dialogue by:

Gregory White

Cast in order of appearance:

Mark Twain …………………………………………………………………………………….  James Greene

Young Sam Clemens …………………………………………………………..  David Drew Gallagher

Huckleberry Finn ……………………………………………………………….  Colin Thomas Jennings

Miss Watson …………………………………………………………………………………….  Eve Brenner

Mississippi Water Man …………………………………………………………….. Jeffrey Stubblefield

Chief Pilot Bixby ………………………………………………………………………………  Don Fischer

Pap Finn …………………………………………………………………………………………..  Dave Florek

Jim ……………………………………………………………………………………………….  Thomas Silcott

Undertaker …………………………………………………………………………………………  Bob Larkin

Jim Blaine …………………………………………………………………………………….  Gregory White

Blue Jay Woman ……………………………………………………………………………….  Eve Brenner

Scotty Briggs ……………………………………………………………………………………  Dave Florek

Minister ………………………………………………………………………………  Robert Briscoe Evans

King ………………………………………………………………………………………………….  Bob Larkin

Duke …………………………………………………………………………………….  Jeffrey Stubblefield

Invalid ………………………………………………………………………………..  Robert Briscoe Evans

Railway Express Man …………………………………………………………………….  Gregory White

Directed by Dave Florek

There will be one intermission

Interact Theatre Company

Founded in the early 1990s, the Interact Theatre Company has received over 78 awards and 150 nominations for outstanding and distinguished theater from organizations including the LA Drama Critics Circle, the Theater LA Ovation Awards, and the LA Weekly.

For information on upcoming events, including the free readings that occur many Monday nights in North Hollywood at the NoHo Arts Center, check Interact’s web site at www.interactla.org, or provide your name and e-mail address on the sign-up sheet to receive announcements.  You can also join Professor Lowenstein’s e-mail distribution list for occasional theater recommendations and Interact news.

The UCLA Law School

Series of Dramatic Readings

This series, co-sponsored by the UCLA Law School and the Interact Theatre Company, consists of readings of plays with themes related to justice, government, and public responsibility.  Ordinarily, one play will be read each semester.  The purposes of the readings are to stimulate discussion of the ethical and societal issues raised by these excellent plays, to help stimulate interdisciplinary consideration of law and the humanities, and to entertain.  Admission to the readings is free.  The faculty sponsor of the series is Professor Daniel Lowenstein.  Comments, suggestions, and requests to join his “theater recommendations” e-mail list should be submitted to him at <lowenstein@law.ucla.edu>.

Readings in the Series

Rosmersholm, by Henrik Ibsen ………………………………………………………………………………………………. Spring 1999

Antigone, by Sophocles ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………… Fall 1999

The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, by Herman Wouk ……………………………………………………………. Spring 2000

Nuts, by Tom Topor …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… Fall 2000

Antigone, by Jean Anouilh ……………………………………………………………………………………………………. Spring 2001

Twelve Angry Men, by Reginald Rose…………………………………………………………………………………………. Fall 2001

The Visit, by Friedrich Dürrenmatt …………………………………………………………………………………………  Spring 2002

Escape from Happiness, by George F. Walker ……………………………………………………………………………  Fall 2002

Proof, by David Auburn …………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. Fall 2003

Iphigenia in Aulis, by Euripides……………………………………………………………………………………………… Spring 2004

A Man for All Seasons, by Robert Bolt ………………………………………………………………………………………  Fall 2004

Death and the Maiden, Ariel Dorfman …………………………………………………………………………………..  Spring 2005

Fathers and Sons, Deborah Pearl ……………………………………………………………………………………………….  Fall 2005

A Doll’s House, Henrik Ibsen …………………………………………………………………………………………………  Spring 2006

Doubt, John Patrick Shanley ………………………………………………………………………………………………………  Fall 2006

The Winslow Boy, Terence Rattigan ………………………………………………………………………………………  Spring 2007

Oleanna, David Mamet ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………… Fall 2007

State of the Union, Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse ……………………………………………………….  Spring 2008

