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/ 0 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.

Hume

David Hume (b. 1711) died the year Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence.  While he may have rolled over in his grave had he seen the theorizing of the American Founders, he was more than a little sympathetic with the goals of American political practice.

On the one hand, in his essays “Of Civil Liberty,”  “Of the Original Contract,” “Of Passive Obedience,” and “Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences,” Hume opposed the rise of a rights-based, social contract thinking characteristic of Locke and the Declaration.  Locke’s Second Treatise, Hume writes, was a book “most despicable, both for style and matter.”  Hume’s worry was that “parties from principle, especially abstract speculative principle” would give rise to a dangerous factionalism. Because he criticized such speculative principles and the natural rights foundation of the American republic, the most revolutionary and Whiggish Americans branded Hume a Tory.  Writing of Hume’s magisterial History of England, Jefferson thought Hume had “undermined the free principles of the English Constitution”; Jefferson considered Hume to be a “traitor to his fellow man.”

On the other hand, in his essays such as “Of Commerce” and “Of Refinement in the Arts,” Hume looked forward to the ascension of a more humane, stable politics, and he thought that the advancement of the modern commercial enterprise would help bring such a politics about.  He discerned the importance of such political structures as the separation of powers, the checks and balances, and the extended commercial republic as a means of mitigating the effects of faction and promoting political moderation.  As Americans focused less on the origin of political power and the establishment of popular government and more on the proper exercise of power and the prevention of democratic factionalism, they found Hume an invaluable guide. Hume writes, “there is compass and room enough” in large polities “to refine democracy through representation.”  A society “dispersed in small bodies” is “more susceptible both of reason and order; the force of popular currents and tides is, in a great measure, broken; and the public interest may be pursued with some method and constancy.”  These links between Hume and the American Founders are pursued most persistently in the pioneering work of Douglas Adair, whose Fame and Founding remains the locus classicus of Hume’s influence.

Hume appears hostile to the Declaration, yet a friend of the Constitution.  The question of Hume scholarship concerns how these political aspects of Hume’s thought fit in with his philosophic reflections.  To this day, many have argued that a “philosophical melancholy” led Hume to quite philosophical studies for the world of political essays and history.  In Thomas Reid’s Inquiry into the Human Mind (1764), Hume emerges as a skeptic who destroyed the Enlighenment faith in our ability to apprehend the external world and our ability to guide political practice through reason.  Reid sought to replace Hume’s radical skepticism with a philosophy of common sense.

While Reid’s views were echoed through the years in philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, and T.H Green, during the Twentieth Century scholars have emphasized how Hume himself aligns with a “philosophy of common life” through what Hume himself calls a mitigated skepticism, and this eventually led to the view that Hume’s skepticism prepares the way for his embrace of political moderation.  The “common sense” Hume emerged in a two-step process.  First, Norman Kemp Smith’s Philosophy of David Hume (1941), still the classic study of David Hume, initiated this re-evaluation of Hume’s thought.  Kemp Smith argued that Hume’s skepticism was in the service of what he called naturalism—reason must be subordinated to feelings and instincts if we are to explain the way human beings perceive the world.  Kemp Smith did not detect a link between Hume’s philosophy and his politics.

Second and most decisively, scholars such as Donald Livingston (Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life (1984) and Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium: Hume’s Pathology of Philosophy (1998)), Nicholas Capaldi (Hume’s Place in Moral Philosophy (1989)) and John W. Danford (David Hume and the Problem of Reason (1990)), painted a complete picture of Hume, uniting his philosophic works with his political disposition.  The position of these books, in one way or another, is that Hume’s skepticism served as a preparatory ground for philosophical and political moderation.  He used his skepticism to poke holes in doctrines such as the distinction between primary and secondary qualities or social contract theory in order to prepare people to understand that doctrines and principles do not best explain human life.  Moreover, against Kemp Smith and his followers, this wave of Hume’s scholars show that reason can help to correct the mistakes of instinct and feeling.  What emerges is a Hume whose skepticism is mitigated by feelings and instincts and whose naturalism is mitigated by reason.  Given our complex set of equipment, we would do well not to expect perfection or certainty in politics or philosophy and this explains why Hume defended the institutions of political moderation in the modern world.

..

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Baton Rouge – James Ceaser of the University of Virginia will deliver a public lecture on Tuesday, March 30, at three o’clock p.m., at Hill Memorial Library, Louisiana State University. His topic is “Demagoguery in Democratic Politics: The Possibilities and Limits of Persuasion.”

James W. Ceaser is Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia, where he has taught since 1976. He has written several books on American politics and political thought, including Presidential Selection (Princeton, 1979), Liberal Democracy and Political Science (John Hopkins, 1990), Reconstructing America: The Symbol of America in Modern Thought (Yale, 1997), and Nature and History in American Political Development (Harvard, 2006). In addition, he has co-authored books on the past five presidential elections. He has published numerous articles in books and journals on political science and public policy.

Professor Ceaser has held visiting professorships at the University of Florence, the University of Basel, Oxford University, the University of Bordeaux, and the University of Rennes. Professor Ceaser is a frequent contributor to the popular press, and he often comments on American Politics for the Voice of America.

Professor Ceaser’s lecture is co-sponsored by the Political Science Department and the Program in the Classical Tradition in Learning and Leadership. While at LSU, Professor Ceaser will also lecture in Political Science 4080, American Political Thought, and he will speak informally with students and faculty about his most recent book. Funding for Professor Ceaser’s lecture and visit is provided by a grant from the Apgar Foundation.

Contact:

James R. Stoner, Jr., Professor and Chair

LSU Department of Political Science

(225) 578-2538

poston@lsu.edu