American Founding Research Articles

Kody W. Cooper and Justin Buckley Dyer: The Classical and Christian Origins of American Politics: Political Theology, Natural Law, and the American Founding. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Pp. xii, 238.)

Kody W. Cooper and Justin Buckley Dyer: The Classical and Christian Origins of American Politics: Political Theology, Natural Law, and the American Founding. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Pp. xii, 238.)

Cézanne’s paintings and Judd’s Specific Objects: from objects in painting to objects in space

ABSTRACT This article examines Judd’s Specific Objects in light of Cézanne’s paintings and suggests that the two artists share a conception of the relation between objects and space. I argue that, much like Cézanne, Judd saw objects and space as related elements that constantly define each other. Cézanne and Judd are prominent figures who represent two distinct positions in the history of Western art. I consider these positions in relation to the topic of artistic autonomy and suggest that, even though theoreticians have framed Judd’s work in opposition to the modernist concept of the autonomous work of art—the American founding figure of Minimalism has something in common with the French ‘Father of Modern Art’. The proposed phenomenological analysis of works by Judd and Cézanne moves beyond period-based and medium-oriented interpretations and differs from much art-historical discourse, to suggest an additional perspective on their works.

The Classical and Christian Origins of American Politics: Political Theology, Natural Law, and the American Founding, by Kody W. Cooper and Justin Buckley Dyer

<i>The Classical and Christian Origins of American Politics: Political Theology, Natural Law, and the American Founding</i>, by Kody W. Cooper and Justin Buckley Dyer

Book Review: Underwriters of the United States: How Insurance Shaped the American Founding by Hannah Farber

Book Review: <i>Underwriters of the United States: How Insurance Shaped the American Founding</i> by Hannah Farber

George H.W. Bush’s unexceptional moment: rhetorical casuistry following the dissolution of the Soviet Union on Christmas Day

In the fall of the Soviet Union and resignation of Mikhail Gorbachev, many Americans doubtless saw the realization of Ronald Reagan’s Cold War strategy. However, it was not Reagan who was tasked with responding to this momentous occasion, but George H.W. Bush. Rather than exult over communism’s failure in the USSR, Bush’s response was careful, measured, and surprisingly lacking in the American exceptionalist bluster that characterized his predecessor’s approach. This essay evaluates Bush’s rhetorical choice as a case study in what Kenneth Burke called “casuistic stretching”: introducing new principles while remaining faithful to the old. I argue that Bush’s casuistic stretching drew from core narratives of the American founding to reconceptualize the United States’ relationship with Russia’s fledgling democracy. While this choice may have assuaged the international community, domestic appeal for Bush’s rhetorical strategy was ultimately blunted by his political proximity to Reagan, a situation that can be better understood using Stephen Skowronek’s theory of political time. Thus, my larger argument is that political time provides insight into the limits of casuistic stretching for presidential rhetoric. Casuistic stretching, as Bush’s example illustrates, requires sensitivity to the not only the particulars of a situation, but also the competing and contingent hierarchies of value that exist within the broader moment of political time.

The Classical and Christian Origins of American Politics: Political Theology, Natural Law, and the American Founding. By Kody W. Cooper and Justin Buckley Dyer

The Classical and Christian Origins of American Politics: Political Theology, Natural Law, and the American Founding. By Kody W. Cooper and Justin Buckley Dyer

The Classical and Christian Origins of American Politics: Political Theology, Natural Law, and the American Founding by Kody W. Cooper and Justin Buckley Dyer

The Classical and Christian Origins of American Politics: Political Theology, Natural Law, and the American Founding <i>by Kody W. Cooper and Justin Buckley Dyer</i>

Hannah Farber. Underwriters of the United States: How Insurance Shaped the American Founding.

Hannah Farber. <i>Underwriters of the United States: How Insurance Shaped the American Founding</i>.

The Classical and Christian Origins of American Politics: Political Theology, Natural Law, and the American Founding. By Kody W. Cooper and Justin Buckley Dyer. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022. 225p. $99.99 cloth, $34.99 paper.

The Classical and Christian Origins of American Politics: Political Theology, Natural Law, and the American Founding. By Kody W. Cooper and Justin Buckley Dyer. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022. 225p. $99.99 cloth, $34.99 paper.

