Chapter 1
1.“[F]rom him came, / As from the Pythian’s mystic cave of yore, / Those oracles which set the world in flame, / Nor ceased to burn till kingdoms were no more.” Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (H.C. Baird, 1854), 151, 153.
2.Robert Nisbet, The Present Age: Progress and Anarchy in Modern America (Indianapolis, Indiana: Liberty Fund, 1988), 54.
3.Jacob L. Talmon, Political Messianism: The Romantic Phase (New York: Frederick A. Praeger Publishing, 1960), 127.
4.Quoted in James Farr and David Lay Williams, eds., The General Will: The Evolution of a Concept (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), editors’ introduction, xvi.
5.Ernst Cassirer, The Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 2nd edition, ed. Peter Gay (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1989), 76.
6.Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques: Dialogues, trans. Judith Bush et al. (Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1990), 213.
7.Gerald Gaus explores four different interpretations of Rousseau’s general will, but they all share the idea that for Rousseau, “a properly constituted democracy could express the will or judgment of the people.” See Gerald Gaus, “Does Democracy Reveal the Voice of the People? Four Takes on Rousseau,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 75, no. 2 (1997), 141–162.
8.Judith Shklar, “General Will,” in The Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas, Vol. 2, ed. Philip Wiener (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973), 275.
9.Farr and Williams, The General Will, xv–xvi.
10.Ibid., xvi.
11.Aristotle, Politics, ed. Ernest Barker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), Book I-II, 1252a–1253b.
12.See Leviathan, Part II in Of Commonwealth, Ch. XVII, in which Hobbes states that human beings are naturally asocial and that they unite “all their wills by plurality of voices unto one will” to form a commonwealth. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. A. P. Martinich (Toronto: Broadview Publishing, 2005), 128.
13.Ibid.
14.Ibid., 129.
15.See John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing, 1980), 8.
16.Ibid., 45–46.
17.Ibid., 47.
18.For the continuity between Hobbes and Locke (and earlier, natural-law thinkers) and Rousseau, see Robert Derathé, Le Rationalisme de J.-J. Rousseau and Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la science politique de son temps (Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1950).
19.The introduction of money as a means of exchange generates wealth disparity. See Locke, Second Treatise of Government, 23.
20.Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract, in The Basic Political Writings, 2nd ed., trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing Company, 2011), 164.
21.Gay, “Introduction” to Cassirer, The Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 26.
22.Rousseau, On the Social Contract, 164.
23.Derathé, Le Rationalisme de J.-J. Rousseau, 169, 176, quoted in Gay, “Introduction” to Cassirer, The Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 26.
24.Rousseau, On the Social Contract, 167.
25.David Lay Williams, “The Substantive Elements of Rousseau’s General Will,” in Farr and Williams, The General Will, 219.
26.Quoted in ibid., 220.
27.Ibid., 220.
28.Rousseau, On the Social Contract, 173.
29.Ibid.
30.Quoted in Patrick Riley, “The General Will before Rousseau: The Contributions of Arnauld, Pascal, Malebranche, Bayle, and Bossuet,” in Farr and Williams, The General Will, 14.
31.Quoted in ibid., 15.
32.Ibid., 11.
33.Diderot, in the essay “Natural Rights,” writes that “the general will in each individual is a pure act of understanding that reasons in the silence of the passions about what man can demand of his fellow man and about what his fellow man can rightfully demand of him.” Moreover, the general will is “always good” and “never falls into error.” See Denis Diderot, “Natural Rights,” in The Encyclopedia of Diderot and d’Alembert: Collaborative Translation Project, trans. Stephen J. Gendzier (Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library, 2009), http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0001.313 (accessed February 8, 2019); originally published as “Droit naturel,” in Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, Vol. 5 (Paris, 1755), 115–116.
34.I have borrowed this phrase from Patrick Riley’s titular work, The General Will before Rousseau: The Transformation of the Divine into the Civic (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1986).
35.Ibid., 14.
36.Quoted in ibid., 16.
37.Alberto Postigliola, “De Malebranche à Rousseau: Les Apories de la Volonté Générale et la Revanche du ‘Raisonner Violent,’ ” in Riley, “The General Will before Rousseau,” 57.
38.Riley, “The General Will before Rousseau,” 57.
39.David Lay Williams, Rousseau’s Social Contract: An Introduction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 247–248.
40.Joshua Cohen, Rousseau: A Free Community of Equals (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 10.
41.Ibid., 179n12.
42.Rousseau, On the Social Contract, 173.
43.Ibid.
44.Quoted in Williams, Rousseau’s Social Contract, 246.
45.See Williams, “The Substantive Elements of Rousseau’s General Will,” 228–230.
46.Ibid., 227.
47.See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Political Economy, in The Basic Political Writings, 2nd ed., trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing Company, 2011), 127.
48.Ibid., 58.
49.Williams, “The Substantive Elements of Rousseau’s General Will,” 221.
50.Ibid., 222.
51.Rousseau, On the Social Contract, 167.
52.Ibid., 159.
53.Ibid., 167.
54.Rousseau, Discourse on Political Economy, 128.
55.Ibid., 132.
56.Rousseau, On the Social Contract, 182.
57.Ibid., 181.
58.Ibid.
59.Hobbes, Leviathan, 129.
60.See Plato, Republic, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing Co., 1992), 414b–415d.
61.Rousseau, On the Social Contract, 182.
62.Ibid., 183.
63.Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men, in The Basic Political Writings, 2nd ed., trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing Company, 2011), 32.
64.Rousseau, On the Social Contract, 183.
65.Rousseau, Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques, 23.
66.See Frederick Neuhouser, Rousseau’s Theodicy of Self-Love: Evil, Rationality, and the Drive for Recognition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 21–22.
67.Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality, 55.
68.Rousseau, On the Social Contract, 188.
69.F. C. Green, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: A Critical Study of His Life and Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955), 280–281.
70.Thomas Jefferson to Roger C. Weightman, June 24, 1826. Available at the Library of Congress digital archive: https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/declara/rcwltr.html.
71.Woodrow Wilson, Leaders of Men, ed. T. H. Vail Motter (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1952), 24.
72.Letter to Malesherbes in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Collected Writings of Rousseau, Vol. 5, trans. Christopher Kelley (Hanover, New Hampshire: Dartmouth College, 1995), 575.
73.Letter to Beaumont in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Collected Writings of Rousseau, Vol. 9, trans. Christopher Kelley and Judith R. Bush (Hanover, New Hampshire: Dartmouth College, 2001), 28.
74.Rousseau, On the Social Contract, 161; emphasis added. By “real relations,” Rousseau means property.
75.Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality,” 69.
76.Letter to Beaumont, in Rousseau, The Collected Writings of Rousseau, Vol. 9, 28.
77.Rousseau, Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, 14.
78.Rousseau, Discourse on Political Economy, 128.
79.Rousseau, On the Social Contract, 171.
80.Ibid., 172.
81.Ibid., 166.
82.1 Corinthians 12:19.
83.Rousseau, On the Social Contract, 167.
84.1 Corinthians 12:26.
85.Bertrand de Jouvenel, The Ethics of Redistribution (Indianapolis, Indiana: Liberty Fund, 1990), 15.
86.See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice: Original Edition (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971) and Political Liberalism: Expanded Edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).
87.De Jouvenel, The Ethics of Redistribution, 14.
88.Rousseau, Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, 14.
89.Eric Voegelin, “Ersatz Religion,” in Science, Politics and Gnosticism (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2007), 75. For all of Voegelin’s insight into the phenomenon of gnosticism, he never mentions its connection with the philosophy of Rousseau. In fact, Voegelin is mostly silent on Rousseau. In his voluminous corpus he mentions Rousseau in fewer than a dozen passages. See Carolina Armenteros, “Rousseau in the Philosophy of Eric Voegelin,” paper delivered at American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, 2011.
90.Voegelin, “Ersatz Religion,” 100.
91.Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men, 46.
92.Ibid., 74.
93.Ibid., 100n.ix.
94.Rousseau, On the Social Contract, 172.
95.Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men, 46.
96.Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, trans. Peter France (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 27.
97.Letter to Malesherbes in Rousseau, The Collected Writings of Rousseau, Vol. 5, 575.
98.See Rousseau, Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques; Reveries; and The Confessions, trans. J. M. Cohen (New York: Penguin Books), 1953.
99.Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men, 48, 51.
100.Rousseau, Reveries, 43, 31; Rousseau, Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques, 246
101.Rousseau, Reveries, 37.
102.Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men, 100n.ix. For examples of Rousseau’s belief that “men” in the abstract are good but living and breathing human beings are often bad, see Rousseau, Reveries, 37, 50, and 55.
103.Bryan Garsten, “Benjamin Constant’s Liberalism,” in Farr and Williams, The General Will, 383.
104.This is not the place to attempt to dissect the substantive differences between liberalism and democratism, but suffice to say that democratism draws special attention to the concept of the popular will in understandings of legitimacy and government, whereas liberalism as a concept is much more sprawling and with many more contributors, not all of whom hold an ideological view of liberalism, whereas democratism specifically references the ideological component of democratic thinking.
105.Quoted in Riley, “The General Will before Rousseau,” 16.
106.Rousseau, On the Social Contract 178. At one point Rousseau says that “there is only one good government possible for a state” (193).
107.Ibid., 193.
108.Rousseau, Reveries, 27.
109.An address, April 6, 1918, in Arthur Link, The Papers of Woodrow Wilson (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984), Vol. 47, 270.
110.Rousseau Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men ,41.
111.Maritain represents a Christian thinker who does believe that Christianity calls for a specific political order, namely democracy. I examine Maritain as a democratist in chapter 5 of this book.
112.Garsten, “Benjamin Constant’s Liberalism,” 387.
113.Benjamin Constant, Principles of Politics Applicable to All Governments (Indianapolis, Indiana: Liberty Fund, 2003), 19.
114.To be sure, Patrick Riley notes Alberto Postigliola’s observation that Rousseau adopts Malebranche’s metaphysical categorization of the general will without accounting for human finitude. Riley, “The General Will before Rousseau,” 56–57.
115.Nelson Lund, Rousseau’s Rejuvenation of Political Philosophy: A New Introduction (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 5.
Chapter 2
1.Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing Co., 1987), 49.
2.A number of works have addressed aspects of what I term “democratism.” Those that suggest the possibility of regarding a certain view of democracy as an ideology include Claes G. Ryn, Democracy and the Ethical Life: A Philosophy of Politics and Community, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1990), first published in 1978, The New Jacobinism: America as Revolutionary State, 2nd expanded ed. (Bowie, Maryland: National Humanities Institute, 2011), first published in 1991, and America the Virtuous: The Crisis of Democracy and the Quest for Empire (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2003); Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, trans. Teresa Adelson (New York: Encounter Books, 2016); Peter Collins, Ideology after the Fall of Communism (New York: Boyars/Bowerdean, 1992); Michael P. Federici, The Rise of Right-Wing Democratism in Postwar America (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Publishers, 1991); Richard M. Gamble, The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2003); Patrick Deneen, Democratic Faith (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2005) and Why Liberalism Failed (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2018); Irving Babbitt, Democracy and Leadership (Indianapolis, Indiana: Liberty Fund, 1979); and Edmund Burke’s classic work, Reflections on the Revolution in France. While many of these works refer to or assume the general phenomenon of democratism, none concentrates on this subject in order to examine and define its central beliefs and trace an intellectual and political history of the ideology.
