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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
How do Americans think about foundational political questions? Covering the full span of U.S. history, American Political Thought: An Invitation offers a lively yet sophisticated overview of the nature and dynamics of American Political Thought for students and general readers alike. Award-winning scholar Ken Kersch's engaging introduction situates the key debates in their historical, political and cultural context. He introduces the touchstone frameworks and ideas that are both deeply ingrained and yet have been actively re-made in a country that has spent 250 years of shifting circumstances battling over their real-world implications. Covering thinkers ranging from Jefferson to Rawls, Du Bois to Audre Lorde, he examines the ambiguities of the purportedly 'consensus' American principles of liberty, equality, and democracy as well as addressing questions ranging from 'What are the foundations of a legitimate political order?' and 'What is the appropriate role of government?' to 'What are the appropriate terms of full civic membership ?' - and beyond. Politically balanced and inclusive, American Political Thought introduces the contested terrain concerning these core political questions as they were raised over the course of the USA's often dramatic history.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
1 Themes and Frameworks in American Political Thought
The Traditional Framing: Lockean Liberalism, Civic Republicanism, and the Liberal–Republican Debate
Complications and Refinements: Other Liberalisms, Other Republicanisms, and Other Thought Traditions
Theories Positing the Inadequacy of the Traditional Frameworks and Proposing Alternatives
Stories About America
Conclusion
Questions
Notes
2 Settlement, the Road to Revolution, the Founding, and the Early Republic
The Theological Dimensions of Colonial American Thought
Race and Indigeneity during the Settlement and the Road to Revolution
The American Revolution and the Founding
Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian Visions
Conclusion
Questions
Notes
3 Antebellum Political Thought
Jacksonian Democracy
The Whig Vision and “the American System”
Majority Rule and Minority Rights
The Sovereign Individual
Anti-Materialism and Nature
The Call of Moral and Social Reform
An “Empire of Liberty”?
Labor: Work and Slavery
Conclusion
Questions
Notes
4 Secession/Civil War/Reconstruction
Race, Slavery, and Natural Rights
Slavery and Union
A New Birth of Freedom? Equality and Union after Slavery
Conclusion
Questions
Notes
5 Industrial Capitalism, Reformism, and the New American State
Restraining Government: The Philosophy of Laissez-Faire
Conservative Critics of Industrial Capitalism and Liberal Modernity
Reformist and Revolutionary Critics of Industrial Capitalism: Ideas
Ideas in Action
From Pragmatism to Progressivism
Pragmatism in Politics and Government
The New Pluralism: Ethnicity, Nationality, and Race
Sex and Gender
Conclusion
Questions
Notes
6 The New Deal Liberal Order: Collapse, Culmination, or “Great Exception”?
The New Deal
The Fate of the Individual in a Mass Polity
Who Governs? The Liberal Consensus
Outliers in Franklin Roosevelt’s America: The “Radical Right,” Marxian Left, and Marginalized African-Americans
Rumbling Undercurrents
Conclusion
Questions
Notes
7 Radical Stirrings, Civil Rights, the Contentious 1960s, and the Rise of Modern Conservatism
Mass Conformity: The Diagnosis and the Rebels
Postwar Conservatism’s Political Rise
Conservative Political Thought
Civil Rights Resistance
Black Nationalism
The New Left
The Full Flowering: The Late 1960s Counterculture
Conclusion
Questions
Notes
8 The Identity and Post-Materialist Left, the New Right, and Third Way Liberalism
Sex and Gender
The Intervention of Feminist Women of Color
“Gay Liberation” and the Politics of LGBTQ + Identity
Racial and Ethnic Identity and Pride: the Chicano and American Indian Movements, and Beyond
Ecology and Environment
The New Right
Third Way (Neo)Liberalism
Conclusion
Questions
Notes
9 Conclusion
Boundaries, Categories, and Intersectionality
The Persisting Problem of the Color Line
Contemporary Conservatism
Contemporary Liberalism
Capitalism, Socialism, and Neoliberalism
The Resurgent American Left
Conclusion: The Futures of American Political Thought
Questions
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Begin Reading
Index
End User License Agreement
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Dedication
In Memory ofIsaac Kramnick
American Political Thought
An Invitation
KEN I. KERSCH
polity
Copyright © Ken Kersch 2021
The right of Ken Kersch to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2021 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3035-9
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataNames: Kersch, Kenneth Ira, 1964- author.Title: American political thought : an invitation / Ken I. Kersch.Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “The best one-volume introduction to American Political Thought available”-- Provided by publisher.Identifiers: LCCN 2020027944 (print) | LCCN 2020027945 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509530328 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509530335 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509530359 (epub)Subjects: LCSH: United States--Politics and government--Philosophy.Classification: LCC JK31 .K469 2021 (print) | LCC JK31 (ebook) | DDC 320.0973--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020027944LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020027945
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Acknowledgments
In thinking about and writing this book, I am grateful for the assistance of my Boston College students, both the many with whom I have explored this subject in my classes, and the few who provided more extensive critiques, suggestions, and research assistance. Of the latter, I am especially grateful to Steven LeGere, Aaron Pezzullo, and, thankfully, once again, Ryan Towey. Kaylie Ramirez and Caleb Tansey from BC provided more targeted advice, as did Chris Bartlett, Richard Bensel, and Ted Holsten. My conversations with Clem Fatovic on this topic have been so numerous that it is hard for me to know where his understandings of key points and issues end and my own begin.
Anyone who has studied this subject with Isaac Kramnick at Cornell, as Clem and I did together, will know, as casual readers might not, that Isaac’s influence on this book is pervasive. It is also hard for me to imagine having learned whatever I have about this subject without thinking of my initial conversations at Cornell with Ted Lowi, Richard Bensel, Jeremy Rabkin, and Elizabeth Sanders. I have learned an immense amount about this subject since, of course, especially from Keith Whittington, Mark Graber, and Carol Nackenoff, but from many others as well. Boston College provided generous financial assistance.
