Civic Morality Research Articles

The Words We Live by: The Creeds, Mottoes, and Pledges That Have Shaped America

Brian Burrell's splendid collection shows that many of the phrases we once lived by can still have resonance today. A comprehensive, fascinating treasure trove of American common sense and whimsy, The Words We Live By presents a sentimental rediscovery of a lost era in American history. Burrell's work was inspired by his father, an obsessive collector of words and a chronic nostalgia buff who traveled widely with his family, introducing them to the landmarks, monuments, and other symbols of America's past. Throughout his life, he clipped or wrote down memorable phrases, quotes, mottoes, and quips, both the silly and the profound, the playful and the maudlin. Burrell has lovingly compiled his father's collection of scrapbooks, complementing them with extraordinary research into the origins of America's civic ethics, to produce a truly memorable and inspirational work of historical reference. More than just a compendium of classic American wit and wisdom, The Words We Live By brings this material to life with poignantly told stories, forgotten anecdotes, and deeply considered meditations on the meaning of the words that have shaped the American nation.

Trust in government and welfare regimes: attitudes to redistribution and financial cheating in the USA and Norway

Abstract. Claims have been made that national institutions influence public preferences, as well as structuring patterns of social division. This article analyses attitudes to redistribution and financial cheating in Norway and the USA. On the aggregate level the results show that there are striking differences between the two countries regarding attitudes to redistribution and confidence in the state, while similar attitude patterns are found regarding cheating with taxes and benefits. Results endorse arguments emphasising that the design and scope of welfare state policies shape and determine their own legitimacy. There is less support for political trust arguments, which emphasise that the efficacy of political decision–making institutions promotes beliefs about trust in the state and views on government responsibilities. Similarly, arguments proposing that advanced welfare statism has undesirable effects on civic morality, such as cheating on taxes and benefits, are not supported empirically. Finally, while conflicts over redistribution are similarly structured in the USA and Norway, divisions over financial cheating are less clear–cut and vary cross–nationally.

Inside a Swiss Army Knife: An Assessment of AmeriCorps

Inside a Swiss Army Knife: An Assessment of AmeriCorps

Women’s Costume and Feminine Civic Morality in Augustan Rome

Augustus claimed that the moral decay of the Roman Republic was especially due to Roman women who had forsaken their traditional role of custos domi (‘preserver of the house/hold’). In reforming feminine morality, Augustus created a new pictorial language that troped the feminine body as a ‘moral sign’ of civic morality and authorized a distinctive costume for women. Sebesta investigates the relationship between women’s garments, the female body and the Roman concept of feminine civic morality.

Ecological Literacy for Moral Virtue: Orr on [moral] education for postmodern sustainability

Abstract David Orr's postmodern philosophical investigations begin with the recognition that our modern culture is not ecologically sustainable; and therefore threatens all life on earth in the long term, even as it continues to destroy sustainable cultures in the short term. Hopeful of redirecting our civic culture or morality, as well as our technologies towards postmodern sustainability, Orr proposes an education for ecological literacy. This paper examines Orr's account of ecological literacy. Following his attempts to take us beyond modern literacy, it analyses Orr's conception of moral virtue. It concludes with some reflections on Orr's deconstruction of professional academic boundaries, including those that continue to separate ecological literacy from moral education.

:Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe: Institutions, Texts, Images

List of illustrations Notes on contributors Preface and acknowledgements Introduction: a history of sexuality? 1. Marriage, love, sex, and Renaissance civic morality 2. Typology, sexuality and the Renaissance Esther 3. Artifice as seduction in Titian 4. Renaissance women and the question of class 5. Venetian women and their discontents 6. The ambiguity of beauty in Tasso and Petrarch 7. George Pettie, Barnaby Rich, and delights for women 'only' 8. Troping Utopia: Donne's brief for Lesbianism 9. Staging gender in Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew 10. The semiotics of masculinity in Renaissance England 11. Recuperating women and the man behind the screen 12. Male Renaissance poets in the female body 13. The geography of Renaissance love 13. Gender and conduct in Paradise Lost.