3.James Burnham, Congress and the American Tradition (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1959), 41.
4.Erik Ritter Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, The Menace of the Herd or Procrustes at Large (Milwaukee, Wisconsin: Bruce Publishing Company, 1943), 28, 10 (written under the name Francis Stuart Campbell).
5.Ryn, America the Virtuous, 16.
6.Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2004), 75, first published in 1919.
7.Jefferson to James Madison. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 15: 27 March 1789 to 30 November 1789 (Princeton University Press, 1958), 394.
8.The “idyllic” imagination, Babbitt says, is universal or an ideal type. For an extended discussion of this type of epistemological role of the imagination, see Claes G. Ryn, Will, Imagination, and Reason: Babbitt, Croce and the Problem of Reality (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1997), first published in 1986.
9.The following sketch outlining some of the salient differences between democratism and republicanism is meant to demonstrate that the fundamental assumptions behind democratism are very different from those informing republicanism of the classical variety. Illustrating some of the major differences between these two ideas will help to place democratism in historical and intellectual context and also help to define democratism. It should go without saying that this account of republicanism is far from comprehensive. To engage with the voluminous literature on republicanism is hardly possible here and would detract from the major purpose at hand: defining democratism.
10.Federalist No. 10, in George W. Carey and James McClellan, eds., The Federalist: The Gideon Edition (Indianapolis, Indiana: Liberty Fund, 2001), 46.
11.Thomas Jefferson to John Taylor, May 28, 1816. All references to Jefferson’s correspondence can be found at https://founders.archives.gov/, which maintains a digitized archive of all of Thomas Jefferson’s letters and is fully searchable.
12.See Social Contract, Book II, Ch. 3: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “On the Social Contract,” in The Basic Political Writings, 2nd ed., ed. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing Co., 2011), 173.
13.Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 1–2.
14.Ibid., 4.
15.Ibid., 4–5.
16.For a full discussion of Hobbes’s understanding of liberty see Quentin Skinner, Thomas Hobbes and Republican Liberty (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), esp. 154–158.
17.Quoted in ibid., 161.
18.Book II, Ch. 1: Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Martin Ostwald (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1999), 33.
19.Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 213.
20.Contrast the relationship of the Émile to the Social Contract with the relationship of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics to the Politics. In the Émile, Rousseau is concerned with eliciting the child’s natural goodness through his education. In the Ethics, Aristotle believes that an ethical character must be formed and shaped by preexisting institutions such as the family and society. Herein lies one of the roots of the two different political philosophies.
21.Jefferson to James Madison. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 15: 27 March 1789 to 30 November 1789 (Princeton University Press, 1958), 394.
22.See Matthew Cantirino, “The Dictatress and the Decisionmakers,” Humanitas, Vol. 35, Nos. 1–2 (2022): 116.
23.Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 6.
24.John Quincy Adams, “An Address Delivered at the Request of a Committee of the Citizens of Washington; On the Occasion of Reading the Declaration of Independence, On the Fourth of July, 1821,” quoted in Cantirino, “The Dictatress and the Decisionmakers,” 117.
25.Adams, “An Address Delivered at the Request of a Committee of the Citizens of Washington.”
26.Rousseau, “On the Social Contract,” 156.
27.Babbitt, Democracy and Leadership, 154.
28.Ibid., 294.
29.Rousseau, “On the Social Contract,” 177.
30.It is especially ironic that the latest class of people to be considered enemies of democracy are the “populists,” since historically the term “populism” has referred to popular, grassroots political movements that eschew political elitism.
31.Rousseau, “On the Social Contract,” 177.
32.Jefferson to James Monroe, March 7, 1801. Available at https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-33-02-0166.
Chapter 3
1.This chapter, in a certain respect, turns the thesis—a thesis that now seems rather quaint and dated—of Jean M. Yarbrough’s 1998 book American Virtues on its head. Yarbrough says, “By exploring in a serious and critical way Jefferson’s understanding of the virtues that modern republicanism encourages and on which it depends, we may be in a better position to address some of the most pressing moral and political problems of our own day.” See Jean M. Yarbrough, American Virtues: Thomas Jefferson on the Character of a Free People (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998), xx.
2.Jefferson preferred the terminology of “republicanism” rather than “democracy,” often associating the latter word—following from the ancient philosophers—with mob rule. Yet the very evolution of “Jeffersonian democracy” as a salutary concept demonstrates that the word has undergone significant change since Jefferson’s time. Jefferson, along with others, helped to further the idea that direct popular rule should be the standard for republicanism. This chapter explores Jefferson’s understanding of what is now commonly referred to as “democracy”—popular rule with minimal mediation or “filtration” through representatives. As this book argues, the abstract terms matter far less than the concrete reality that gives them their life and meaning. Whether one lauds democracy or republicanism is inconsequential. Only a close examination of the system of beliefs behind these abstractions reveals their meaning, and especially what kind of democrat one is. For Jefferson’s relationship with “democracy” per se, see Peter S. Onuf, “Jefferson and American Democracy,” in A Companion to Thomas Jefferson, ed. Francis D. Cogliano (Blackwell, 2012), 397.
3.See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “On the Social Contract,” in The Basic Political Writings, 2nd ed., ed. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing Co., 2011), 173. Thomas Jefferson had a copy of Rousseau’s Social Contract in his library at Monticello. See Emily Millicent Sowerby, ed., Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson, 5 vols. (1952–1959), vol. 3, no. 2338. And as an avid Francophile interested in French politics, he must have been quite familiar with the Genevan’s theory of republicanism, which in so many ways mirrored his own.
Many have compared Jefferson to Rousseau. To mention just a few: for a pointed comparison of Jefferson’s and Rousseau’s democratic inclinations, see Claes G. Ryn, Democracy and the Ethical Life: A Philosophy of Politics and Community, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1990), chap. 11, “Constitutionalism versus Plebiscitarianism,” and chap. 12, “The General Will.” Ryn compares Jefferson’s desire that “every form of government were so perfectly contrived, that the will of the majority could always be obtained, fairly and without impediment,” to Rousseau’s General Will and his belief that “any law which the people has not ratified in person is void; it is not law at all” (183, 117–118). Others, including Will and Ariel Durant, have commented on Rousseau’s influence over Jefferson’s writing of the Declaration of Independence. See Will Durant and Ariel Durant, The Story of Civilization: Rousseau and Revolution, vol. 10 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1967), 891. Jason Robles in “An Honest Heart and a Knowing Head: A Study of the Moral, Political, and Educational Thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Jefferson” (doctoral thesis, University of Colorado, 2012) argues that “the Jeffersonian vision of republican government ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people’—sits comfortably alongside Rousseau’s theory” (iii). Conor Cruise O’Brien compares Jefferson’s desire for Britain to be forcibly “freed” by revolutionary France to Rousseau’s idea that people might be “forced to be free” under the General Will. O’Brien also observes that although Jefferson, so far as the author is aware, never explicitly acknowledged a debt to Rousseau, we should not “understand from that, that the debt was not there.” For “Jefferson, always keenly alert, in his long march to the presidency, to considerations of political advantage and disadvantage, must have been well aware that to acknowledge a debt to Rousseau would have been politically damaging.” See Conor Cruise O’Brien, “Rousseau, Robespierre, Burke, Jefferson, and the French Revolution,” in The Social Contract and the First and Second Discourses: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. Susan Dunn (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2002), 306–8.
4.Richard K. Matthews, The Radical Politics of Thomas Jefferson: A Revisionist View (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1984), 15.
5.Jefferson to John Taylor, May 28, 1816.
6.Ibid. In considering the legacy of “Jeffersonian democracy,” it means little that Jefferson refused to think of himself as a “democrat” proper, no doubt due to the connotation of mob rule that had been associated with democracy since antiquity
7.Ibid.
8.Jefferson to David Hartley, July 2, 1787.
9.Query XIX in Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955), 164–165.
10.Ibid.
11.Jefferson to John Jay, August 23, 1785.
12.Jefferson to David Williams, November 14, 1803.
13.Jefferson to Horatio G. Spafford, March 17, 1817.
14.Adams would escape from the “rattle-gabble” of the streets of Boston to his family farm, which “put the mind into a stirring, thoughtful mood.” Even Hamilton, otherwise very different from Jefferson, admits that farming “has intrinsically a strong claim to pre-eminence over every other kind of industry,” producing “a state most favourable to the freedom and independence of the human mind.” James Madison too calls husbandry “pre-eminently suited to the comfort and happiness of the individual.” George Washington, hailed as an American Cincinnatus, fondly reflects, “To see plants rise from the earth and flourish by the superior skill and bounty of the laborer fills the contemplative mind with ideas which are more easy to be conceived than expressed.” Carl J. Richard, The Founders and the Classics (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995), 165; Alexander Hamilton, “Report on Manufactures,” in Morton J. Frisch, ed., Selected Writings and Speeches of Alexander Hamilton (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 1985), 280.
15.Jefferson to James Madison, December 20, 1787.
16.Gordon Wood and Louis Hartz, for example, see the imprint of John Locke on the American Revolution. See Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (Vintage Books, 1991) and Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (San Diego, California: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1991).
17.Jefferson to Adamantios Coray, October 31, 1823.
18.Jefferson to William Johnson, June 12, 1823.
19.Jefferson, first inaugural address, March 4, 1801.
20.Cf. Locke, Second Treatise of Government, Ch. V, “Of Property,” esp. §42: “[T]he increase of lands, and the rights employing of them, is the great art of government”; Ch. VIII, “Of the Beginning of Political Societies,” esp. §95: John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing, 1980), 26, 52.
21.Jefferson to Pierre Samuel Du Pont de Nemours, April 4, 1816.
22.St. John de Crèvecoeur, “Letters from an American Farmer: Letter III” (1782).
23.Jefferson to Joseph Priestley, March 21, 1801.
24.Jefferson to François D’Ivernois, February 6, 1795.
25.Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XIX.
26.Jefferson to John Taylor, May 28, 1816.
27.See Patricia U. Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 274.
28.Jefferson to William Short, August 4, 1820.
29.Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing Co., 1987), 30.
30.Jefferson to Joseph Priestley, March 21, 1801.
31.Ernest Lee Tuveson, Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 109.
32.Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Discourse on Inequality,” in The Basic Political Writings, ed. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing Co., 2011), 66.
33.Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XIX, 165.
34.Tuveson, Redeemer Nation, 109.
35.Irving Babbitt, Democracy and Leadership (Indianapolis, Indiana: Liberty Fund, 1979), 139.