I am immensely grateful to George Owers at Polity, both for soliciting me to write a book on this topic – which I had long been pondering – and for being such a knowledgeable, engaged, and inspiring editor. The anonymous outside reviewers George assembled first for the book proposal and then for the completed manuscript provided extraordinarily penetrating critiques, sage advice, and essential corrections that significantly improved the book. I also would like to thank Julia Davies at Polity, whose expertise and attentiveness have been indispensable to whatever successes this book may have.
It was with great sadness that I learned of Isaac Kramnick’s death as I was completing this manuscript. But it is with a resolute happiness that I dedicate it to his memory.
Timeline
Chapter 2 Settlement, the Road to Revolution, the Founding, and the Early Republic
1565: First permanent European settlement established by Spain at St. Augustine, Florida
1607: First permanent English settlement established at Jamestown, Virginia
1619: First African laborers imported to British North America
1620: English Puritans settle at Plymouth, Massachusetts
1624: First Dutch Settlement at New Amsterdam (seized by the British in 1664, when its name was changed to New York)
1630–1637: Massachusetts Bay colony established
1675–1678: King Philip’s War
1688–1689: Glorious Revolution (England)
1689: Publication of John Locke’s Second Treatise on Civil Government
1689: English Bill of Rights
1730–1755 (circa): First Great Awakening
1769: Spanish Catholic Franciscan missionaries establish twenty-one permanent missions along the California coast
1775: Pennsylvania Abolition Society founded
1775–1783: American Revolution
1776 (July 4): US Declaration of Independence
1781: Articles of Confederation ratified
1785: New York Society for the Promotion of the Manumission of Slaves founded
1787–1789: Constitutional ratification debates
1789 (September 17): US Constitution adopted
1789–1799: French Revolution
Chapter 3 Antebellum Political Thought
1790–1840 (circa): Second Great Awakening
1791: US Bill of Rights adopted
1791–1804: Saint-Domingue Slave Rebellion/Haitian Revolution
1793: Fugitive Slave Act of 1793
1800: First peaceful transition of power between national political parties
1803: Louisiana Purchase
1804–1806: Lewis and Clark expedition
1808: Atlantic slave trade ended
1812: War of 1812
1814–1815: Hartford Convention
1819–1821: Missouri Crises
1821: Mexican independence from Spain shifts large parts of what later will become the American West from Spanish to Mexican control
1822: Denmark Vesey Rebellion (aborted)
1823: Monroe Doctrine
1830: Indian Removal Act/Trail of Tears
1831:The Liberator founded
1831: Nat Turner Rebellion
1833: American Anti-Slavery Society founded
1845 (July 4): Henry David Thoreau begins residence at Walden Pond
1845: US annexation of Texas
1846–1848: Mexican–American War
1848: California Gold Rush
1848: Seneca Falls Convention
Chapter 4 Secession/Civil War/Reconstruction
1850: Fugitive Slave Act of 1850
1852: Publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin
1854: Republican Party founded
1857:Dred Scott v. Sandford
1858 (August–October): Lincoln–Douglas Debates
1859: Radical abolitionist John Brown’s raid on US arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia
1860 (December): South Carolina secedes
1861 (April 12): South Carolina fires upon Fort Sumter; hostilities begin
1861–1865: Abraham Lincoln presidency
1861–1865: US Civil War
1862: Homestead Act
1863: Emancipation Proclamation
1863: Gettysburg Address
1864: Sand Creek massacre
1865 (April 9): Robert E. Lee surrenders to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse
1865 (April 15): Abraham Lincoln assassinated
1865 (June 19): First African-American Juneteenth celebration commemorating the Emancipation Proclamation
1865: First Ku Klux Klan founded
1865–1870: Civil War Amendments adopted
1865–1877: Reconstruction
1866: Civil Rights Act of 1866
Chapter 5 Industrial Capitalism, Reformism, and the New American State
1869: Transcontinental Railroad completed
1869–1874: Granger Laws passed
1871: Indian Appropriations Act
1872: First National Park established at Yellowstone
1875: Civil Rights Act of 1875 (voided by Civil Rights Cases, 1883)
1876: Alexander Graham Bell invents telephone
1876: Battle of Little Big Horn
1877–1880: Thomas Edison invents the phonograph, the electric light bulb, and electric power generation
1882: Chinese Exclusion Act
1886 (May 4): Haymarket Affair, Chicago
1887: Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) established
1887: Dawes Act (Native American land allotments)
1890: Sherman Anti-trust Act
1890: Wounded Knee massacre
1890: American Frontier closed
1890: “Jim Crow” white supremacy re-established in South
1890s (circa): Populist movement
1890–1920: Progressive era
1892: Homestead Strike, Pittsburgh
1896:Plessy v. Ferguson
1898: Spanish–American War
1901–1909: Theodore Roosevelt presidency
1903: Wright Brothers invent airplane and fly at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina
1908: Introduction of the Model T automobile by the Ford Motor Company
1909: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) founded
1912: Theodore Roosevelt’s third-party “Bull Moose” presidential campaign
1913: Federal Reserve established
1913–1921: Woodrow Wilson presidency
1914–1918: World War I
1917 (April)–1918 (November): US joins World War I
1918–1920: Spanish flu pandemic
1920: Nineteenth Amendment ratified
1920–1933: Prohibition
1921: Tulsa Race massacre
1921: Equal Rights Amendment proposed
1924: Immigration Act
1924: Indian Citizenship Act
Chapter 6 The New Deal Liberal Order: Collapse, Culmination, or “Great Exception”?
1929–1939: The Great Depression
1932: Great Plains dust storms
1933–1934: First New Deal
1933–1945: Franklin Delano Roosevelt presidency
1935: National Labor Relations Act
1935: Social Security Act
1935–1936: Second New Deal
1938: Fair Labor Standards Act
1939–1962: Civil rights movement sit-ins
1941 (December 7): Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii; US enters World War II
1941–1945: World War II
1944: Normandy Invasion
1945: US drops atomic bombs on Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
1945: Yalta Conference
1947–1991: Cold War
1947: Jackie Robinson breaks baseball color barrier
1948: Alger Hiss–Whittaker Chambers hearings
1948–1952: Chinese Communist Revolution
1949–1951 (circa): US television networks established
1950: Mattachine Society founded
1950–1953: Korean War
1950–1954: “McCarthy era” anticommunist crusade
1953: Soviets test hydrogen bomb
Chapter 7 Radical Stirrings, Civil Rights, the Contentious 1960s, and the Rise of Modern Conservatism
1954:Brown v. Board of Education
1955: Lynching of Emmitt Till
1955: Daughters of Bilitis founded
1955:National Review founded by William F. Buckley Jr.