Christianity, Enlightenment, and the American Experiment: A Review Essay

Abstract In the Classical and Christian Origins of American Politics: Political Theology, Natural Law, and the American Founding, Kody Cooper and Justin Dyer argue that the classical Christian Natural Law tradition is the central tradition shaping the American political order. Rejecting the scholarly consensus that the American founding was shaped by multiple traditions, Cooper and Dyer see continuity from Aristotle to Aquinas to the founding generation. This argument far exceeds the evidence: It is unpersuasive at the level of ideas, but it is even less compelling considering the epic political conflicts that surrounded these ideas—conflicts that were responsible for the genesis of Enlightenment ideas about religious liberty. Both liberalism and civic republicanism, to take the two leading schools of thought, emerged in response to conflicts over theology among the different sects of Christianity. Yet Cooper and Dyer's analysis obscures the political conflicts that were an essential feature of creating the American political order. To argue that Christianity and political theology had an important influence on thinking during the founding era, we must wrestle with what type of Christianity and political theology? How did understandings of Christianity and political theology change in their encounter with Enlightenment thinking? Cooper and Dyer do not attend to these questions. Yet such questions are all the more important given the rise of Christian nationalism and Catholic integralism, which would return us to pre-Enlightenment understandings of religious liberty that are profoundly at odds with the American experiment and the religious pluralism that stems from it.

A Lockean Aristotle: Wisdom, Consent, and Equality—According to Harry V. Jaffa

Harry V. Jaffa came to argue that the proper understanding of the American founding required a blend of Aristotle and Locke. The article in which he first made this claim contains Jaffa’s own criticisms of this idea. These criticisms implicate the fundamental elements of his interpretation of the founding and help us grasp Jaffa’s understanding of political philosophy and its relationship to politics.

A Renaissance of Civic Education and Civic Engagement in Higher Education in the Spirit of the American Founders and Constitutionalism

A growing number of states have responded to negative trends in civic knowledge, trust, and engagement by creating new institutes or schools at state universities, with the express aim of reinvigorating civic education and thoughtful, engaged citizenship. In seeking to increase civic knowledge, champion viewpoint diversity, model civil discussion of ideas, combat polarization, and embrace the civic responsibilities of higher education, these institutes can be seen as carrying forward the American founders’ vision of civic education, the moral foundations of law and constitutionalism, and the constitutional principles of free speech and federalism.

The Misunderstanding of Lockean Political Philosophy in the American Founding Era

It has become a historical inertia that the public and academia deem Lock as the foundation of American politics. However, Locke never explicitly supports the separation of power. Unlike Modern Liberalism, there is no clear-cut definition identifying the boundary between the legislative and executive power. It is a common mistake to interpret the Declaration of Independence as originating from Lockean Liberalism. In reality, Lockean political philosophy and DOI bifurcate at several points within the Second Treatise: executive power and legislative power can be owned by the same person; the exercise of executive power can exceed the limits of the legislatures. Besides, the question of the origin of the executive power remains unsolved. This essay will point out these mysteries and academic misunderstandings by explaining that the Law of Nature is the foundational thought of The Second Treatise. This essay will also delineate conflicts in The Second Treatise but argue that the divine intention is the resolution to all the self-contradictions. This divine intention is set up by both normative and historical threads.

Montesquieu and The Federalist : A Contested Legacy at the American Founding

Abstract: During the contentious political debate of 1787, Montesquieu enjoyed exceptional prestige in the United States. In their struggle against the Constitution adopted in Philadelphia, Anti-Federalists appealed to The Spirit of the Laws as their leading authority. In response, those defending the proposed Constitution had to go back to Montesquieu's founding theories to counter the arguments of their opponents. Building upon previous scholarship, this article will explore three aspects of The Federalist 's political doctrine where Madison and Hamilton analyzed and subverted Montesquieu's ideas: first, the dogma that republics cannot survive when surrounded by empires if they do not unite their forces in a confederation; second, that in a federative state as in any kind of state, power should limit power; third, that in this constitutional arrangement, an independent judiciary should play a special role. Thus, the core of American federal ideology was borrowed from Montesquieu: that multiple layers of government could legitimately exist within a single polity, and that such an arrangement is not a defect to be lamented but a virtue to be celebrated if the balance of powers is properly respected. Yet it is only by confronting the Anti-Federalists' intellectual allegiance to axioms of The Spirit of the Laws that Madison and Hamilton were able to provide the first political treatise – however unfinished it might be – on the viability of modern democracies.