36.Ibid.
37.The comparison with Rousseau might be continued here with Rousseau’s Émile, the titular character of which looks to his tutor for direction. Paradoxically, an enlightened educator is necessary to coax from the boy the virtues of spontaneity and natural goodness. Having received this education, Émile, in the end, chooses to live in the country, away from the degrading life of the city, and in what may be called a quasi-natural state.
38.Jefferson to Thomas Cooper, August 14, 1820; Jefferson to Peter Carr, August 10, 1787.
39.Jefferson to Peter Carr, August 10, 1787.
40.Jefferson to John Adams, August 1, 1816.
41.Jefferson to Pierre Samuel Dupont de Nemours, April 24, 1816.
42.Jefferson to Joseph C. Cabell, September 10, 1817.
43.Jefferson to Charles Yancey, January 6, 1816.
44.Jefferson to Levi Lincoln, January 1, 1802.
45.See Paul Zummo, “Thomas Jefferson’s America: Democracy, Progress, and the Quest for Perfection” (doctoral dissertation, The Catholic University of America, 2008), esp. chap. 1.
46.Cameron Addis, “Jefferson and Education,” The Journal of Southern History, Vol. 72, No. 2 (2006): 457.
47.Robert K. Faulkner, “Spreading Progress: Jefferson’s Mix of Science and Liberty,” The Good Society, Vol. 79, No. 1 (2008): 26. See also Silvio A. Bedini, Thomas Jefferson, Statesman of Science (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1990).
48.Quoted by Cassirer, The Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 127.
49.Quoted by Joyce Appleby, “Commercial Farming and the ‘Agrarian Myth’ in the Early Republic,” The Journal of American History, Vol. 68, No. 4 (March 1982): 833; Jefferson to Benjamin Rush, January 16, 1811.
50.Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, July 12, 1816.
51.Ibid.
52.Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (Penguin Classics, 2006), 241.
53.See Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (1620), Book I, XXXI. Available in the public domain and can be accessed at: https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/bacon-novum-organum
54.For a retelling of this episode, see Alan Taylor, Thomas Jefferson’s Education (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2019), 246–49.
55.Jefferson to Adams, October 28, 1813.
56.Jefferson to Pierre Samuel DuPont de Nemours, April 15, 1811.
57.Mark Andrew Holowchak, Thomas Jefferson’s Philosophy of Education: A Utopian Dream (New York: Routledge, 2014), xvii.
58.Taylor, Thomas Jefferson’s Education, 193.
59.Ibid., 214.
60.Ibid., 258–259.
61.Jefferson to Thomas Cooper, November 2, 1822.
62.Taylor, Thomas Jefferson’s Education, 259.
63.Jefferson indeed had hoped that the University of Virginia would produce a new generation that would eventually abolish slavery. See Taylor, Thomas Jefferson’s Education, 214.
64.Jefferson to Thomas Cooper, November 2, 1822.
65.Jefferson uses this phrase on several occasions. See Jefferson to George Rogers Clark, December 25, 1780, and Jefferson to James Madison, April 27, 1809.
66.Jefferson to Roger Weightman, June 24, 1826.
67.Ibid.
68.Jefferson to Robert R. Livingston, April 18, 1802.
69.Peter S. Onuf, “Prologue: Jefferson, Louisiana, and American Nationhood,” in Empires of the Imagination: Transatlantic Histories of the Louisiana Purchase, ed. Peter J. Kastor and François Weil (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009), 32.
70.Quoted in Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson, Empire of Liberty: The Statecraft of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 157.
71.Jefferson to John Breckinridge, August 12, 1803.
72.Tucker and Hendrickson, Empire of Liberty, 159.
73.Walter A. McDougall, The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy: How America’s Civil Religion Betrayed the National Interest (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2016), 57.
74.Anthony F. C. Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 1999), 206.
75.Christian B. Keller, “Philanthropy Betrayed: Thomas Jefferson, the Louisiana Purchase, and the Origins of Federal Indian Removal Policy,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 144, No. 1 (2000): 42.
76.Jefferson to John Adams, September 4, 1823.
77.For an account of the history of Jefferson’s dealings with the Native Americans, see Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians, chapter 7, “President Jefferson’s Indian Policy,” pp. 206–240. For Jefferson’s use of deception and salami tactics, see esp. 221–23.
78.Jefferson, “Memorandum for Henry Dearborn,” December 29, 1802.
79.Jefferson to William Henry Harrison, February 27, 1803.
80.Andrew Jackson, Second Annual Message to Congress, December 6, 1830, National Archives, https://www.archives.gov/historical-docs/todays-doc/index.html?dod-date=1206, accessed September 10, 2021. For the relationship between Jefferson’s Indian removal policies and Jackson’s, see Keller, “Philanthropy Betrayed,” 39–66; Peter S. Onuf, “We Shall All Be Americans: Thomas Jefferson and the Indians,” Indiana Magazine of History, Vol. 95, No. 2 (1999): 103–141; Harold Hellenbrand, “Not ‘to Destroy but to Fulfill’: Jefferson, Indians, and Republican Dispensation,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 18, No. 4 (Autumn 1985): 523–549.
81.Jefferson to William Henry Harrison, February 27, 1803.
82.Jefferson to William Ludlow, September 6, 1824. Robert Nisbet sheds light on and traces this notion of progress in the comparative method of Comte, Spencer, Tylor, and others in The Making of Modern Society (Sussex: Wheatsheaf Books, 1986), 72–74.
83.Peter S. Onuf, “Thomas Jefferson’s Christian Nation,” in Religion, State, and Society: Jefferson’s Wall of Separation in Comparative Perspective, ed. R. Fatton and R. Ramazini (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 23.
84.In this respect Jefferson follows in the footsteps of John Locke, who undertook a similar venture in The Reasonableness of Christianity, ed. I. T. Ramsey (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2005).
85.Jefferson to Joseph Priestley April 9, 1803.
86.Justin D. Garrison, “Friedrich Nietzsche: The Hammer Goes to Monticello,” in Critics of Enlightenment Rationalism, ed. Gene Callahan and Kenneth B. McIntyre (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 69.
87.Ibid., 68–69. See Jefferson to Joseph Priestley, March 21, 1801.
88.Jefferson to Gideon Granger, May 3, 1801.
89.Jefferson to Benjamin Galloway, February 2, 1812.
90.Jefferson to John Taylor, June 4, 1798.
91.Jefferson to Roger C. Weightman, June 24, 1826.
92.Jefferson to Peter Carr, August 10, 1787.
93.Jefferson to Joseph Priestley, March 21, 1801.
94.Jefferson to John Taylor, June 4, 1798.
95.Jefferson to John Taylor, May 28, 1816.
96.Jefferson to Horatio Gates, March 8, 1801.
97.Richard Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780–1840 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 205, quoted in David N. Mayer, The Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), 123.
98.Mayer, The Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson, 123.
99.See Jefferson to Benjamin Galloway, February 2, 1812.
100.Jefferson to David Hall, July 6, 1802.
101.Jefferson to Richard Rush, October 20, 1820.
102.Henry Adams, The History of the United States during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Library of America, 1986), 101.
103.Jefferson to Richard Rush, October 20, 1820.
104.Jefferson, unaddressed letter, March 18, 1793.
105.Jefferson to François D’Ivernois, February 6, 1795.
106.Jefferson to William Short, January 3, 1793.
107.Adams, The History of the United States, 100.
108.Jefferson to William Smith, November 13, 1787.
Chapter 4
1.For a history of this type of foreign policy thinking in America, see Walter A. McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World since 1776 (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997) and The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy: How America’s Civil Religion Betrayed the National Interest (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2016).
2.John Quincy Adams, “An Address Delivered at the Request of the Citizens of Washington; on the Occasion of Reading the Declaration of Independence, on the Fourth of July, 1821,” quoted in McDougall in Promised Land, Crusader State, 36.
3.See Ernest Lee Tuveson, Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), viii; McDougall Promised Land, Crusader State, 118; Ralph Henry Gabriel, The Course of American Democratic Thought (New York: Ronald Press Co., 1940), 339; Richard Gamble, The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2003), 111.
4.Gabriel, The Course of American Democratic Thought, 339.
5.McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State, 118.
6.Woodrow Wilson, “A Campaign Address in Jersey City, New Jersey,” in Arthur S. Link, ed. The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 69 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966–1994), 24: 443. May 25, 1912.
7.Woodrow Wilson, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1913.
8.The influence of the social gospel movement on Wilson has been well documented. See Tuveson, Redeemer Nation, 173–175; Gamble, The War for Righteousness; McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State, Ch. 6; Milan Babík, Statecraft and Salvation: Wilsonian Liberal Internationalism as Secularized Eschatology (Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2013), Ch. 6; Gregory S. Butler, “Visions of a Nation Transformed: Modernity and Ideology in Wilson’s Political Thought,” Journal of Church and State, Vol. 39 (Winter 1997); Lloyd E. Ambrosius, Wilsonian Statecraft: Theory and Practice of Liberal Internationalism during World War I (Wilmington, Delaware: Scholarly Resources, 1991), 3. Much work has also been done to show the tremendous impact that Wilson’s liberal Protestant faith had on his politics: this theme is variously treated in Butler, “Visions of a Nation Transformed”; Babík, Statecraft and Salvation; Gamble’s War for Righteousness; Jan Willem Schulte Nordholt, Woodrow Wilson: A Life for World Peace (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 46. Various Wilson biographers have mentioned the centrality of Wilson’s faith to his politics, including Ray Standard Baker, Woodrow Wilson: Life and Letters (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1927–1939), 1:68; Arthur Link, Higher Realism of Woodrow Wilson (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1971), 4 (among many other places). Ronald J. Pestritto documents the influence of Hegel and German Idealism on Wilson’s thinking in Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 1–33.
9.Quoted in Gamble, The War for Righteousness, 61.
10.Gamble, The War for Righteousness, 58.
11.Babík, Statecraft and Salvation, 21. See Augustine, City of God, trans. Marcus Dodd (Peabody, Massachusetts: Hendrickson Publishing Company, 2009). Tuveson says the expectation that human suffering and strife could permanently give way to peace and brotherhood “reversed the attitude dominant in Christianity for many centuries” (Redeemer Nation, 12).
12.Catholicism, too, had come under the influence of a new, progressive theology that many traditional Catholics condemned as heretical “modernism” and “Americanism.” See, for example, Pope Leo XIII’s letter “Testem Benevolentiae nostrae” to Cardinal James Gibbons, Archbishop of Baltimore, January 22, 1899. https://www.papalencyclicals.net/leo13/l13teste.htm.
13.Butler, “Visions of a Nation Transformed,” 43.
14.Woodrow Wilson, “The Modern Democratic State,” in The Papers of Woodrow Wilson (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1966–1994), 5:71.
15.Ibid., 5:63–78.
16.Ibid., 5:70.
17.Woodrow Wilson, Constitutional Government in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1908).