1955–1956: Montgomery Bus Boycott
1955–1975: Vietnam War
1957: Russian Sputnik 1 satellite launched
1959: Nixon–Khrushchev “Kitchen Debate”
1960: Students for a Democratic Society founded
1960: Civil rights movement sit-ins begin at Greensboro, North Carolina
1960: Young Americans for Freedom founded
1960: Christian Broadcasting Network founded
1961: Bay of Pigs invasion (failed)
1961: Freedom Rides
1962: Cuban Missile Crisis
1963: March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom
1963: Birmingham 16th Street Baptist Church bombing
1963 (November 22): John F. Kennedy assassinated, Dallas
1963–1969: Lyndon Baines Johnson presidency
1964 (June): Murder of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, Neshoba County, Mississippi
1964 (June–August): Mississippi Freedom Summer
1964: Civil Rights Act of 1964
1964: Barry Goldwater nomination
1964: UC Berkeley Free Speech movement
1964–1965: Great Society social welfare programs, including Medicare and Medicaid, launched
1965: Selma to Montgomery Voting Rights marches
1965: Voting Rights Act of 1965
1965: Delano Grape Boycott (Cesar Chavez)
1965: Malcolm X assassinated, New York City
1966: National Organization for Women founded
1966: Black Panther Party founded.
1967: Summer of Love, Haight-Asbury, San Francisco
1968 (April 4): Martin Luther King Jr. assassinated, Memphis
1968 (April–May): Urban riots
1968 (June 6): Robert F. Kennedy assassinated, Los Angeles
1968: Democratic National Convention riots, Chicago
1969: Stonewall uprising
1969 (July 20): Apollo 11 moon landing
1969 (August): Woodstock Music Festival
1969–1974: Richard M. Nixon presidency
1970: First Earth Day
1972: Eagle Forum established by Phyllis Schlafly
Chapter 8 The Identity and Post-Materialist Left, the New Right, and Third Way Liberalism
1972–1974: Watergate scandal; Nixon resigns
1973:Roe v. Wade
1973–1974: OPEC Oil Crisis
1979: Moral Majority founded
1981–1989: Ronald Reagan presidency
1982: Gay Men’s Health Crisis founded
1985: Democratic Leadership Council founded
1986: Operation Rescue founded
1987: ACT-UP founded
1990–1991: Persian Gulf War
1992: Los Angeles Riots
1992: North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)
1993: First World Trade Center bombing
1995: Oklahoma City federal building bombing
1998: Bill Clinton–Monica Lewinsky scandal
2001 (September 11): Al-Qaeda terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC
2001: US invasion of Afghanistan
2001– : “War on Terror”
2002: Department of Homeland Security founded
2003–2011: Second Iraq War
2005: Hurricane Katrina
Chapter 9 Conclusion
2008 (September): Financial Crisis/Great Recession
2008: Election of Barack Obama
2010:Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission
2010: Affordable [Health] Care Act
2011: Occupy Wall Street movement
2013: Boston Marathon bombings
2013: Black Lives Matter founded
2014: Ferguson, Missouri, uprising
2015:Obergefell v. Hodges
2016: Donald Trump elected; “American Carnage” Inaugural
2019: Green New Deal Resolution introduced
2019–2020: Donald Trump impeachment and acquittal
2020 (March)– : Coronavirus/Covid-19 pandemic
2020: George Floyd uprising against racist police violence and white supremacy
1Themes and Frameworks in American Political Thought
Who gets to tell you what to do? Asking that question about a group of people comprising a political community – a polis, or polity – is the foundational question of the study of politics.
The question can be considered in two senses: the positive and the normative. The first takes up the question of who gets to tell you what to do as a matter of real-world fact. As a real-world fact, it can be studied empirically by asking: “Who, in fact, has demonstrated the power to direct, or coerce, you into doing A rather than B?” Positive approaches to the exercise of political power bracket judgments about authorized or unauthorized, justified or unjustified, good and bad, right and wrong. They aspire only to accuracy: the facts of the world, as it actually works, and is. The second – the normative – sense of the question, by contrast, takes up the question of who gets to tell you what to do by asking if the person, official, or institution claiming that power has been authorized to do so, is justified in doing so, does so for good or for ill, rightly or wrongly. Normative approaches to the exercise of political power – arising out of what the sociologist Max Weber called the “fact–value” distinction in the social sciences – invite and require moral judgment either of the particular commandment issued by a political actor, or of the underlying foundations of the authorization of power to that superintending actor. Normative approaches to the exercise of political power ask questions about authority, legitimacy, legality, and justice.
In studying political thought, we ask fundamental positive and normative questions about how power (positive) and authority (normative) has been wielded, exercised, and justified within politics generally – the more abstract study of “political theory” or “political philosophy” – and within particular political communities, that is, within a given polis or polity. The study of American political thought is the study of how political power and authority have been both wielded and justified within the United States over the length and breadth of its history. Undertaking such study invites both more general and abstract “universal” questions of political theory and thought, and more “particularistic” questions about the political power and authority within a single, delimited political community, in a world comprised of many, and diverse, political communities, with both overlapping and disparate approaches to the same foundational political questions.