Taking Sides, Ronald Harwood …………………………………………………………………………………………………  Fall 2008

The Memorandum, Vaclav Havel …………………………………………………………………………………………..  Spring 2009

The Rivalry, Norman Corwin ……………………………………………………………………………………………………..  Fall 2009

Mark Twain & Friends: A River Journey, Gregory White ………………………………………………………  Spring 2010

]]> http://www.jackmillercenter.org/2010/03/twain-at-ucla/feed/ 1 http://www.jackmillercenter.org/2010/03/benjamin-franklin-and-the-pursuit-of-happiness/ http://www.jackmillercenter.org/2010/03/benjamin-franklin-and-the-pursuit-of-happiness/#comments Mon, 08 Mar 2010 12:19:02 +0000 rmajor http://www.jackmillercenter.org/?p=1374 Montesquieu Forum Lecture

“It is not a matter of indifference that the people be enlightened.”

Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, Preface

Professor Jerry Weinberger

Department of Political Science, Michigan State University

“Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Happiness”

March 23^rd, Tuesday, 4:30 P.M.

Roosevelt University

Sullivan Room (2^nd floor)

430 S. Michigan Avenue

Chicago

For further information contact Professor Stuart Warner at 312.218.5955

or

Professor Svetozar Minkov at 740.324.0234

“The Jack Miller Center does great work in getting young scholars involved in the era of the founding,” says Professor Wood, one of the nation’s preeminent historians and a frequent participant at the Miller Center Summer Institutes.

Wood, a Professor Emeritus of History at Brown University, earned his doctorate at Harvard University and taught at the College of William and Mary, Harvard, the University of Michigan and Cambridge University before joining the faculty at Brown in 1969. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his book, “The Radicalism of the American Revolution,” in 1993.

“The young people are so engaged and interested in this material; you just can’t help but be thrilled to be involved,” Wood says.

“The summer faculty development institutes are an integral part of our overall mission,” says Dr. Michael Andrews, Miller Center vice president of academic programs. “Each institute brings together 20 to 30 junior faculty members and advanced graduate students for workshops led by leading scholars, educators and intellectuals.”

A renowned scholar, Wood believes the summer institutes benefit everyone involved. “I am learning as much as the young scholars are learning,” Wood adds. “My thinking is affected by the exchanges that take place at the seminar.

“It’s important because these men who drafted the Constitution created the institutions and ideals by which we are governed,” Wood says. “They have created our identity. America is not a nation in th e usual sense of the term. We have no ethnic or tribal identity. Our nation is based on a set of beliefs and aspirations — equality, liberty, constitutionalism — that came out of the Revolution. We go back to the Revolution and the founding to find out who we are.

“That’s why we keep going back to the founders: to refresh and reaffirm our sense of identity. Our interest in the founding will continue as long as the United States exists.”

*

See our video interview with Gordon Wood on the founders here.

The above title is perhaps strange, because in some ways the prospects for American political thought seem so bright.  There are now post-doc’s at good schools for freshly minted scholars, and we now benefit from ongoing connections with a relatively new subfield in political science—American Political Development.  More broadly, and compared to other traditions in political thought, American political thought will always benefit from cultural home field advantage: my colleagues seem interested to hear about the original understanding of the veto power or judicial review, and people on the street seem eager to talk about the Founders.

Library

But two problems suggest that the larger future does not look so good. First, as we all know, there are still very few jobs.   In political science, I would guess that the average number of tenure-track job ads mentioning American political thought as a desired subfield has been between one and two, at least since 2002.   Second, and much more important, there are very few senior scholars who specialize in American political thought. In political science, I probably could count those tenured in PhD granting departments on one hand.  In history, the situation is probably worse.   In both fields, these senior scholars will retire and likely not be replaced.  Without jobs, the field will disappear.  If good tenure track jobs at liberal arts colleges suddenly appear, but senior scholars in PhD granting departments are not replaced, American political thought will be taught for a generation to undergraduates and then disappear.