18.Wilson, “The Modern Democratic State,” 5:75, emphasis in original.
19.Ibid., 5:76.
20.Similarly, while Wilson claims philosophical kinship with Edmund Burke, there is little that Wilson has in common with the Irishman. Many have argued that Wilson’s alleged conservatism and fondness for Burke have been greatly exaggerated. August Heckscher, Woodrow Wilson (New York: Scribner, 1991), 112; Babík, Statecraft and Salvation, 166–169; Butler, “Visions of a Nation Transformed,” 46–49. Scholars have noted the connection between Wilson and Rousseau. Robert Nisbet sees in Wilson a “Rousseauian vision” of a nationalized community: The Present Age, 51–54. Irving Babbitt in Democracy and Leadership (Indianapolis, Indiana: Liberty Fund, 1979), 295–296 finds Wilson’s “sentimental imperialism” inspired by a Rousseauean “idyllic imagination.” Ethan M. Fishman notes the similarities between the two idealists’ sense of limitlessness in The Prudential Presidency: An Aristotelian Approach to Presidential Leadership (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2001), 51–52.
21.Wilson, “The Modern Democratic State,” 5:76.
22.Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “On the Social Contract,” in The Basic Political Writings, 2nd ed., ed. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing Co., 2011), 171.
23.Ibid., 173.
24.Wilson, “The Modern Democratic State,” 5:80.
25.Rousseau, “On the Social Contract,” 164.
26.Wilson, “The Modern Democratic State,” 5:75.
27.Ibid., 5:83.
28.Ibid.
29.Ibid., 5:84.
30.“Leaders of Men” was originally a commencement speech that Wilson delivered on numerous occasions. It was later published as an essay.
31.Wilson, “The Modern Democratic State,” 5:83.
32.Wilson, The New Freedom, ed. William Bayard Hale. (New York: Doubleday, Page and Company, 1913), 10.
33.Woodrow Wilson, Leaders of Men, ed. T. H. Vail Motter (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1952), 44–45.
34.Wilson, Constitutional Government, 68.
35.Rousseau, “On the Social Contract,” 182.
36.Wilson, Leaders of Men, 29.
37.Ibid.
38.Ibid., 33.
39.Babbitt, Democracy and Leadership, 218. Babbitt is here quoting the famous words of Napoleon.
40.Wilson, Leaders of Men, 33.
41.McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State, 128.
42.Wilson, Leaders of Men, 26, emphasis in original.
43.Woodrow Wilson, Congressional Government (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956), 210.
44.Wilson, Leaders of Men, 26.
45.Wilson, Congressional Government, 209–210.
46.Jeffrey K. Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1987), 120.
47.Woodrow Wilson, “Cabinet Government in the United States” (August 1879), in The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson: College and State, Vols. 1–2 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1925–1927), 1:33–34.
48.Ibid., 1:35. Several scholars have termed this aspect of Wilson’s presidency “crisis leadership.” Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency, 126; C. Eric Schulzke, “Wilsonian Crisis Leadership, the Organic State, and the Modern Presidency,” Polity, Vol. 37, No. 2 (April 2005): 262–285.
49.Wilson, “Cabinet Government in the United States,” 1:34; Woodrow Wilson, A History of the American People (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1902), 299; Schulzke, “Wilsonian Crisis Leadership,” 275.
50.Wilson, Constitutional Government, 67, emphasis added.
51.Wilson, “Cabinet Government in the United States,” 1:35.
52.Wilson, Constitutional Government, 65.
53.James MacGregor Burns, The Power to Lead (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), 190.
54.Wilson, “The Modern Democratic State,” 5:72.
55.Ibid., 5:73.
56.Quoted in Niels Aage Thorson, The Political Thought of Woodrow Wilson (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1988), 185.
57.Wilson, Leaders of Men, 39.
58.Wilson, The New Freedom, 54.
59.Wilson, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1914.
60.See Gamble, The War for Righteousness, 76–77.
61.McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State, 132. See, for example, Link, Higher Realism of Woodrow Wilson and Thomas A. Bailey, Woodrow Wilson and the Lost Peace (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1963). On the other hand, Paul Johnson, Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties (New York: Perennial Classics Ed., 2001), 22 believes that Wilson desired moral authority through neutrality. McDougall also believes this.
62.Quoted in Gamble, The War for Righteousness, 138.
63.McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State, 191; Wilson, “Declaration of Neutrality” delivered before the U.S. Senate, August 19, 1914.
64.McDougall, The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy, 148.
65.Ibid., 157.
66.Rodney Carlisle, “The Attacks on U.S. Shipping That Precipitated American Entry into World War I,” The Northern Mariner, Vol. 17, No. 3 (July 2007): 43.
67.McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State, 135.
68.McDougall, The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy, 148.
69.Wilson, “War Message to Congress,” 309. Publicly available at the National Archives website, archives.gov.
70.Carlisle points out that most secondary scholarship about Wilson’s neutrality and decision to go to war neglects the actual casus belli. Most accounts make little or no mention of the specific U.S. ships sunk in the U-boat campaign, and some make no mention of any ship losses. See Carlisle, “The Attacks on U.S. Shipping,” 42n1.
71.Wilson, “War Message to Congress,” 309; Carlisle, “The Attacks on U.S. Shipping,” 63.
72.See, for example, William Kristol and Robert Kagan, “Introduction: National Interest and Global Responsibility,” in Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy, ed. Robert Kagan and William Kristol (New York: Encounter Books, 2000), 3–24.
73.Wilson, “War Message to Congress,” 309.
74.Riezler’s diary, April 18, 1915, quoted in Johnson, Modern Times, 107.
75.Wilson’s letter to Chairman Edwin Webb of the House Judiciary Committee, in “Wilson Demands Press Censorship,” New York Times, May 23, 1917.
76.Peter Conolly-Smith, “‘Reading between the Lines’: The Bureau of Investigation, the United States Post Office, and Domestic Surveillance during World War I,” Social Justice, Vol. 36, No. 1 (2009): 16.
77.Amendment to the Espionage Act, 65th Congress, Session II, Ch. 75 (1918). For a discussion of civil liberties under Wilson, see H. C. Peterson and Gilbert C. Fite, Opponents of War, 1917–1918 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957); Harry N. Scheiber, The Wilson Administration and Civil Liberties, 1917–1921 (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1960); Zechariah Chafee Jr., Free Speech in the United States (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1954); Geoffrey R. Stone, Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 135–235; Mitchell Newton-Matza, The Espionage and Sedition Acts: World War I and the Image of Civil Liberties (New York: Routledge, 2017).
78.Quoted in Conolly-Smith, “ ‘Reading between the Lines,’ ” 10.
79.Ibid., 13.
80.Ibid., 12.
81.Geoffrey R. Stone, “Mr. Wilson’s First Amendment,” in Reconsidering Woodrow Wilson: Progressivism, Internationalism, War, and Peace, ed. John Milton Cooper Jr. (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 196.
82.Stone, “Mr. Wilson’s First Amendment,” 196–198.
83.Quoted in Benjamin A. Kleinerman, “‘In the Name of National Security’ Executive Discretion and Congressional Legislation in the Civil War and World War I,” in The Limits of Constitutional Democracy, ed. Jeffrey K. Tulis and Stephen Macedo (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2010), 93.
84.Wilson, “Address on Flag Day,” June 14, 1917. This document is publicly available at The American Presidency Project at https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-flag-day.
85.Woodrow Wilson, speech at the opening of the Third Liberty Loan Campaign, delivered in the Fifth Regiment Armory, Baltimore, April 6, 1918, in Arthur Link, The Papers of Woodrow Wilson (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984), 47:270.
86.Ross Gregory, “To Do Good in the World: Woodrow Wilson and America’s Mission,” in Makers of American Diplomacy, ed. Frank J. Merli and Theodore A. Wilson (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1974), 363.
87.Johnson, Modern Times, 24–25.
88.Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 235.
89.Quoted in Johnson, Modern Times, 31.
90.Johnson, Modern Times, 32.
91.Wilson, Leaders of Men, 50.
92.Henry Cabot Lodge discusses the failure of the League in the Senate and mentions the “steady advance of opposition” to the League “among the mass of the American people . . . [that] became stronger day by day as, owing to the debate, the average American came to understand the questions to be decided.” Henry Cabot Lodge, The Senate and the League of Nations (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925), 179.
93.Quoted in Gerhard Schulz, Revolutions and Peace Treaties: 1917–1920, trans. Marian Jackson (London: Methuen & Co., 1972), 189.
94.Ibid., 182.
95.Ibid., 183.
96.Johnson, Modern Times, 14.
97.Wilson, “Address on Flag Day,” June 14, 1917.
98.Woodrow Wilson, address at Cheyenne, Wyoming, September 24, 1919. The American Presidency Project: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-the-princess-theater-cheyenne-wyoming.
99.Babbitt, Democracy and Leadership, 122.
100.Ibid., 103.
101.Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, trans. J. M. Cohen (New York: Penguin Books, 1953), 398
102.Nordholt, Woodrow Wilson, 52.
103.Quoted in Tuveson, Redeemer Nation, 211.
104.Wilson, “Americanism and the Foreign Born,” May 10, 1915; Wilson, speech at the opening of the Third Liberty Loan Campaign, both in Link, Papers, 47:270; Wilson’s words to Frank Cobb, quoted in Johnson, Modern Times, 14.
105.Wilson at Oakland, September 18, 1919, quoted in Tuveson, Redeemer Nation, 210–211. Babík says that “Wilson’s international political utopianism derived in significant measure from his religious utopianism: his scripturally inspired belief that history was a redemptive process, with America as the providentially appointed savior of humanity” (Statecraft and Salvation, 3).
106.Wilson, speech at the opening of the Third Liberty Loan Campaign in Link, Papers, 47:270.
107.Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution: A History, 3 vols. (Boston: Dana Estes & Company, 1985), 2:56.
Chapter 5
1.The sociologist and philosopher Daniel Bell assumes that liberal democracy cannot be ideological. See his The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2000; originally published 1960), in which he claims that systematic ideologies are now petering out and giving way to a postideological world.
2.Maritain, Jacques. Man and the State. (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1998; first published in 1951), 108.
3.Ibid., 60.
4.Ibid., 61.
5.Ibid., 59.
6.Ibid., 59.
7.Ibid., 59.
8.Jacques Maritain, Christianity and Democracy, in Christianity and Democracy and The Rights of Man and Natural Law, trans. Doris C. Anson (San Francisco, California: Ignatius Press, 1986), 46.
9.Jacques Maritain, Ransoming the Time, trans. Harry Lorin Binsse (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1941), 18.
10.Heinrich Rommen, The State in Catholic Thought (St. Louis, Missouri: B. Herder Book Co., 1950), 501.
11.Maritain, Ransoming the Time, 17.
12.Ibid., 18.
13.Ibid., 21.
14.Ibid., 21.
15.Ibid., 27.
16.Ibid., 24.