While quotidian contention over who gets to tell whom what to do is as old as human society itself, the public raising of hard and sustained questions about the legitimacy of the social and political order was once rare. To do so (if it even occurred to people) was considered not only presumptuous and hubristic, but also potentially destabilizing, if not subversive: it was dangerous. In almost all human societies, longstanding, deeply rooted, and entrenched assumptions about who gets to tell you what to do pervaded the community. The question was rarely raised in part because, within the community, that answer – whatever it was – was taken to be obvious: what always had been, and what forever will be. Among the most common of these answers were God or the Gods; those chosen by the Gods as their earthly agents (clerics and an ecclesiastical hierarchy; monarchs chosen by divine right); tribal elders; parents; or your lord, master, or owner. The matter of who gets to tell you what to do was decided by presumptively eternal, natural, or divinely ordained hierarchies. In the western political tradition, the animating assumption of these hierarchies setting the relationship between rulers and ruled was that the higher and better rightfully commanded the lower and lesser. To subject these hierarchies to questioning, and to imagine a menu of alternative possibilities, was the beginning of political philosophy. One of the first men to devote his life to political philosophy and to teaching it to the young, the ancient Athenian Socrates, it is worth recalling, was put to death. The charge was the corruption of the city’s youth and the (dangerous and destabilizing) challenging of its Gods.
Do nations like the United States have shared and pervading political philosophies? My own view, as reflected in this book, is that – in complicated ways, to be sure – they do. But there is a pre-history, and context, even to that. Modern nation-states like the US are just one type of polity, and a relatively new one at that. Families, tribes, cities, city-states, and even churches set the rules of group life within a community long before modern “sovereign” nations were imagined. The modern nation first emerged as a distinctive type of polity in seventeenth-century Europe. By that time, under the pressures of economic transformation and a Renaissance humanism fueled in significant part by the rediscovery of ancient Greek and Roman political thought, the political authority structure of medieval Europe had decayed and declined. In medieval Europe, worldly political and religious ecclesiastical authority were extensively intertwined. While disputes sometimes arose, political authority, it was nevertheless said, ran from God to his Church – and, as such, to his appointed agent on earth, the Pope, who sat at the pinnacle of the Christian (Roman Catholic) Church’s clerical hierarchy. As God’s divinely chosen agent, the Pope’s authority extended downward both within and without the Church. In the latter realm, it extended downward to monarchs – Kings and Queens – held to rule by “divine right.” Under the feudal system, that hierarchical line of authority extended downward from the monarch to his or her Lords and Nobles, to their vassals and serfs. Under a feudal political order, the lines of authority concerning who got to tell whom what to do were clearly defined, running vertically from top to bottom. These lines of authority were understood to be not only the reality, but rightful.
The dawn of modernity, which was characterized by a new focus on men as unique, worldly, self-determining agents, was reflected in, and driven by, a series of revolutionary new departures: the invention of the printing press (c. 1440); the (Protestant) Reformation (c. 1517–1648) and, relatedly, the first translations of the Bible into vernacular languages, the Protestant elevation of the laity above the clergy, and the democratization of church structures. The new humanism, an incipient capitalism, and Protestantism generated a cascade of disputes that repeatedly raised more persistent questions about who gets to tell whom what to do, challenging in a more substantial and systematic way society’s long-settled hierarchies. Europe’s monarchs began to push back against the commands and dictates of the Pope. Feudal lords and nobles pushed back in a more pervasive way against the political power and authority of the monarchs. Vassals, serfs, and peasants began pushing back more vehemently and insistently against the authority of their Lords and masters.
As the feudal order unraveled at the dawn of modernity, a sense of crisis descended concerning the legitimacy of the full array of claims to authority. New, “modern” or “liberal” theories of the origins of political authority – of who gets to tell you what to do – emerged out of this crisis. These theories were forged with the aim of reconstructing some sense of legitimate, rightful authority that would underwrite a workable political order in a context of spiraling chaos, occasioning a succession of wars, rebellions, and acts of insolent disobedience. In time, “modern” political theorists like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau alighted upon a new – and revolutionary – social contract theory of political authority, which emerged in conjunction with new understandings of sovereignty and nationhood. Who got to tell you what to do? The authorized ruler of your (geographically bounded and delimited) nation. Who was the foundational and authorized ruler of your nation? The sovereign (which, for some radical theorists, was constituted by the people as a whole).
With moderns chafing at hierarchies underwritten by the understanding that the stronger, the better, or the powers-that-be from time immemorial got to tell them what to do, a new group of political theories began with what, under conditions of dissension and disagreement concerning first principles, they assumed would be the least controversial starting point promising the broadest common ground. They proposed that each individual person (answering to his own understanding of God’s commands) got to tell himself what to do (the “his” here is deliberate: gender played a major role in structuring the public realm). Modern political theorists asked next, “Under what conditions would this person delegate the authority to tell himself what to do to someone other than himself?” The answer was: “Under conditions in which that person could help them get something that they needed or wanted but could not otherwise get if sovereignty were held only to reside in their lowly selves – all equals in the state of nature – and no higher.” In Leviathan (1651), the English political theorist Thomas Hobbes described the state of nature as a condition in which
there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently no culture of the earth, no navigation nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and, which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
Hobbes posited the state of nature, bereft of common political authority, as a hellscape. His countryman John Locke’s subsequent understanding of the state of nature (Second Treatise on Civil Government, 1689) was somewhat more benign, but still undesirable. It was a condition in which the protection of highly valued natural rights to “life, liberty, and property” vouchsafed to all by nature was perpetually uncertain. Under such conditions, these modern political theorists proposed, men would agree to a “social contract” by which they would cede either all power, save that of self-defense (Hobbes), or all powers which did not transgress upon their core natural rights (Locke), to a sovereign who would stand, by their own hypothesized grant of political authority, above them. The sovereign would then have the good and rightful authority to tell them what to do, since the sovereign’s power was a power they themselves, acting in the posited state of nature as sovereign individuals of their own free will, would have logically conferred upon – delegated to – the sovereign to advance their own best individual and common interests. These modern ideas of the origins of political authority underwrote the rise of a distinctive species of modern nation-state. And they were enlisted by the American Revolutionaries as the basis for their Declaration of Independence (1776), and, under the theory of “popular sovereignty” – “We the People” – for the Constitution of the United States (1787/1789).
As such, many have argued that, from its inception in the “Age of Revolutions” (English, 1689; French, 1789), American political thought represents an apotheosis of the new genus of “modern” political thinking. In part by dint of its fictional and imaginatively willed origins in the settlement of an (ostensibly) unpopulated blank-slate wilderness, with none of the on-the-ground monarchical and ecclesiastical baggage of palimpsest England and France, the United States was heralded by many – not least the proud Americans themselves – as the first “new” nation, founded upon modern principles on the origins of legitimate political authority, free from the encrusted hierarchies and traditions of Old World assumptions and understandings. Indeed, John Locke himself was looking across the ocean to this altogether new departure: “In the beginning,” he wrote of the hypothesized state of nature in his Second Treatise, “all the world was America.”
