My purpose in this essay is to show that the enduring value of Alexis de Tocqueville’s work is rooted in his philosophical anthropology, or view of human nature. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville reveals his view of human nature as he treats the relationship between religion and politics in the democratic social state. His political […]
Shumaker. 2016
To counter partisan polarization, political theorists like John Rawls and political leaders like Barack Obama have sought to locate and express consensual elements of American culture that can appeal to or at least be accepted by people having political, religious, moral, and philosophical differences. While orthodox pluralism previously recognized the need for a normative consensus […]
Garrison, Justin. 2016
Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men provides a vivid account of the tension between ethics and politics. Especially in studies of Adam Stanton and Willie Stark, scholars have used concepts such as “idealism” and “realism” to interpret this theme. Grounded in the secondary literature and political theory, this article provides an original, philosophically rigorous […]
Meyers, Peter.
Americans in the post–civil rights era are sharply divided over the principle of color-blindness or race neutrality in law and policy, with some holding a strict adherence to the idea to be indispensable to the achievement of just and healthy race relations and others rejecting at least present appeals to color-blindness as obstructive of needed […]
Schake, Kori. 2017
History records only one peaceful transition of hegemonic power: the passage from British to American dominance of the international order. What made that transition uniquely cooperative and nonviolent? Does it offer lessons to guide policy as the United States faces its own challengers to the order it has enforced since the 1940s? To answer these […]