17.Erik Ritter Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Liberty or Equality: The Challenge of Our Times, ed. John P. Hughes (Auburn, Alabama: The Mises Institute, 2014), 90.
18.Maritain, Man and the State, 172.
19.Ibid., 104–105.
20.Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica 2.2, Question 66, Article 7.
21.Pope Paul VI, Gaudium et Spes, December 7, 1965, introduction §4. This document is publicly available through the digital Vatican archives: https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19651207_gaudium-et-spes_en.html.
22.Ibid., Part I, Ch. 2, §26.
23.Pope John XXIII, Pacem in Terris, April 11, 1963, §§11–27. https://www.vatican.va/content/john-xxiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_j-xxiii_enc_11041963_pacem.html.
24.Ibid., §§41, 42–43.
25.Maritain, Christianity and Democracy, 111.
26.See Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, ed. L. M. Findlay (Ontario: Broadview Press, 2004) and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, ed. C. J. Arthur (New York: International Publisher Co., 1970).
27.Pope John Paul II, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis §41.1, in J. Michael Miller, ed., The Encyclicals of John Paul II (Huntington, Indiana: Our Sunday Visitor Publishing Division, 2001), 411.
28.John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae, §70. https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_25031995_evangelium-vitae.html
29.Maritain, Christianity and Democracy, 18.
30.Ibid., 4–5.
31.Ibid., 12.
32.Ibid., 12–13.
33.Book of Revelation, Ch. 21.
34.Maritain, Man and the State, 114–115.
35.Ibid., 201. The idea of constructing a world government persisted into the 1990s. The model of world government—the Hutchins report or Committee to Frame a World Constitution—that Maritain admired in Man and the State, again, received attention a half-century later. In the December 1995 issue of the University of Chicago Magazine, the intellectual home of the Committee, there appeared an article expressing renewed hope that such a scheme for global politics could finally come to fruition. The author writes that “the committee’s dream of a world order guaranteeing universal justice beyond the proclivities of nationalism and national self-interest may not seem so quixotic as it did in the days of the incipient Cold War.” He points to some elements of the draft constitution that have already been enacted in various ways, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement and the European Union, two institutions whose political utility is currently undergoing serious political reexamination. The article, appropriately titled “Drafting Salvation,” reveals the continual ebb and flow of democratist optimism. See John W. Boyer, “Drafting Salvation,” University of Chicago Magazine, December 1995, accessible at http://magazine.uchicago.edu/archives.
36.Maritain, Man and the State, 214, 215–216.
37.Ibid., 214, 215.
38.Ibid., 207.
39.Ibid., 208.
40.Ibid., 199.
41.Ibid., 207–208.
42.Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 62–69.
43.Pope Paul VI, Gaudium et Spes, Introduction, §5.
44.Jacques Maritain, Integral Humanism, Freedom in the Modern World, and A Letter on Independence, ed. Otto Bird (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), 181n8.
45.Ibid., 181.
46.Ibid., 182.
47.Ibid., 177–178.
48.Maritain, Man and the State, 199.
49.Ibid., 213.
50.Maritain, Christianity and Democracy, 41.
51.Ibid., 38.
52.Maritain, Man and the State, 50–51. Compare this with Wilson’s statement that, together with America, all nations “are entering or nearing the adult age of their political development.” See Woodrow Wilson, “The Modern Democratic State,” in The Papers of Woodrow Wilson (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1966–1994), 5:74.
53.Maritain, Man and the State, 142.
54.Ibid., 141.
55.Maritain, Christianity and Democracy, 48, 13.
56.UNESCO, Human Rights, Comments and Interpretations (Paris: PHS, 1949), 2.
57.Thaddeus J. Kozinski, The Political Problem of Religious Pluralism (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2010), 69.
58.Ibid.
59.Maritain, Man and the State, 176.
60.Aurel Kolnai, “Between Christ and the Idols of Modernity: A Review of Jacques Maritain’s Man and the State,” in Privilege and Liberty and Other Essays in Political Philosophy, ed. Daniel J. Mahoney (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 1999), 180.
61.Ibid.
62.Ibid.
63.Jacques Maritain, The Peasant of the Garonne, trans. Michael Cudahy and Elizabeth Hughes (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968), 201.
64.Ibid.
65.Eric Voegelin, “Ersatz Religion,” in Science, Politics and Gnosticism (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2007), 75.
66.Maritain, The Peasant of the Garonne, 203.
67.Ibid., 204.
68.Voegelin, “Ersatz Religion,” 83.
69.Orestes Brownson, The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny (New York: P. O’Shea, 1866), 184.
70.Ibid., 181.
71.Ibid., 181–182.
72.Rommen, The State in Catholic Thought, 477.
73.Brownson, The American Republic, 183.
74.Rommen, The State in Catholic Thought, 478.
75.Brownson, The American Republic, 186.
76.Ibid., 274–275.
77.Ibid., 272–273.
78.Ibid., 185.
79.Maritain, Man and the State, 202.
80.Ibid., 199.
81.Kolnai, “Between Christ and the Idols of Modernity,” 179.
82.Ibid., 178–179.
83.Pope Francis, Laudato si’, §219. Accessible at https://www.vatican.va/content/dam/francesco/pdf/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si_en.pdf.
84.Ibid., §231.
85.Ibid., §220.
86.See Michael Novak, “The Achievement of Jacques Maritain,” in Catholic Social Thought and Liberal Institutions: Freedom with Justice (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1989) also reveals the continuity of Novak’s thought with Maritain’s.
87.Brownson, The American Republic, 186.
88.Maritain, Man and the State, 216.
Chapter 6
1.Andre Bächtiger, John S. Dryzek, Jane Mansbridge, and Mark Warren, “Deliberative Democracy: An Introduction,” in The Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy, ed. Andre Bächtiger et al., (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 2.
2.Many deliberative democrats self-consciously draw on Rousseau’s political ideals. For a review of the philosophical origins of deliberative democracy, see Simone Chambers, “The Philosophical Origins of Deliberative Ideals,” in The Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy, 55–69.
3.Ibid.
4.Bächtiger et al., “Deliberative Democracy,” 2.
5.“Remarks by the President at Presentation of the National Medal of the Arts and the National Humanities Medal,” White House, September 29, 1999, https://clintonwhitehouse4.archives.gov/WH/New/html/19990929.html.
6.The National Conversation at the Wilson Center, https://www.wilsoncenter.org/the-national-conversation-the-wilson-center, accessed 9/21/2017.
7.Second-generation deliberative democrats broaden the notion of rationality to include “differing styles of communication such as narrative and rhetoric” and to account for the role of emotion in discourse. See Bächtiger et al., “Deliberative Democracy,” 3.
8.The argument of communitarians such as Michael Walzer is that Rawls fails to account sufficiently for historical community norms in his conception of political justice. See Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1983).
9.Joshua Cohen, “Procedure and Substance in Deliberative Democracy,” in Philosophy and Democracy: An Anthology, ed. Thomas Christiano (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 21.
10.Bächtiger et al., “Deliberative Democracy,” 2.
11.Cohen, “Procedure and Substance in Deliberative Democracy,” 21.
12.Dennis F. Thompson, “Deliberative Democratic Theory and Empirical Political Science,” Annual Review of Political Science, Vol. 11 (2008): 498.
13.Seyla Benhabib, “Liberal Dialogue versus a Critical Theory of Discursive Legitimation,” in Liberalism and the Moral Life, ed. Nancy L. Rosenblum (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1996), 143.
14.Bruce Ackerman, “Why Dialogue?,” The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 86, No. 1 (January 1989): 10.
15.Jürgen Habermas, “Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification,” in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1990), 91.
16.Benhabib, “Liberal Dialogue versus a Critical Theory of Legitimacy,” 150.
17.John Rawls, “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” The University of Chicago Law Review, Vol. 64, No. 3 (Summer 1997): 769.
18.Derek W. M. Barker, Noëlle McAfee, David W. McIvor, “Introduction,” in Democratizing Deliberation: A Political Theory Anthology, ed. Derek W. M. Barker, Noëlle McAfee, David W. McIvor (Dayton, Ohio: Kettering Foundation Press, 2012), 4. Others, however, have dismissed deliberative democracy “as irrelevant when it comes to ‘understanding democratic politics on a national scale.’ ” Quoted in Bächtiger et al., “Deliberative Democracy,” 1.
19.Bächtiger et al., “Deliberative Democracy,” 3.
20.Habermas defines communicative action as the process by which “one actor seeks rationally to motivate another by relying on the illocutionary binding/bonding (Bindungseffekt) of the offer contained in his speech act.” See Habermas, “Discourse Ethics,” 58. See also, Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action in two volumes, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984–1985).
21.Jürgen Habermas, “Three Normative Models of Democracy,” Constellations, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1994): 7.
22.Habermas, “Discourse Ethics,” 58.
23.Ibid., 67.
24.Ibid., 58.
25.Ibid., 63.
26.Ibid., 66, emphasis in original.
27.Habermas, “Three Normative Models of Democracy,” 4–5.
28.Cf. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing Co., 1987).
29.Habermas, “Three Normative Models of Democracy,” 5, emphasis added.
30.Thomas McCarthy, “Kantian Constructivism and Reconstructivism: Rawls and Habermas in Dialogue,” Ethics, Vol. 105, no. 1 (October 1994): 47.
31.Ibid.
32.Rawls, “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” 772.
33.Ibid., 773.
34.Some, including Rawls, contend that Political Liberalism is intended to be the historical application of the metaphysics of A Theory of Justice. Richard Rorty, for example, argues that Political Liberalism demonstrates the historical nature of justice as fairness: Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 1 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
35.Cohen, “Reflections on Habermas on Democracy,” in Ratio. Juris, Vol. 12 Issue 4 (December 1999): 387.
36.Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1996), 304; Cohen, “Reflections on Habermas on Democracy,” 400.
37.For the relationship between deliberation democracy and Mill, see Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Why Deliberative Democracy? (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2004), 9; Chambers, “The Philosophical Origins of Deliberative Ideals,” 60.
38.Cohen, “Reflections on Habermas on Democracy,” 387.
39.Ackerman, “Why Dialogue?,” 17–18.
40.Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, “Moral Conflict and Political Consensus,” Ethics, Vol. 101, No. 1 (October 1990): 78.
41.Thompson, “Deliberative Democratic Theory and Empirical Political Science,” 509.
42.Ibid., 506.
43.Ibid.
44.Bächtiger et al., “Deliberative Democracy,” 6.
45.Simone Chambers explains, “When Rousseau suggests that deliberation might undermine the general will . . . he is not, according to this reading, rejecting the core ideals of deliberative democracy; instead he is suggesting that deliberation must be insulated from factionalism and certain types of disagreements, that is, those in which citizens reason from self and group interests rather than from the common good” (“The Philosophical Origins of Deliberative Ideals,” 57).
46.Cohen, “Procedure and Substance in Deliberative Democracy,” 18.
47.See James MacGregor Burns, The Deadlock of Democracy (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1963).