While there is certainly something to this, the reality is considerably more complicated. For one thing, of course, the settlers who came to North America were hardly stripped clean of their prior understandings of political and other forms of authority – of their faiths, folkways, traditions, and hierarchical assumptions. All – including a belief in the rightfulness of monarchy – were imported, to greater and lesser degrees, into the North American settlement. To complicate matters further, the polity – or polities, since British North America was initially organized as a contiguous arrangement of separate self-governing colonies – was far from static or impermeable. From the beginning, new immigrants and new ideas were introduced into the polity, either from the outside, or as cultivated from within. These layered over and interacted with the peoples and the political thought already there. As such, “New World” or not, the US polity was its own palimpsest. The result was a lively political culture, and distinctive tradition of American political thought, grounded, dynamic, and perpetually becoming.
The Traditional Framing: Lockean Liberalism, Civic Republicanism, and the Liberal–Republican Debate
Frameworks of American Political Thought
(Lockean) liberalism (“The Hartz Thesis”)– Other liberalisms:
J. David Greenstone’s liberal bipolarity Judith Shklar’s liberalism of fear Rawlsian liberalism
(Civic) republicanism
Ascriptive Americanism
Lockean Liberalism
Some of the first phrases to fall from the lips of contemporary scholars seeking a core essence of American political thought (if they are so inclined) – whether to praise, condemn, or simply describe it – are “Lockean liberalism,” “liberal individualism,” “individual liberty,” and “individual freedom.” The belief in “American exceptionalism” – the idea that the United States as a polity is unique, and sui generis – has been closely (if not solely) associated with an understanding that the United States is quintessentially, and to a peerless degree, a Lockean liberal nation. By this, these scholars mean that the American people have defined themselves as a nation defined not, as other nations have been, by race or ethnicity, its people (volk), spirit (geist), or its primordial traditions, but rather by a pervading commitment to a set of political-philosophical ideas and ideals associated with Lockean liberalism or liberal individualism – by its foundational commitment to the political liberty of free and equal individuals.
The most prominent contemporary articulation of this view is known as the “Hartz thesis,” advanced by the Harvard political scientist Louis Hartz in The Liberal Tradition in America (1955). The Hartz thesis holds that the key to understanding how Americans think about political authority is that, as modern liberals, they collectively subscribe to the belief that all claims to political authority ultimately derive from the will of sovereign individuals. Acting of their own free will, in their own self-interest, these individuals chose to unite with others, via a social contract, to create a government to protect their foundational natural rights to “life, liberty, and property.”1 Hartz argued – critically, rather than in celebration – that, for the length of its history, American politics, and, indeed, the political imagination of Americans, has been fundamentally shaped and bounded by a consensus commitment to Lockean liberal premises and principles.
Liberal political thought as a genus is defined by a set of themes and touchstones. First, liberalism takes the individual as the foundational unit of analysis. It considers political questions initially from the standpoint of the individual, as opposed to, say, communal bodies or groups, like a tribe, family, or demos (the people, considered as a self-governing unity, and whole) – although, to be sure, each of these can be reimagined in accord with liberal premises. Second, liberalism posits that the chief purpose of government is to protect the rights of individuals. In line with liberalism’s a priori individualism, those rights are considered pre-political: they exist in nature, prior to the establishment of political society, by virtue of simply being human. Third, liberalism promises individual freedom, guaranteed equally to all individuals, under a legitimately authorized government limited by constitutional constraints and the rule of law (an understanding that political philosophers call “negative freedom”).2 Fourth, by necessary implication from its commitment to limited government under the rule of law, liberalism enacts a separation between the public and private spheres, and distinguishes the proper realms of state and civil society. While as a practical matter the boundaries can be disputed, liberalism tends to push, if not confine, matters of economic production, religion, and family to the private sphere, removing them from the purview of public concern and government policy. Liberalism, moreover, typically valorizes the private over the public sphere, the latter of which it tends to regard as a necessary evil. Finally, liberalism’s touchstone thinker John Locke placed special value within his framework on the duty to work, and the productive value of labor (“God gave the world … to the industrious and rational”) – the “producer ethic” – from which Locke derives the right to private property, the third of his posited troika of foundational natural rights (life, liberty, and property). Locke highly valued religious liberty, which he considered an essential sphere in which (most) individuals would be free to follow their inner lights and consciences in the private sphere, without interference from worldly governments. Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) is a seminal argument for that fledgling commitment. Locke’s call for religious liberty and toleration reflected the incipient tendencies of liberal political thought to valorize secular government and the separation of Church and State.
While liberal individualism is a fairly abstract political theory, it has considerable real-world implications for how Americans think about politics. (Hartz considered Lockean liberalism to be a hegemonic political ideology that had lamentably circumscribed the collective aspirations and political possibilities of the American people.) While Locke’s social contract theory was designed to justify and legitimize government power (in Locke’s case, England’s Glorious Revolution, 1688–1689) – to put it on firm foundations derived from the free will of sovereign, independent individuals – it also has the perhaps ironic effect of simultaneously subverting that power by implication. It is potentially subversive of the power it legitimates by underlining that, if government does not serve the ends for which it has been created, the social contract has been violated, and, as such, is rendered null and void. A contract, in other words, can be broken. And, if it is, the parties are released from their obligations, and all bets are off. Pursuant to what Locke deemed the (natural) right of revolution, the people perpetually retain the sovereign right “to alter and abolish” the government for a failure to achieve, or for betraying, its contracted aims.
