American Political Thought

doi: 10.1086/723095pmid: N/A

Silver, Hadass

doi: 10.1086/721916pmid: N/A

A growing number of scholars who study race in the United States are calling on white Americans to advance racial equality by renouncing their “white privilege.” Yet few academics have explicitly defined this term. Here I analyze how scholars who discuss the phenomenon use “white privilege” in their work. In so doing, I argue that examining racial injustice through the lens of white privilege not only fails to subvert racial inequality in the United States but also helps maintain it. It does so by reinforcing racial stereotypes and undermining cross-racial worker solidarity and calls for universal public goods, both of which are necessary to advance the interests of most nonwhite Americans. By analyzing the most common invocations of “white privilege,” I ultimately find that white privilege discourse provides a pseudo-progressive smokescreen that protects the laws, policies, and economic and political interests that perpetuate racial inequality in the United States today.

Overeem, Patrick

doi: 10.1086/721953pmid: N/A

Except for occasional glimpses (like the one, surprisingly, in Rawls’s The Law of Peoples), the concept and ideal of statesmanship have disappeared from modern political thought. This article examines how this has happened and what reversing this would require. It concentrates on The Federalist as a text situated at the very transition from the classical appraisal of statesmanship to its modern dismissal. I show how its authors not only relegated statesmanship to a secondary role after constitutionalism but also emptied it as a moral ideal and blurred its distinctions with other types of rulership, namely, that of officials, demagogues, and ultimately tyrants. The Federalist has thus opened the way to the ensuing democratic and technocratic undermining of statesmanship (through what Storing has called “populism” and “scientific management”), processes impossible to redress without a thorough questioning of some core modern assumptions.

Foster, Luke

doi: 10.1086/721952pmid: N/A

This article reimagines the role of universities in American public life today by examining two early twentieth-century critics of the research university. Both worried that the new educational system could fracture democratic society, but they drew opposite conclusions about the positive role of universities. Irving Babbitt led a New Humanist school that made the case for liberal learning as a good in itself, but one also capable of cultivating an ethic of self-restraint through the study of classical texts. This would serve to train leaders who could question democracy’s impulse for self-gratification. He fiercely criticized John Dewey, who argued that learning must be practical and experimental because truths are not received as a canon but created through living together. This article demonstrates that Babbitt’s corpus develops a unified educational and political theory for elite formation by linking Socratic psychology and the constitutional order of the United States.

Dow, Jay K.

doi: 10.1086/722097pmid: N/A

Political scientists have long accepted the “party eras” delineation of American political history. In this, the first party era (1789–1824) is characterized as a proto-democratic period lacking the party development and mass electoral engagement necessary to produce recognizably modern electoral democracy. This study uses newly available constituency-level House of Representatives election returns from the Middle Atlantic region to challenge this characterization. These data permit detailed study of voter turnout, the party vote and evidence of partisanship, geographic patterns of party support, and the effect of election rules on party ability to elect representatives. Interpreted in light of recent historical scholarship and received theories of party emergence, the returns show a more developed, party-centric, and competitive electoral politics than previously recognized.

Tait, Joshua

doi: 10.1086/722112pmid: N/A

Christopher Owen’s biography of Willmoore Kendall and Glenn Ellmers’s study of Harry Jaffa are timely works about thinkers who sought the leadership of the intellectual Right. Owen traces Kendall’s intellectual development, highlighting his emphasis on deliberative democracy in American politics. Kendall criticized rights that undercut social orthodoxies. Instead of biography, Ellmers makes an extended exegesis of Jaffa’s thought, particularly his increasingly elevated assessment of the Declaration of Independence that justified a conservative substantive counterrevolution. These works show that Jaffa and Kendall thought partly in critical dialogue with one another. But where Owen adds to the scholarly record about Kendall, Ellmers provides little new about Jaffa. Jaffa and Kendall helped construct the intellectual basis of the polarized modern Right: Kendallian illiberal democratic conservatism and Jaffaite radical restorationism. Conservative in a more Burkean sense, Kendall warned of the Caesarist potentials in Jaffa’s thought at the outset of their intellectual engagement.

Kersch, Ken I.

doi: 10.1086/722099pmid: N/A

In recent years, conservative political scientists have increasingly turned away from the textualist and originalist arguments of their legal academic compatriots by reviving defunct historiographical templates to reorient the Right’s constitutionalism around a fundamentalist orthodoxy centered on the Declaration of Independence. This essay considers C. Bradley Thompson’s America’s Revolutionary Mind (2019) as a contribution to this project that manifests its valorization of political violence, misrepresentation of the relation of revolutionary era ideas and events to contemporary politics, and misconstrual of the American founding that underwrote the events of January 6. By contrast, George Thomas’s The (Un)Written Constitution (2021) argues for moving beyond constitutional theory debates about the interpretive methods most likely to remove politics from constitutional law by imagining a polity constituted by a commitment to good-faith civic deliberation over core liberal democratic principles, manifesting the true Spirit of ’76.