48.Bächtiger et al., “Deliberative Democracy,” 5.
49.Gutmann and Thompson, “Moral Conflict and Political Consensus,” 86.
50.Robert J. Lacey, American Pragmatism and Democratic Faith (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2008), 21.
51.Ibid.
52.Gutmann and Thompson, “Moral Conflict and Political Consensus,” 77. See J. Knight and J. Johnson, “What Sort of Political Equality Does Democratic Deliberation Require?,” in Deliberative Democracy, ed. J. Bohman and W. Rehg (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1997), 280, 292.
53.André Bächtiger, Marco Steenbergen, Thomas Gautschi, and Seraina Pedrini, “Deliberation in Swiss Direct Democracy: A Field Experiment on the Expulsion Initiative,” National Centres of Competence in Research (NCCR) Newsletter, February 2011, 5.
54.Ibid., 6–7.
55.Ibid., 5.
56.Paul Quirk, William Bendix, and Andre Bächtiger, “Institutional Deliberation,” in The Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy, ed. Andre Bächtiger et al. (New York: Oxford University Press), 287.
57.Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, “Reflections on Deliberative Democracy: When Theory Meets Practice,” in The Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy, ed. Andre Bächtiger et al. (New York: Oxford University Press), 905–906.
58.Chambers, “The Philosophical Origins of Deliberative Ideals,” 60.
59.Quoted in ibid.
60.Gutmann and Thompson, “Moral Conflict and Political Consensus,” 77.
61.Gutmann and Thompson, “Reflections on Deliberative Democracy,” 904–905.
62.Bächtiger et al., “Deliberation in Swiss Direct Democracy,” 5.
63.Michael Saward, “Rawls and Deliberative Democracy,” in Democracy as Public Deliberation: New Perspectives, ed. Maurizio Passerin D’Entreves (New York: Manchester University Press, 2002), 117.
64.Ibid.
65.John Rawls, Political Liberalism: Expanded Edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 225, quoted in Saward, “Rawls and Deliberative Democracy,” 115.
66.Rawls, Political Liberalism, 225, quoted in Saward, “Rawls and Deliberative Democracy,” 115.
67.John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 107; Rawls, “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” 774.
68.Rawls, “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” 774.
69.For a discussion of Rawls’s defense of the welfare state, see Stephen Nathanson, Economic Justice (New York: Pearson, 1997), “Rawls’s Defense of the Liberal Democratic Welfare State,” 81–99, esp. 92–93. In Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press, 2001; second edition), Rawls does state that justice requires property ownership or liberal socialism, but this separates Rawls from, say, communists or full-blown socialists, rather than from welfare state capitalism, which he seems to endorse.
70.John Rawls, A Theory of Justice: Original Edition (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971), 87.
71.Rawls, “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” 773–774.
72.Habermas, “Three Normative Models of Democracy,” 6.
73.For a treatment of deliberative democracy’s tendency for ahistoricism and rationalism, see Ryan Holston, “Deliberation in Context: Reexamining the Confrontation between the Discourse Ethics and Neo-Aristotelianism,” Telos, Vol. 181 (Winter 2017): 151–175.
74.Bächtiger et al., “Deliberative Democracy,” 1.
75.Gutmann and Thompson, “Reflections on Deliberative Democracy,” 900.
76.Gutmann and Thompson, “Moral Conflict and Political Consensus,” 77.
77.Stefan Rummens, “Deliberation and Justice,” in The Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy, ed. Andre Bächtiger et al. (New York: Oxford University Press), 136.
78.Quoted in Monique Deveaux, “Deliberative Democracy and Multiculturalism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy, ed. Andre Bächtiger et al. (New York: Oxford University Press), 161, 163.
79.Ibid., 161.
80.Ibid., 163.
81.Benhabib, “Liberal Dialogue versus a Critical Theory of Legitimacy,” 150.
82.Andrew March and Alicia Steinmetz, “Religious Reasons in Public Deliberation,” in The Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy, ed. Andre Bächtiger et al. (New York: Oxford University Press), 208.
83.Quoted in Jeffrey Flynn, “Communicative Power in Habermas’s Theory of Democracy,” European Journal of Political Theory 3 (4) 2004: 446.
84.Even Rawls admits that his assumptions about individuals embodying these abstract concepts are for hypothetical purposes and that real people often fall short of these ideals. See Rawls, A Theory of Justice: Original Edition, 443 and Rawls, Political Liberalism, 20.
85.St. Paul Letter to the Romans 7:15–19 (New Revised Standard Version).
86.See Plato, Republic, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing Co., 1992), Book III for his “myth of the metals” and his understanding of the central importance of myth, song, lyric, rhetoric, art, and poetry for the formation of young minds in the city.
87.Rawls, A Theory of Justice: Original Edition, 87.
88.Ibid., 87–88.
89.Ibid., 88.
90.See Thompson, “Deliberative Democratic Theory and Empirical Political Science,” 498–500.
91.Ibid., 500.
92.Michael X. Delli Carpini, Fay Lomax Cook, and Lawrence R. Jacobs, “Public Deliberation, Discursive Participation, and Citizen Engagement: A Review of the Empirical Literature,” Annual Review of Political Science, Vol. 7 (2004): 325.
93.Thompson, “Deliberative Democratic Theory and Empirical Political Science,” 509, 506.
94.Patrick Deneen, Democratic Faith (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2005), 27.
95.Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 318.
96.Thompson, “Deliberative Democratic Theory and Empirical Political Science,” 500.
97.Rousseau, The Social Contract, in The Basic Political Writings (Indianapolis: Hacket Publishing, 2011), 199. Book III, Ch. 4.
98.Thompson, “Deliberative Democratic Theory and Empirical Political Science,” 500.
99.Rawls, A Theory of Justice: Original Edition, 87.
100.Plato, Republic, 95.
101.See Zach Beauchamp, “The Anti-Liberal Moment,” Vox, September 9, 2019, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/9/9/20750160/liberalism-trump-putin-socialism-reactionary, accessed September 10, 2019. That the popular, left-wing Vox magazine has documented recent criticisms against liberalism of the Lockean and Rawlsian sorts is a testament to the rather widespread discontent.
102.Barker et al, “Introduction,” 7.
103.Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “On the Social Contract,” in The Basic Political Writings, 2nd ed., trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing Co., 2011), Book II, Ch. 5., 167.
104.“Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey Testimony Transcript Hearing November 17, [2020],” , Transcript Library, rev.com/blog/transcripts/mark-zuckerberg-jack-dorsey-testimony-transcript-senate-tech-hearing-november-17.
Chapter 7
1.George W. Bush, Second Inaugural Address, January 20, 2005. The primary source documents of George W. Bush cited in this chapter can be found at https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/index.html.
2.John Mearsheimer, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2018), 153.
3.See ibid., esp. Ch. 3, in which Mearsheimer analyzes political liberalism. Stephen M. Walt, The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018).
4.Mearsheimer, The Great Delusion, 217.
5.This is a reference to C. Bradley Thompson with Yaron Brook, Neoconservatism: An Obituary for an Idea (Boulder, Colorado: Paradigm Publishers, 2010).
6.Max Boot, “I’m No Democrat—but I’m Voting Exclusively for Democrats to Save Our Democracy,” Washington Post, October 11, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/10/11/im-no-democrat-im-voting-exclusively-democrats-save-our-democracy/, accessed November 2, 2021.
7.Irving Kristol defined neoconservatism as a “persuasion” on numerous occasions. For a collection of his essays that mention the term, see Irving Kristol, The Neo-conservative Persuasion: Selected Essays, 1942–2009 (New York: Basic Books, 2011)
8.Deal W. Hudson, Sed Contra: The Neocon Question, July 1, 2003, https://www.crisismagazine.com/2003/sed-contra-the-neocon-question, accessed March 10, 2018.
9.A great deal of scholarship and journalism has investigated the connection between the neoconservatives and Strauss and the Straussians. Two of the most prominent scholars indicting Strauss for the rise of neoconservatism are Shadia Drury and C. Bradley Thompson. See Shadia Drury, Leo Strauss and the American Right (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999) and Thompson and Brook, Neoconservatism. Strauss’s students have responded to these claims with works of their own: see Catherine H. Zuckert and Michael P. Zuckert, The Truth about Leo Strauss: Political Philosophy and American Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); Peter Minowitz, Straussophobia: Defending Leo Strauss and Straussians against Shadia Drury and Other Accusers (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2009).
10.For a detailed list of many of the Straussians involved in the Bush and Reagan administrations, see Kenneth R. Weinstein, “Philosophic Roots, The Role of Leo Strauss, and the War in Iraq,” in The Neocon Reader, ed. Irwin Stelzer (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 204–205.
11.Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 11.
12.Ibid., 15.
13.Ibid., 11.
14.See Book III of Plato’s Republic.
15.Strauss, Natural Right and History, 133.
16.Ibid., 141–142.
17.Leo Strauss, “On Classical Political Philosophy,” in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, ed. Thomas Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 55.
18.Strauss, Natural Right and History, 133.
19.Strauss, “On Classical Political Philosophy,” 55.
20.Strauss, Natural Right and History, 144.
21.Strauss, “On Classical Political Philosophy,” 55, 50.
22.Strauss, Natural Right and History, 141, 142.
23.See, for example, Thompson and Brook, Neoconservatism. While Thompson makes a compelling case for the influence of Strauss on many neoconservatives, especially Strauss’s student Irving Kristol, Thompson’s argument appears to be heavily influenced by his own Straussian background. Thompson emphasizes the Straussian methodology at the expense of other powerful cultural influences that span the ideological spectrum and affect neoconservatives and the Left alike.
24.See Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (San Diego, California: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1991) and especially Robert Kagan, Dangerous Nation (New York: Vintage Books, 2006).
25.Kagan, Dangerous Nation, 42.
26.J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letter III, 1782, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/letter_03.asp.
27.Kagan, Dangerous Nation, 42.
28.Charles Krauthammer, “Democratic Realism: An American Foreign Policy for a Unipolar World,” Irving Kristol Lecture at American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, January 1, 2004, 14.
29.See, for example, Russell Kirk, The Roots of American Order (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI, 2003); George W. Carey, In Defense of the Constitution (Indianapolis, Indiana: Liberty Fund, 1995); Claes G. Ryn, Democracy and the Ethical Life (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1990), 154–165.
30.John Quincy Adams, “An Address Delivered at the Request of a Committee of the Citizens of Washington; On the Occasion of Reading the Declaration of Independence, On the Fourth of July, 1821,” (Washington, DC: Davis and Force, 1821), 29.
31.Allan Bloom, “Rousseau: The Turning Point,” in Giants and Dwarfs: Essays 1960–1990 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), 208.
32.William Kristol and Robert Kagan stress the role of regime-change in “Introduction: National Interest and Global Responsibility,” in Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy, ed. William Kristol and Robert Kagan (New York: Encounter Books, 2000).
33.Strauss, Natural Right and History, 18.