Beyond Tribalism: Renewing the American Ideal

Not since the U.S. Civil War has American society been more divided regarding social, economic, political, religious, and especially cultural issues. It is as if America's very self-identity has become problematic. How does the cultural morass and the promotion of “cancel culture” and unlimited individual subjectivity relate to the original American Founders’ vision articulated in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution? By the twenty-first century, the U.S. reflects the moral corrosion of a popular culture with its secular leftist bent and antiChristian bias. U.S. society is undergoing re-tribalization due to “affirmative action” and the un-American emphasis on race, ethnicity, and gender. It is causing rampant gender and identity confusion, especially among the nation’s youth already stressed by online shaming rituals via social media. Official government and educational bureaucracies promote toxic cultural mandates, invoking “anti-discrimination” laws and the mantra, “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” intensifying the culture wars and divisive identity politics. The essay concludes with a vision to renew the American ideal of “One nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

John Witherspoon and Slavery

Like many of the American Founders, Witherspoon was influential and successful in several different pursuits. We are right to remember him as an important Christian pastor, as an American patriot, and as Princeton's first great president. The question we must ask, then, is whether this man and his accomplishments are rendered suspect, or at least made moot, because of one issue: slavery. On the one hand there is much in what Witherspoon said and did that shows him to be an opponent of slavery. While a pastor in Scotland, he baptized a runaway slave belonging to one of the leading members of his church. Later at Princeton, Witherspoon gladly taught free Blacks. His stated opinions—in writing and in lectures—were uniformly against slavery. He voiced objections to mistreating slaves and urged masters to instruct their slaves and equip them for future freedom. On the other hand, Witherspoon owned slaves. For many, that's all we need to know to denounce Witherspoon as self-serving hypocrite. Yet, we should look more closely at the historical record. Until now, Witherspoon has been condemned as an enslaver on mainly one piece of paper: an inventory prepared after his death that listed among his property two slaves. Even this line has not been quoted in its entirety or considered alongside the other contemporaneous account of his possessions. The full record needs a fuller explanation. Despite his flaws, there is little doubt that Witherspoon was, on the whole, more enlightened on the issue of slavery than many of his generation, and less personally complicit in the evils of slavery than many of our country's most celebrated founders.

A West Coast Straussian Appreciation of The Classical and Christian Origins of American Politics

Cooper and Dyer’s outstanding book deserves praise for its thorough investigation of the ideas of the American Founders, bringing us back to the common sense of the subject. Just as the main stream of American political thinking argued at the outset, natural rights and natural theology were important to the ideas, institutions, and culture of the Founders. Looking beyond their project, there are additional points of contact with other scholarship that can be drawn out—which I shall endeavor to do here.

Christian History Meets Constitutional History: John Courtney Murray's Augustinian Political Theology of the American Founding

Christian History Meets Constitutional History: John Courtney Murray's Augustinian Political Theology of the American Founding

Three Hypotheses About America: Helper, Lincoln, Douglass, and King

This essay advances arguments and evidence for three hypotheses about America. First, that slavery was a burden to the South, and the nation, and that it degraded what it affected. Second, that, in the main, the Fathers of this nation meant it when they recognized slavery as a moral evil. And third, that the greatest American after Abraham Lincoln in effecting legal and attitudinal change in America for the betterment of relations between the races built his strategies for reform upon the Founders’ vision, and depended on its truth to achieve his successes. To support the hypothesis that slavery was a burden, the essay recalls the arguments of a white citizen of the slave state of North Carolina, Hinton Rowan Helper. To support the hypothesis that the Founders, in the main, meant it when they condemned slavery as a moral evil, it engages the arguments of a white man of the free West, Abraham Lincoln, and those of an escaped slave, Frederick Douglass. To support the hypothesis that the understandings of the American Founding provided the fundamental guide for the way forward, it invokes the arguments and actions of a black resident of the Jim Crow South, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Two white men, two black men, four Americans to support three hypotheses about America.

Understanding Novak’s Spirit of democratic capitalism through “the corporation”

Abstract Many social theorists hold that the corporation is the key institution of the modern world. Novak wrote four books on the corporation, viewing it as the chief instrument of innovation within “democratic capitalism”, and the concrete entity in which its three systems (political, economic, moral-cultural) converge. We look at Novak’s account with its roots in Maritain, and at Novak’s intention to ground this account in the ideals of the American Founding, and in a Christian understanding of grace. “The corporation” turns out to be an excellent pathway into Novak’s thought and a safeguard against some fundamental mistakes in interpreting him.