The Lockean liberal understanding of the origins of free governments holds that government powers are delegated by the sovereign people for specific ends – and those ends only. Any powers exercised by the government not directed toward those ends, or in violation of the rights for which government was created to protect, are, under the paradigm, considered illegitimate exercises of governmental power. As such, many attribute familiar features of American political thinking – the deep (and sometimes conspiratorial) suspicion that the government is exceeding its rightful powers (anti-statism); the persistent demands for the recognition of individual rights by proponents of civil liberties and civil rights; and hot-headed threats of rebellion and revolution in the name of freedom (think the recent militia or Tea Party movements on the Right) – to the Lockean liberal paradigm that has ostensibly held the country in its grip from its inception. Many have commented on what seems like the country’s congenital suspicion of authority, per se – the prickly affinity of Americans for the idea that nobody gets to tell someone what to do unless he or she has (expressly?) delegated that authority to that person. They have fingered that suspicion as the root cause of the much remarked upon sense of atomization and isolation in American life, arising out of the orienting liberal assumption that it is, in the end, everyone for him- or herself.
Surveys of public attitudes suggest that, in contrast to Western Europeans, most Americans believe that we are all free to rise by our own efforts. The sometimes unstated implication is that if someone fails it must have been for a lack of such efforts, a personal failing. By these lights, in a free country individuals are authors of both their own successes and their own failures. Society’s “losers” are not entitled to any assistance from the government, whose chief, and perhaps sole, purpose is to set the rules of the game for the free play of the ordered liberty of free individuals. This thoroughgoing individualism, Louis Hartz complained, made Americans especially resistant to any recognition of class consciousness, perhaps pre-eminently among the working class. The Lockean liberal framework may also be responsible for the generalized sense of anxiety, workaholism, and competitiveness, for the special attraction Americans seem to have for naming winners and losers, and even the culture’s running undertone of violence. A saying displayed in the entryway of a prominent American business school in Texas nicely captures the general mood, and anxiety: “There is no status quo in American life: you are either on your way up, or on your way down.”
Liberal Foundations, Themes, and Political Preoccupations
Individualism
Individual rights/rights consciousness, with special value placed on rights to labor, property, and religious toleration and liberty
Limited government, held to have originated by consent, pursuant to a social contract
Rule of law
[Liberal] constitutionalism
Separation of the public and private spheres
Right of revolution for violation of the terms of the original agreement upon which government was founded
(Civic) Republicanism
In the 1960s, the historians J.G.A. Pocock, Bernard Bailyn, and Gordon Wood launched the first scholarly salvo against the Hartz thesis. These historians of the founding era argued that in that seminal period at least – and, hence, perhaps in others going forward – a quite different political thought tradition, republicanism (sometimes styled “civic republican” or “classical republicanism”), had been ubitquitous for anyone who troubled to look. This challenge to the Hartz thesis launched “the liberal–republican” (or, in a slightly different guise, the “liberal–communitarian”) debate among scholars of American political thought. For a time, scholars lined up as partisans arguing for the ideological predominance of one framework or the other, either at the founding, in other periods or moments of American history, or across it, or within identifiable spaces and subcultures within the American political order.
While liberalism is a product of political modernity, republicanism’s lineage dates back to ancient Greece and Rome. “Classical” republican thought was rediscovered and revived during the Renaissance (including by the Italian political philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli in his Discourses on Livy, 1531; interestingly, Machiavelli was also the author of the proto-modern political theory masterpiece The Prince, 1532). That current of classical and Renaissance thought was then – most proximately as concerns American political thought, as revised and, in some sense, reimagined for a modern context – drafted into service in the extended seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political struggles between the English Crown and Parliament. As Englishmen, the American colonists were steeped in this politics of their mother country. That politics was the prism through which the American colonists came to understand their crescendo of grievances with the English Crown in the aftermath of the French and Indian War (1754–1763). This framing informed the political thought that fomented the American Revolution.
Instead of starting with a posited sovereign individual in a state of nature, republicans, following Aristotle, began by stipulating the social and political – the inherently communal nature – of man. (Aristotle, Politics: “Man is a political animal.”) The republican writers of ancient Greece and Rome – Aristotle, Polybius, Cicero, and others – were widely read by the North American colonial, revolutionary, and early republic elites as part of their classical educations, which often included instruction in the original ancient Greek and Latin languages of such works. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English “country” political thought had enlisted classical republicanism to challenge the authority of the English “Court” and Crown. When, not long afterward, the colonists found themselves with their own growing list of grievances against the Court and Crown (George III), they were primed by both these ancient and English predecessors to read their grievances through republican lenses.
Classical republican thought struck themes that were different from – and, in some cases, the antithesis of – individualistic liberalism. Perhaps foremost was the foundational, a priori commitment to the common good (the word “republic” itself derives from the Latin res publica – “public things”). Republicanism glorified the “free state” – the independent polity, understood as one body, indivisible, directing its own collective life and destiny, free from foreign subjugation or constraint. Liberty is of surpassing value to republicans. But the emphasis within republican thought was on the understanding that no individual within the polity was truly free unless the community of which he was a part was itself, as a body, free. Republican thought, moreover, placed surpassing value on the virtue – the “civic virtue” – of republican citizens, with virtue itself defined as involving the pursuit of the common good. Republicanism holds that the preservation of individual and collective freedom depends on the virtue of ordinary citizens, their selfless and patriotic devotion to the principles of a free republic, and the common political project. This entailed, and was evidenced by, a willingness of citizens to sacrifice their own personal or private interests for the greater good. As such, whereas liberalism valorizes individual rights, republicanism entails a strenuous, and even austere, devotion to duty. Virtuous republican “citizens” (a republican concept) are expected to directly and actively participate in public life, not to advance their private or partial interests, but to work together with their fellow citizens to advance the common good. (The reliance on elected “representatives” in deliberative bodies, or mercenaries in war, was considered by republicans to be a corruption – evidence of a want of responsibility, citizenship, and duty.) Put otherwise, citizens were understood to be directly responsible for the exercise and preservation of their own freedoms. (As such, republicans traditionally spurned standing armies in favor of citizen militias.) In this regard, many speak of liberalism being anchored in “negative” conceptions of liberty (where liberty is preserved by the limitations imposed on the powers of government) and republicanism in conceptions of “positive” liberty (where liberty is manifested as a free people’s active exercise of their power to make their own laws, to set their own collective path, and realize their own common political project).3 It is characteristic of republicans to be perpetually apprehending the freedom of their polity to be under threat, whether from internal corruption or external subversion or predation.