34.Kagan, Dangerous Nation, 40.
35.Ibid.
36.Condoleezza Rice, “The President’s National Security Strategy,” in The Neocon Reader, ed. Irwin Steelier (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 85.
37.Krauthammer, “Democratic Realism,” 14, quoting John F. Kennedy.
38.William Kristol and Robert Kagan, “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 75, No. 4 (July 1996): 20.
39.Krauthammer, “Democratic Realism,” 14.
40.Kristol and Kagan, “Introduction,” 22.
41.Max Boot, “American Imperialism? No Need to Run Away from the Label,” USA Today, May 5, 2003. Thomas Donnelly and William Kristol also employ this Jeffersonian epithet in the title of their article in the Weekly Standard: “An Empire for Liberty,” Weekly Standard, October 2, 2017.
42.Boot, “American Imperialism?”.
43.Max Boot, “We Didn’t Kick Britain’s Ass to Be This Kind of Country: Donald Trump’s Abandonment of Human Rights Is a Repudiation of the Country’s Founding Principles,” Foreign Policy, July 3, 2017.
44.George W. Bush, speech at Whitehall Palace, London, November 20, 2003.
45.George W. Bush, “Address before a Joint Session of Congress on the State of the Union,” January 31, 2006.
46.George H. W. Bush, “Address before a Joint Session of Congress on the State of the Union,” January 29, 1991.
47.Rice, “The President’s National Security Strategy,” 83.
48.Bush, Second Inaugural Address.
49.Kristol and Kagan, “Introduction,” 20.
50.Kagan, “Power and Weakness,” 14–15; Kristol and Kagan, “Introduction,” 23.
51.Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol, “What Is the Public Interest?,” The Public Interest, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Fall 1965): 5.
52.George W. Bush, Speech to United Nations General Assembly, September 21, 2004.
53.Ralph Peters, “Stability, America’s Enemy,” Parameters, Winter 2001-2002, 6.
54.Michael A. Ledeen, The War against the Terror Masters: Why It Happened, Where We Are Now, How We’ll Win (New York: Truman Talley Books, 2003), 213.
55.Mission statement from USAID website: https://www.foreignassistance.gov/, accessed February 21, 2018.
56.https://www.foreignassistance.gov/categories/Education-Social-Services, accessed February 21, 2018. Cf. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing, 1980), 26, 52, Ch. V, “Of Property,” esp. §42: “[T]he increase of lands, and the rights employing of them, is the great art of government”; and Ch. VIII, esp. §95: “Of the Beginning of Political Societies.”
57.John McCain, speech at the Republican National Convention, August 29, 2012. Transcript available at: https://www.politico.com/story/2012/08/john-mccain-rnc-speech-transcript-080399.
58.The Afghan Women and Children Relief Act, 22 USC 2374, passed December 12, 2001, authorized educational and healthcare measures that would benefit women in Afghanistan. In 2002 the U.S.-Afghan Women’s Council was formed to provide education and microfinance programs to women in Afghanistan. This organization was to “help promote partnerships between the public and private sectors, as between the two countries and governments concerned,” and its “key function” was to “mobilize and bring together resources, expertise, and networking capabilities across governments, NGOs, and private companies—and target them specifically toward practical projects for women.” See U.S. Department of State archive, https://2001-2009.state.gov/g/wi/rls/46289.htm and https://2001-2009.state.gov/g/wi/rls/10684.htm, accessed August 13, 2019. Projects such as the Iraqi Women’s Gift Fund combined government support and funding from U.S. corporations and private citizens to help with the “economic and political empowerment of Iraqi women.” U.S. Department of State archive, https://2001-2009.state.gov/g/wi/rls/72237.htm, accessed August 13, 2019.
59.Quoted in Nadje Al-Ali and Nicola Pratt, What Kind of Liberation? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 63.
60.Ibid.
61.See, for example, Michaele L. Ferguson, “‘W’ Stands for Women: Feminism and Security Rhetoric in the Post-9/11 Bush Administration,” Politics and Gender, Vol. 1, No. 1 (March 2005): 9–38; Al-Ali and Pratt, What Kind of Liberation?; Barbara Finlay, Bush and the War on Women: Turning Back the Clock on Women’s Progress (New York: Zed Books, 2006); Kim Berry, “The Symbolic Use of Afghan Women in the War on Terror,” Humboldt Journal of Social Relations, Vol. 27, No. 2 (2003): 137–160; Jennifer L. Fluri and Rachel Lehr, The Carpetbaggers of Kabul and Other American-Afghan Entanglements: Intimate Development, Geopolitics, and the Currency of Gender and Grief (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017), Ch. 4, “ ‘Conscientiously Chic’: The Production and Consumption of Afghan Women’s Liberation.”
62.Many have pointed out the ideological motives for the Soviet “liberation” of women in Central Asia. Some of the major works include Gregory Massell, The Surrogate Proletariat (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1974); Douglas Northrop, Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2004); Marianne Kamp, The New Woman in Uzbekistan: Islam, Modernity and Unveiling under Communism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006). For a comparison of the U.S. and Soviet treatment of Muslim women, see Emily B. Finley, “Women’s Liberation in Sino, Soviet, and American State-Building: Theory and Practice,” Humanitas, Vol. 35, Nos. 1–2 (2022).
63.Ferguson, “ ‘W’ Stands for Women,” 28.
64.U.S. Department of State archive, https://2001-2009.state.gov/g/wi/rls/10684.htm, accessed August 13, 2019.
65.George W. Bush, “Remarks by the First Lady and the President on Efforts to Globally Promote Women’s Human Rights,” The East Room of the White House, March 12, 2004.
66.Richard Holbrooke, “Is U.S. Economy Recovering?,” Interview with Fareed Zakaria GPS, October 24, 2010.
67.Among other places, this is referenced in Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” 2007: Joe Klein, “Runners-Up: David Petraeus,” Time, December 19, 2007.
68.John McCain, speech at the Republican National Convention.
69.Chuck Hagel, “Leaving Iraq, Honorably,” Washington Post, November 26, 2006.
70.“U.S. Policy on Iraq,” an interview with Henry Kissinger, November 19, 2006, on BBC Sunday Morning with Andrew Marr.
71.Kosh Sadat and Stanley McChrystal, “Staying the Course in Afghanistan: How to Fight the Longest War,” Foreign Affairs, November–December 2017. Available at: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/asia/2017-10-16/staying-course-afghanistan.
72.On October 1, 2009, at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, General McChrystal, breaking the tradition that military officials not recommend national strategy, gave a speech calling for another surge of U.S. troops. “Surges” continued under President Trump, who authorized Secretary of Defense James Mattis to deploy additional troops. As of January 2018, fourteen thousand additional troops were deployed to Afghanistan with the prospect of more being sent. See Greg Jaffe and Missy Ryan, “Up to 1,000 More U.S. Troops Could Be Headed to Afghanistan This Spring,” Washington Post, January 21, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/up-to-1000-more-us-troops-could-be-headed-to-afghanistan-this-spring/2018/01/21/153930b6-fd1b-11e7-a46b-a3614530bd87_story.html?utm_term=.fb7b6dee379c. Accessed February 19, 2018. Trump continued to give the Central Intelligence Agency the authority to use drone strikes to kill suspected terrorists, a practice that Obama initiated. See Gordon Lubold and Shane Harris, “Trump Broadens CIA Power to Launch Drone Strikes,” Wall Street Journal Online, March 13, 2017, https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-gave-cia-power-to-launch-drone-strikes-1489444374?mod=rss_US_News, accessed February 19, 2018.
73.For a thorough account of the thoughts and actions of many in the Johnson administration, especially those closest to the decision-making, see David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (New York: Ballantine Books, 1992).
74.Memorandum for the President from George Ball, “A Compromise Solution in South Vietnam,” July 1, 1965, in Mike Gravel, ed., The Pentagon Papers, Vol. 4 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 615–619.
75.Ralph Peters, “Wishful Thinking and Indecisive Wars,” The Journal of International Security Affairs, No. 16 (Spring 2009), http://archive.is/mqqb, accessed February 16, 2018.
76.Ibid.
77.Arthur Brooks, “For Iraqis to Win, the U.S. Must Lose,” in The New York Times, May 11, 2004. https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/11/opinion/for-iraqis-to-win-the-us-must-lose.html.
78.Sadat and McChrystal, “Staying the Course in Afghanistan.”
79.Ibid.
80.See Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917–1991 (New York: Free Press, 1994), Ch. 4, “A Regime Is Born: War Communism, 1918–1921.” For a convincing argument about the similarities between communism and liberal democracy, see Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, trans. Teresa Adelson (New York: Encounter Books, 2016).
81.Kristol and Kagan, “Introduction,” 18.
82.Ibid., 17.
83.Robert Kagan, “Power and Weakness,” Policy Review, No. 113 (June–July 2002): 8.
84.Ibid., 8, 16; Boot, “American Imperialism?”. According to a report released in 2016 by the U.S. director of national intelligence, between January 20, 2009, and December 31, 2015, drone strikes killed 2,372 to 2,581 combatants and 64 to 116 noncombatants outside of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria (https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/reports-publications/item/1741-summary-of-information-regarding-u-s-counterterrorism-strikes-outside-areas-of-active-hostilities, accessed February 19, 2018). The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports that the number of civilians killed was between 380 and 801 for that time period, and the total number killed was 2,753 (https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2016-07-01/obama-drone-casualty-numbers-a-fraction-of-those-recorded-by-the-bureau, accessed February 19, 2018). The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports that these figures represent ten times more drone strikes in “the covert war on terror” during Obama’s presidency than Bush’s (https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2017-01-17/obamas-covert-drone-war-in-numbers-ten-times-more-strikes-than-bush, accessed February 19, 2018).
85.Kristol and Kagan, “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy,” 32.
86.See Thompson and Brook, Neoconservatism, Ch. 4, “The Road to Nihilism,” and Ch. 10, “National-Greatness Conservatism”; Drury, Leo Strauss and the American Right, 11–19. Jason Ralph, America’s War on Terror: The State of the 9/11 Exception from Bush to Obama (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 8–10;
87.David Brooks, “Politics and Patriotism: From Teddy Roosevelt to John McCain,” Weekly Standard, April 26, 1999.
88.Ibid.
89.Ibid.
90.The Watson Institute at Brown University “Cost of War” project has summarized as of April 2015, “In Afghanistan, the return to power of discredited warlords, the marginalization of other groups, and the concentration of power in the presidency have contributed to a government that does not represent the interests of large numbers of Afghans. Afghan women remain cut out of political decisions, and many suffer violations of basic human rights such as health care, food, housing, and security. . . . The Iraqi government lacks political and economic inclusion, does not provide basic security for its citizens, and has regressed towards authoritarianism in recent years. The government’s failure to provide basic security for its citizens and to protect rule of law has contributed to widespread gender violence against Iraqi women, though the international community has been silent about these issues.” http://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/social, accessed February 15, 2018.
