Cultivating Virtuous Citizenship?: A Law and Liberty Symposium on American National Character
The Library of Law and Liberty’s symposium on American National Character addresses the current challenges to America’s political vitality, such as polarization and alarmism. As part of the American National Character & Civic Friendship Project, an initiative of the Ryan Foundation, several of JMC’s fellows and faculty partners wrote essays reflecting on ways to revive America’s civic character. View the essays and learn about the project participants below.
Defining Freedom Up: National Character Revived
By JMC fellow W.B. Allen
Masterpiece Cakeshop, Religious Liberty, and America’s Character
To Secure the Blessings of Liberty: Sharing Stories of American Civic Purposes
By JMC faculty partner Rogers Smith
Self-Government Cannot Live while Congress is Moribund
George Washington wrote in a 1785 letter to James Madison that “we are either a United people, or we are not. If the former, let us, in all matters of general concern act as a nation, which has national objects to promote, and a national character to support.” Washington and Madison recognized the need to shape our national character and cultivate civic friendship, by which they meant the formation of habits of “a people” dedicated to a common purpose and informed by a certain set of principles and practices. Those principles were the principles that Americans had fought and died for in the American Revolution, summarily expressed in the Declaration of Independence and captured in the phrase “self-government.
Each of the essays in this symposium addresses in some way the challenge of self-government and the obstacles it faces in our time. Are Americans today still animated, as Publius claimed “every votary of freedom” is ever animated, by “that honorable determination…to rest all our political experiments on the capacity of mankind for self-government”? Or has the experiment in self-government been abandoned, replaced by different principles and diverse purposes? Our authors all seem to say or imply that we – Americans of all stripes – need to take stock of our original mission as a self-governing people. Of course, they emphasize different needs, but they speak with one voice in favor of the American political mission itself.
It is our hope that these essays, and the future fruits of the American National Character & Civic Friendship Project, will inspire fellow scholars and citizens to address, theoretically and practically, the question of what is most needed in our country today, if we are to remain one people.
— Colleen Sheehan and Steven McGuire
Learn more about William Allen >>
Learn more about Rogers Smith >>
His writing has been featured in The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, National Review, the Hill, and Roll Call, National Affairs, and The New Rambler Review, as well as in scholarly journals including Studies in American Political Development. His current projects include examining the legitimacy challenge faced by America’s administrative state, working out the contours of a Congressional Regulation Office, and examining the possibility of partisan realignment in coming years.
Wallach received a B.A. from the College of Social Studies at Wesleyan University and a Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University.
Learn more about Philip Wallach >>
Learn more about Colleen Sheehan >>
Learn more about Steven McGuire >>
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