This article argues that Jane Addams developed a distinctive peace theory drawing on Herbert Spencer and Giuseppe Mazzini in response to gendered war discourse. Spencer's typology of militaristic and industrial societies influenced Addams's critique of American militarism, while Mazzini's vision of concentric circles of ethical obligation influenced her positive vision. Contrasting with William James's famous moral alternatives to war, Addams distanced herself from masculine heroism, establishing discourse centered on human needs. Her "new humanitarianism," rooted in Hull-House experiences and Mazzini-inspired ethics of nurture, offered an ethical alternative to militarism. During WWI, Addams strategically adjusted her rhetoric to the women's peace movement, emphasizing women's sensibilities and expanding her ethics based on universal needs like improving "the standard of life" and advocating for international food relief. Addams's creative intellectual synthesis of Spencer and Mazzini and her strategic adaptation to gendered audiences made indispensable contributions to her distinctive political theory.
This research note analyzes over 85,000 documents from the National Archives Founders Online database to study the significance of virtue in the writings of seven prominent founders: Jefferson, Washington, Madison, Hamilton, Jay, Adams, and Franklin. Using artificial intelligence and natural language processing, we identify nearly every virtue invoked in the database to map the rich constellations of character that appear throughout founding-era writings. This analysis offers three contributions. First, we show that the founders consistently employ a rich and sustained vocabulary of virtue across both public and private writings. Second, we demonstrate that specific virtues (e.g., respect, justice, prudence, and hope) appear far more frequently than generalized appeals to "virtue." Third, we identify the top 25 most frequently cited virtues for each founder, revealing a diverse array of character qualities highlighted throughout their thought. Together, these findings provide a new empirical foundation for interpreting the moral vocabulary of the American founding.
Cormac McCarthy's dark, violent works have received attention from English scholars throughout his writing career but also bear reading by political theorists and philosophers as serious political literature. Two of McCarthy's works, The Sunset Limited and Stella Maris, particularly ought to be read as and alongside Platonic dialogues. In the form and content of the dialogues, in both the argument and the action of the works, McCarthy engages with Platonic themes of life, death, the afterlife, and, most importantly for this analysis, suicide. In these dialogues, the characters of White and Alicia, as anti-Socratic figures, present rational arguments about the meaninglessness of the world against the religious arguments of their pseudo-Socratic counterparts, leading readers to question both the value of philosophical inquiry and what might keep someone from pursuing suicide, a perennial political problem.
Constitutional scholars have recently called into question the interpretation that the Constitution strictly enumerates powers, highlighting a "now forgotten" nationalism present at the founding. Yet even among those nationalists given a voice in the scholarship on the Convention, comparatively little has been written about the moral psychology undergirding the nationalist ideology. This article aims to unpack it in of one of the chief nationalists-and critical figures-at the Convention and during the period: Gouverneur Morris. Morris espoused complex moral and political views: he was both the most outspoken critic of slavery at the Convention and a staunch defender of property rights (even going so far as to insist on property qualifications for representation schemes). The payoff is to show how Morris's psychology of self-interest yields a surprisingly modern argument for national institutions that redirect, rather than suppress, oligarchic ambition.
This article develops John F. Kennedy's political thought on the role of the poet in American liberal democracy. It argues that to counter "Soviet-sponsored art," Kennedy upheld American poetry as essential for educating a democratic people. In this Kennedy saw a shared duty between the democratic statesman and the democratic poet. To make this argument, this article explicates the seven different Robert Frost poems Kennedy directly and indirectly uses in his encomium of Robert Frost at Amherst College: "The Gift Outright," "The Road Not Taken," "Acquainted with the Night," "For John F. Kennedy: His Inauguration," "The Lesson for Today," "The Death of the Hired Man," and "Our Hold on the Planet."
This article explores how Mark Twain's satires of American bureaucracy draw on Charles Dickens's popular satire of British bureaucracy through his fictional presentation of the Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit. The comparison between the British and American bureaucratic satires of Dickens and Twain, respectively, offers unique insight into American literary and political conceptions of progress and bureaucratic institutions. I trace Twain's borrowing of Dickens's Circumlocution Office themes and strategies in order to argue that Twain's characters interact with corruption in a very different way than do Dickens's. Whereas Dickens's satire depicts bureaucratic nonsense as something to be endured or escaped, Twain's satire turns the focus inward and prompts readers to consider how the particularly American spirit of speculation can interact dangerously with both bureaucratic corruption and the seemingly boundless opportunities of the American frontier.
The later work of John Rawls remains the most common foil in the literature on public reason, but an ostensible conflict between core ideas has caused significant misinterpretations. Specifically, a "well-ordered society" requires that citizens act on the basis of a shared conception of political justice, whereas "the ideal of public reason" involves people acting according to differing conceptions of justice. Instead of representing two different periods in his thought, I argue that Rawls intended to offer two different accounts of public reason: one for within the well-ordered society, and one for outside it. This interpretation matches the text and withstands recent criticisms better than alternatives.