This problem regarding the coming absence of senior scholars in PhD granting departments could be related to what might be a third problem: American political thought has been unable to define itself.  For many political theorists, American political thought is not true political theory.  American political thought is too concerned with practical politics, and its principal texts are not as difficult – not as rewarding– as those by real philosophers.  For most Americanists, American political thought belongs to weekends in Barnes and Noble but not in a quantitative social science.  To a true theorist, American political thought is “American politics rightly understood,” yet to a true Americanist it is “political theory we can live with.”

It is true that other subfields have faced the dilemma, and some have survived by using this definitional slipperiness as an advantage.  Even so, it is important for scholars of American political thought to think through its several possible approaches.  Here are four:

1.  American political thought is a series of case studies in democratic theory. This approach highlights the various “activist” strands in the American political tradition, often characterizing American political history as progress from injustice to justice.

2.  American political thought should be treated in the same way that we would consider Roman political thought or British political thought.  This approach would emphasize the central contribution of American political thought, that is, its development of toleration and pluralism.  That is, American political thought is best understood as the grand synthesis of Madison and Rawls.

3.  American political thought is important for its connection to constitutional law and should be used to enhance our understanding about current constitutional questions.  Under this approach, American political thought is to be studied for its precedential value.

4.  American political thought is best understood from the perspective of the contest between the ancients and the moderns. Under this framework, American political thought is an accessible way for students to consider larger questions such as the place of prudence, the relationship of the one and the many, or the necessity of virtue.

Each approach raises its own important – and very different– question about politics, and each offers its toehold to confused undergraduates, but each has a tendency to subjugate what it proposes to study to the larger question it seeks to answer.  As a result, each seems to cycle over the same questions instead of looking deeper into American political thought to see what new questions might arise or to check whether what it claims is true about a particular figure or text is actually true. To put it somewhat differently, because none truly attempts to study a figure as he understood himself, each risks undermining the scholarly future of American political thought.

The good news is that what each approach assumes as a given can in turn serve as a theoretical backdrop for an actual question.  For example:

1. If Jefferson believed in human progress, why did he say over and over again that the people would lose their capacity for republican government in the future?
2. Did Madison ever embrace the Bill of Rights as a positive good?
3. To what extent did Madison and Lincoln have different views about the original understanding of the power of Congress to regulate slavery in the territories?
4. What did Madison mean when he called the Convention of 1787 evidence of divine intervention?

The answers to these four questions would have consequences for the theoretical premise of each of the four approaches, and thus be of interest to political science.  But questions like these sometime require departing from the premise of the approach in order to figure out the political situation under which the figure in question spoke or wrote.  The problem, then, is this: if we depart from the theoretical premise, we in political science find ourselves being charged with doing history (mere history from the perspective of political scientists, and bad history from the perspective of historians). Yet if we refuse to ask new questions, and look the other way when confronted with historical complexity, we undermine the scholarly potential of our already hobbled subfield.

Jeremy Bailey teaches at the University of Houston and is the author of Thomas Jefferson and Executive Power.

The views expressed in this essay are not necessarily those of The Jack Miller Center for Teaching America’s Founding Principles and History.

A new report by Terence Lim Ph.D., “Measuring the Value of Corporate Philanthropy,” suggests ways for corporations to make meaningful measurements on their philanthropic investments:

“Corporate philanthropy is as vital as ever to business and society, but it faces steep pressures to demonstrate that it is also cost-effective and aligned with corporate needs. Indeed, many corporate giving professionals cite measurement as their primary measurement challenge. The industry critically needs to assess current practices and measurement trends, clarify the demands practitioners face for impact evidence, and identify the most promising steps forward. This research report aims to meet that need, by presenting the corporate philanthropy community with an analysis of current measurement studies, models, and evidence drawn from complimentary business disciplines as well as from the social sector.”

Private donors should have the same concerns. When making a charitable contribution, donors become investors in a project they believe in, and must be confident that their investment is producing measurable results.

A full versions of Dr. Lim’s report is available here.

The Jack Miller Center has always been committed to providing full transparency to all of our Donor Partners and fulfilling donor intentions.