Republican thought holds that corruption – the worst fate that can be befall a republic – can come from diverse sources: it can be brought on by a falling away from the state’s founding principles, and from a decline in virtuousness in the citizenry, including – in a refusal of the abstemious self-denial required of republicans – when citizens’ personal or private interests come to prevail over the commitment to virtuous life and the common good. This may be evidenced by a succumbing to the spirit of party, or to the spirit of commerce, the latter of which is doubly suspect as both being based in the pursuit of private interests and for its tendency to distract citizens from their strenuous responsibilities to actively participate in public life. Subversion is enabled by weakness and selfishness, treachery, disloyalty, and treason.
Unlike liberalism, which posits that the end of the state is the preservation of individual rights, republicanism posits a moral purpose or end for the state. As such, following Aristotle, republicanism places surpassing value on establishing the conditions for the cultivation of personal or civic virtue conducive to human flourishing. In this regard, republicans value laws directed to the improvement of men’s morals, at making men good. Consequently, as per the Swiss/French political thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau, republican states will often hew to a “civil religion.”4 Many republicans understood theistic religions as instrumentally valuable in advancing the social and political order sustained by virtuous citizens in a free state – but only to the extent that they were consistent with, or lent support to, the society’s civic religion, which they privileged.
Despite their many differences, there are some commonalities among liberal and republican political outlooks. These include a commitment to limited government and the rule of law (albeit each according to its own distinctive concerns, aspirations, and idioms). Because it begins with mostly self-interested individuals, liberalism valorizes the establishment of institutional mechanisms of countervailing powers to enforce limitations on government power, to steer the exercise of the powers of government, to the extent possible, toward the best approximation of the public good. (Liberals vary in the degree to which they are sanguine about the possibility of doing so.) In its own more hopeful visions for the realization of the common good, republicanism, by contrast, places a higher value, and greater hopes, on inculcation through education and other formative practices (like patriotic exercises and military service), and on the strict adherence by a virtuous citizenry to rules and legal and institutional forms.
While it has its uses, the stark opposition often posited between the conceptual universes of liberal and republican thought – sometimes by contemporary scholars who joined one team or the other in the “Liberal–Republican” Debate – can distort the way that these different currents of thought have actually informed the American experience. Ancient, Renaissance, and modern republicanism, for one thing, were not identical. While their core preoccupations and commitments mark them as a continuation of the same family of ideas, modern republicans were more inclined to regard participation in the public sphere as an instrumental means to the achievement of private ends, as opposed to an independent means to human flourishing to be valued for its own sake. In this regard, while they valued direct civic engagement in public life more than liberals, their expectations and standards for that participation were much less strenuous than those of ancient Greece or Rome. They were certainly more amenable to commerce, and, although they lauded it when it appeared – in the courage and sacrifices of George Washington, for example, as a citizen and soldier – they lowered their expectation of the manifestation of heroic virtues by ordinary citizens in mundane times. Modern republicans certainly placed a much greater emphasis on individual liberty than did classical republicans. For these reasons, many of those moderns whose writings are considered core texts of American political thought, like Montesquieu, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexis de Tocqueville, are classed by some, sometimes, as republicans and by others, at other times, as liberals. The truth is that they drew from the well of both political thought traditions, which, moreover, cross-pollinated, and were far from static. The same was true for less well-known thinkers, and, indeed, of ordinary Americans as they have thought about and participated in public life over the course of American history.
Republican Foundations, Themes, and Political Preoccupations
Devotion to the common good
Pursuit of moral and civic virtue
Idea of a morally aspiring free state
Patriotism and sacrifice for the community
Valorization of public duties over private rights
Civic commitments/civic religion given priority over theistic private faith
Concern with decline, decay, or defeat through internal corruption or foreign subversion
Call for renewal through return to founding principles
Complications and Refinements: Other Liberalisms, Other Republicanisms, and Other Thought Traditions
It is hard to deny the remarkable ability of the Lockean liberal and republican frameworks to illuminate longstanding patterns in the way that Americans from the country’s inception have tended to think about, and practice, politics. In addition to arguing about the respective influence of one framework versus the other, generally, among different groups and actors, and across time, some scholars who broadly subscribe to the Hartz thesis positing Lockean liberal hegemony have suggested that it might be either more accurate or more helpful to look at American political thought through the prism of other American liberalisms that, in a positive sense, have served as foundations for American political thought, and/or, normatively, should serve as the basis for that thought.
In A Theory of Justice (1971), the Harvard analytic philosopher John Rawls (1921–2002), for instance, following liberal philosophers before him, including John Locke, but also David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and John Stuart Mill, explicated a new social contract considered and agreed upon, as he imagined it, by individuals in an “original position” under a “veil of ignorance” about how well they would fare in the new society, economically and in social status. The liberal Rawls posited that these hypothetically contracting individuals would place surpassing value on liberty and equality, via limited constitutional government by consent committed to the appropriate guarantees for individual rights. Rawls argued, broadly speaking, moreover, that in addition to securing these foundational guarantees, individuals operating behind a veil of ignorance would insist that the new political order be just, with what is just defined as what is fair (“justice as fairness”). This, Rawls argued, entailed not simply a commitment to maximizing individual liberty (so long as that liberty did not infringe upon the equal liberty of others – Mill’s “harm principle”). It further entailed a certain level of distributive justice – a floor, guaranteed by the liberal state, that set limits to the level of economic and social status inequality. Rawls enlisted the “minimax” principle (minimizing the maximum possible loss) in specifying how his theory of justice would ensure the realization of basic individual freedoms and equal opportunity of access to offices and positions. In this way, his liberalism sought to model a just political order that offered the fullest possible commitment to liberty and equality (equal rights to basic liberties), under conditions of universal access to power consistent with the full civic membership of free and equal citizens. This liberalism, unlike Locke’s, provided a clear justification for the modern redistributive (liberal) social welfare state.