91.See David Rose, “Neo Culpa,” Vanity Fair, December 5, 2006. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2007/01/neocons200701.
92.Barack Obama, interview with Vice News, March 10, 2015. See also Jason Hanna, “Here’s How ISIS Was Really Founded,” CNN, August 13, 2016.
93.Watson Institute, “Current United States Counterterror War Locations,” http://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/papers/map/counterterrorwarlocations, accessed February 15, 2018.
94.The Taliban slowly increased their hold over the country until taking over. See “Fivefold Increase in Terrorism Fatalities since 9/11, Says Report,” The Guardian, November 17, 2014; Idrees Ali, “Taliban Increases Influence, Territory in Afghanistan: U.S. Watchdog,” Reuters, October 31, 2017; Ken Dilanian, “Taliban Control of Afghanistan Highest since U.S. Invasion,” NBC News, January 29, 2016; Vanda Felbab-Brown testimony before the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation, & Trade of the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Afghanistan’s terrorism resurgence: “Afghanistan’s terrorism resurgence: Al-Qaida, ISIS, and beyond,” Brookings, April 27, 2017, https://www.brookings.edu/testimonies/afghanistans-terrorism-resurgence-al-qaida-isis-and-beyond/, accessed February 15, 2018.
95.Freedom House, “Freedom in the World 2017,” https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/freedom-world-2017, accessed February 15, 2018.
96.Kagan, Dangerous Nation, 40.
97.Krauthammer, “Democratic Realism,” 2, 17, emphasis in original.
98.Boot, “We Didn’t Kick Britain’s Ass to Be This Kind of Country.”
99.According to the U.S. Department of Defense count on February 13, 2018, Iraq Body Count Project, https://www.iraqbodycount.org/, accessed February 13, 2018. Also see CNN report by Ben Westcott, October 31, 2017. This report relied on data from the Watson Institute at Brown University, Stanford, and the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, https://www.cnn.com/2017/08/21/asia/afghanistan-war-explainer/index.html, accessed February 13, 2018.
100.According to the Watson Institute at Brown University “Costs of War” project: “This figure includes: direct Congressional war appropriations; war-related increases to the Pentagon base budget; veterans care and disability; increases in the homeland security budget; interest payments on direct war borrowing; foreign assistance spending; and estimated future obligations for veterans’ care. This total omits many other expenses, such as the macroeconomic costs to the U.S. economy; the opportunity costs of not investing war dollars in alternative sectors; future interest on war borrowing; and local government and private war costs.” Watson Institute, “Costs of War,” http://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/economic, accessed February 13, 2018.
101.Krauthammer, “Democratic Realism,” 15. For domestic missed opportunity costs, see Watson Institute, “Cost of War,” http://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/economic/economy, accessed February 22, 2018; for the effect of war on intangibles domestically, see Lisa Graves, “Burdens of War: The Consequences of the U.S. Military Response to 9/11: The Costs to Civil Liberties and the Rule of Law in the U.S.,” Watson Institute, http://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/economic/economy, accessed February 22, 2018.
102.See Norah Niland, “Democratic Aspiration and Destabilizing Outcomes in Afghanistan,” Watson Institute, http://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2014/COW%20Niland%2061615.pdf, accessed February 22, 2018. Although Niland’s conclusions, ironically, mirror those of many neoconservatives (she blames the “drawdown of U.S. and NATO troops” and an “inappropriate model of democracy” for failures in Afghanistan), her project conveys the sinister motives and expected consequences of U.S. foreign policy in Afghanistan.
103.Madeleine Albright, interview by Leslie Stahl, CBS’s 60 Minutes, May 12, 1996, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbIX1CP9qr4, accessed February 22, 2018.
104.Kristol and Kagan, “Introduction,” 20. See Michael Novak, Catholic Social Thought and Liberal Institutions: Freedom with Justice (New York: Routledge, 2017).
105.Krauthammer, “Democratic Realism,” 14.
106.George W. Bush, “Address before a Joint Session of the Congress on the State of the Union,” January 20, 2004.
107.See Kristol and Kagan’s discussion of “national greatness” in “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy,” 32.
108.Kristol and Kagan, “Introduction,” 23.
109.Ibid., 22. See also Kristol and Kagan, “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy,” 18–19; Brooks, “Politics and Patriotism.”
110.Strauss, Natural Right and History, 13.
111.Ibid., 139.
112.Ibid., 140–141. Note that Strauss is recounting not merely Plato’s understanding of natural right but also his own. Strauss says, “The classical natural right doctrine [in] its original form, if fully developed, is identical with the doctrine of the best regime” (144).
113.Ibid., 153.
114.David Brooks, “A Return to National Greatness: A Manifesto for a Lost Creed,” Weekly Standard, March 3, 1997.
115.Donald Trump, “State of the Union Address,” January 30, 2018, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/president-donald-j-trumps-state-union-address/, accessed February 26, 2018.
116.https://dod.defense.gov/Portals/1/Documents/pubs/2018-National-Defense-Strategy-Summary.pdf
117.Walt, The Hell of Good Intentions, 16.
118.David Brooks, “Voters, Your Foreign Policy Views Stink!,” New York Times, June 13, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/13/opinion/foreign-policy-populism.html, accessed November 26, 2019.
119.Ibid.
120.Patrick C. R. Terry, “The Libya Intervention (2011): Neither Lawful, nor Successful,” The Comparative and International Law Journal of Southern Africa, Vol. 48, No. 2 (July 2015): 179.
Chapter 8
1.Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 663.
2.Ibid., 663, 664.
3.Ibid., 665.
4.See André Bächtiger, Marco Steenbergen, Thomas Gautschi, and Seraina Pedrini, “Deliberation in Swiss Direct Democracy: A Field Experiment on the Expulsion Initiative,” The National Centres of Competence in Research (NCCR) Newsletter, February 2011.
5.Claes G. Ryn identifies two different and opposing types of democracy: plebiscitary and constitutional. The former he characterizes as Rousseauan and democratist in nature; the latter is consonant with the American system devised by the framers. For a fuller analysis of the dichotomy between the Rousseauean understanding of democracy and the Burkean or American constitutional understanding, see Claes G. Ryn, Democracy and the Ethical Life: A Philosophy of Politics and Community, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1990), esp. Ch. XI, “Constitutionalism versus Plebiscitarianism.”
6.For a thoroughgoing discussion of plebiscitarian democracy, see ibid.
7.See Aristotle, Politics, ed. Ernest Barker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), IV, xi, §20, p. 184.
8.See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Terrence Irwin (Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing Company, 1999), Book III, Ch. 3, §12, p. 35.
9.Orestes Brownson, The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny (New York: P. O’Shea, 1866), 183.
10.Aristotle, Politics, IV, xi, §1, p. 180.
11.Michael J. Abramowitz, “Democracy in Crisis,” Freedom House, https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/freedom-world-2018#anchor-one, accessed May 16, 2018.
12.Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 3.
13.Ibid., 29.
14.Jason Brennan, Against Democracy (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2016), 5.
15.Ibid., 3.
16.Ibid., 17.
17.John McCain, interview, Time, March 3, 2014.
18.Jefferson, First Inaugural Address. Available at https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/jefinau1.asp.
19.Abramowitz, “Democracy in Crisis.”
20.Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (New York: Modern Library, 1996), 282.
21.Ibid.
22.Bertrand, Russell The History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972), 700.
23.Louis Fisher, “Unconstitutional Wars from Truman Forward,” Humanitas, Vol. 30, Nos. 1–2 (2017): 15.
24.C. Eric Schulzke, “Wilsonian Crisis Leadership, the Organic State, and the Modern Presidency,” Polity, Vol. 37, No. 2 (April 2005): 273.
25.Barack Obama refused to call American military intervention in Libya “war” because of the “limited nature, scope, and duration” of the planned operations. See Fisher, “Unconstitutional Wars from Truman Forward,” 19–20.
26.The definition of the “foreign policy community” on which I rely is Walt’s: “those individuals and organizations that actively engage on a regular basis with issues of international affairs. This definition incorporates both formal government organizations and the many groups and individuals that deal with foreign policy as part of their normal activities.” Stephen M. Walt, The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), 95, emphasis in original.
27.Ibid., 112.
28.The following represent a few examples documenting the results of the U.S. intervention in the Middle East: Toby Dodge, “The Ideological Roots of Failure: The Application of Kinetic Neo-liberalism to Iraq,” International Affairs, Vol. 86, No. 6 (November 1, 2010): 1269–1286; Barbara J. Falk, “1989 and Post–Cold War Policymaking: Were the ‘Wrong’ Lessons Learned from the Fall of Communism?,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, Vol. 22, No. 3 (September 2009): 291–313; David Beetham, “The Contradictions of Democratization by Force: The Case of Iraq,” Democratisation, Vol. 16, No. 3 (2009): 443–454; Peter Bergen, The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict between America and Al-Qaeda (New York: Free Press, 2011); Norah Niland, “Democratic Aspiration and Destabilizing Outcomes in Afghanistan,” Watson Institute, October 15, 2014, http://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2014/COW%20Niland%2061615.pdf, accessed February 22, 2018; Patrick C. R. Terry, “The Libya Intervention (2011): Neither Lawful, nor Successful,” The Comparative and International Law Journal of Southern Africa, Vol. 48, No. 2 (July 2015): 162–182.
29.Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 11.
30.Woodrow Wilson, address, April 6, 1918, in Arthur Link, The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol. 47 (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984), 270.
31.Woodrow Wilson, “War Message to Congress,” April 2, 1917, in Albert Fried, ed., A Day of Dedication: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Woodrow Wilson (New York: Macmillan Co., 1965), 309.
32.Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, September 4, 1823.
33.Irving Babbitt, Democracy and Leadership (Indianapolis, Indiana: Liberty Fund, 1979), 104.
34.Ibid.
35.Colin Jones, The Fall of Robespierre: 24 Hours in Revolutionary Paris (London: Oxford University Press, 2021), 34.
36.Ibid., 29.
37.Ibid., 36.
38.See Maximilien Robespierre, “On the Principles of Political Morality That Should Guide the National Convention in the Domestic Administration of the Republic,” February 5, 1794, in Robespierre: Virtue and Terror, ed. Jean Ducange, trans. John Howe (New York: Verson, 2007), 108–125.
39.Jones, The Fall of Robespierre, 37.
40.Benedetto Croce, History as the Story of Liberty (Indianapolis, Indiana: Liberty Fund, 2000), 160.
41.Ibid., 159.
42.Claes G. Ryn, “A More Complete Realism: Grand Strategy in a New Key,” Humanitas, Vol. 35, Nos. 1–2 (2022): 19. This is an idea that is more fully developed in Ryn’s Democracy and the Ethical Life.
43.Ryn, “A More Complete Realism,” 20.
44.Russell, The History of Western Philosophy, 700.
45.George W. Bush, address to a joint session of Congress, September 20, 2001.
46.Hebrews 11:1.