For her part, Judith Shklar (1928–1992), a Harvard political scientist, argued, at least implicitly, that Rawls’s grand theoretical bid for an intricately constructed systematic liberalism in A Theory of Justice (and his other books offering refinements of his initial model) was perhaps a bit illiberal in its totalizing ambitions. Informed by her direct encounters with the totalitarian horrors of the twentieth century, including Nazism and Stalinism, Shklar, a Latvian-Jewish refugee, eschewed efforts to forge grand systems. Ever alert to the menace of overwrought utopian ambitions – even in pursuit of ostensibly noble ends – Shklar’s liberalism spent less time positing first principles, and then constructing an elaborate theory of government on those foundations, than focusing our attention on attending to the greatest danger and problem in collective life: human cruelty. Putting “cruelty first” entailed what Shklar called a “liberalism of fear.” Such a liberalism was decidedly non-perfectionist – it held to a (seemingly) modest, but firm, commitment to the project of staving off, to the maximum extent possible in an imperfect world, the greatest ravages and evils of human societies.
While retaining the schematic ambitions of Hartz, and retaining his emphasis on the importance of liberalism, two frameworks of American political thought with ties to the University of Chicago posited the thought tradition of the United States as essentially plural, and contested. The University of Chicago political scientist J. David Greenstone (1937–1990) accepted Hartz’s thesis about the predominance of liberalism in the United States. Greenstone, however, rejected Hartz’s view that this had entailed an American “consensus” – to a one-dimensional hegemonically liberal political culture. Where Hartz had posited widespread and reflexive agreement among Americans, Greenstone found a history of political conflict. Taking Abraham Lincoln’s thought as his point of entry, Greenstone proposed that, if one looked at the nation’s actual politics over the long term, one could discern two different and distinguishable (“bipolar”) liberalisms that were offered in opposition to each other in contests for political power. One emphasized “negative liberty,” or freedom from coercion by government. The other promised “positive liberty,” or the purposive and affirmative direction of public power to expand the scope of individual freedom, in a practical, real-world sense, in everyday life. This concrete contestation over the meaning of liberty, with divergent views over the legitimacy of the enlistment of government power to achieve it, Greenstone argued, was a defining feature of American politics.
Although he wrote almost nothing about American political thought, the German-Jewish émigré University of Chicago political philosopher Leo Strauss (1899–1973) sired a line of scholars who came to write extensively about American political thought from a “Straussian” perspective. Contemporary Straussians – a mostly conservative cohort – have their own distinctive take on, idioms concerning, and disputes over the nature of the American political “regime.” In Natural Right and History (1953), Strauss drew a fundamental distinction between the “ancients” and the “moderns” in political thought. The former, he argued, were devoted to understandings of political communities as committed to knowing and, in turn, pursuing the highest substantive philosophical ideals of truth, virtue, and justice. The latter, Strauss argued, as exemplified by Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke, in formulating their theories of political life, set these normatively desirable philosophical ideals to the side, and focused their attention instead on the “low but solid” goal of establishing social peace among members of a polity, who, in the nature of things, disagreed about the content of those ideas, and, indeed, had a tendency to go to war over them. While the ancients, one might say, believed that politics was about truth, virtue, and justice, the moderns believed it was about self-preservation and self-interest.
Liberalism is an instantiation, par excellence, of the modern view. Its theory of the social contract posits a Hobbesian (or, somewhat more benignly, a Lockean) unsafe – if not dog-eat-dog – state of nature. It then theorizes a contractual agreement that brackets any questions concerning hotly disputed substantive ideals. On these the parties to the contract agree to disagree, and move forward. They create a government that preserves the individual’s right to follow his or her own understandings of what he or she believes those ideas entail and require (“liberal neutrality”).
Strauss mourned the transition of western societies from the ancient understandings to the modern ones as a falling off. It involved, in important ways, a civilizational decline, entailing the abandonment of the pursuit of the highest human ideals in favor of the more grubby and delimited. At the same time, however, Strauss seemed to suggest at various points that this movement toward modernity may have been inevitable. It may even have had some distinct advantages, though this was far from clear. One virtue liberal modernity did have, however, was that it was far from pristine. There were cracks in the pavement through which flowers could bloom. A commitment to the pursuit of the highest ideals in the modern world was retained, for instance, in classic education in the liberal arts (chiefly the “Great Books” of western thought). It was also retained in the teachings of what Straussians have called “revealed religion.” To the extent that we in the modern world were willing to study and construct our institutions to invite, to the extent possible, the salubrious influence of Athens (standing for reason) and Jerusalem (standing for revelation), we might be able to construct a morally and philosophically admirable and decent polity.
Most Straussians writing about American political thought adopted a self-consciously (and, some would say, unduly self-aggrandizing) patriotic stance toward the American polity, although they do not all think about it in the same way. Some, in implicit agreement with Louis Hartz, consider the United States an essentially modern, liberal (and, perhaps, bourgeois and commercial) polity. And they do not hesitate to pass judgment on the political regime. Straussians do not believe that one can separate positive from normative political analysis, in the way that most contemporary social scientists do. They either believe that it is good that the United States is liberal and modern, or they believe that, felicitously, in conjunction with its continuing commitment to normatively desirable non-liberal institutions inside the overarching liberal order (e.g. belief in God; loyalty to family and country; and commitment to traditional [natural] hierarchies), the US regime is worthy of full assent, and possibly even celebration, as the best possible political regime under modern conditions. These Straussians, however, are ever alert to the threats posed to these institutions by the country’s secular liberals, who, as they see it, have waged war against them. For their part, other Straussians either challenge the foundational liberalism of the American political regime, such as by emphasizing republican themes (though they rarely declare themselves as simply proponents of republicanism as against liberalism), or by promoting the religious commitments of the American people and the religious (often Christian) grounding of the American political experiment. Alternatively, some Straussians reimagine liberalism, in the United States, at least, along lines that reject the concepts of liberal neutrality and individual autonomy and posit in their place a commitment within liberalism to a set of substantive moral and philosophical ends. These Straussians will define the content of individual rights in the American liberal order by the lights of a substantive telos informed by a robust understanding of what is just, right, and good. If what is said to be a “right” does not square with that substantive requirement, the claim is held to be mistaken – it is, after due consideration, no right at all.
Straussians pursue their scholarly agendas in American political thought in a family of ways. Many undertake studies of key figures – often of those