The Cold War ethic: National security and national morale

In Compromised Campus, Sigmund Diamond explores the penetration of American universities by the intelligence services of the federal govern? ment at the beginning of the Cold War. Anyone interested in a moral and institutional history of the Cold War in America owes Diamond a substan? tial debt, especially for his investigation of FBI and university records to document the mobilization of the academy and academicians in the struggle against communism. The ensuing is not a critique of Diamond's study. On the contrary, I should like to contribute to his account of the relations between state surveillance and academic policy by placing his narrative in a broader context defined by the relations between national security policy and public ethics in the period 1945-1950. The ethical cleansing of the universities was one facet of a more gen? eral enterprise in moral propaganda and control undertaken by the American state in the early years of the Cold War. The purpose of this enterprise was to develop a civic ethic that would provide the moral un? derpinning of the emerging American national security policy. In this essay, I sketch one of several complementary frameworks, which collectively would constitute the basis for a cultural history of the Cold War in Amer? ica. The central datum of this enterprise is an interesting fact: After World War II, the state began an ambitious effort in moral reform that influenced every sphere of American life. What led the American government under President Truman ? who has been mythologized for years as an exemplar of tolerance and decency ? to conduct a moral crusade that would repre? sent an unprecedented invasion of private life by the state? I want to suggest one answer to this question.

Images of Labor and Diligence in Sixteenth-Century Netherlandish Prints: The Work Ethic Rooted in Civic Morality or Protestantism?

Images of Labor and Diligence in Sixteenth-Century Netherlandish Prints: The Work Ethic Rooted in Civic Morality or Protestantism?

Enterprise and Welfare States: a Comparative Perspective

DO ‘welfare states’ enhance or subvert economic enterprise, civic virtue, private moral character, the integrity of social life? Though these questions have a piquantly contemporary ring in modern British politics, they are nevertheless old quandaries in the history of social policy. Since the seventeenth century, if not earlier, practitioners, theorists and critics of public welfare schemes have argued for and against such schemes in contradictory and adversarial terms; claiming on the one hand that social welfare schemes would supply a humanitarian corrective to the rigours of a market economy; and on the other hand that they would support and streamline market forces by enhancing individual and collective efficiency. Similarly, for several hundred years models of civic morality which emphasize independence and self-sufficiency have jostled with alternative models which emphasize paternalism, altruism and organic solidarity. Few phases of social policy in Britain and elsewhere have not contained elements of more than one approach. Even the New Poor Law, notorious for its subordination to market pressures, nevertheless harboured certain residual anti-market principles and often lapsed into practices that were suspiciously communitarian; whilst Edwardian New Liberalism, famous for its philosophy of organic solidarism, in practice tempered social justice with the quest for ‘national efficiency’. These varying emphases have all been reflected in the fashions and phases of welfare state historiography—fashions and phases that appear to have been at least partly determined by the vagaries of prevailing political climate. Thus, in the aftermath of the Second World War, historians tended to portray the history of social policy as a series of governmental battles against private vested interests—battles in which the mantle of civic virtue was worn by an altruistic administrative elite, while civic vice was embodied in the motley crew of doctors, landlords, employers and insurance companies who viewed social welfare as a commodity in the market.

Societal Organization and Civic Morality in the Work of Herbert Blumer

Societal Organization and Civic Morality in the Work of Herbert Blumer

The Moral Imperative for American Schools: "... Inflame the Civic Temper..."

In the face of clamorous demands for (a) returning the schools to the safe harbors of traditional moral and religious values or (b) piloting the schools through the uncharted shoals of moral choice by means of critical thinking, this article argues for the revitalizing of the historic civic mission of American education. This means explicit and continuing study of the basic concepts and values underlying our democratic political community and constitutional order. The common core of study throughout school and college years should be the morality of citizenship. For this goal to be achieved, scholarly study of civic morality should be the first priority in the liberal and professional education of teachers and administrators. The moral agenda for American education, its curriculum, its common life, and its governance, thus becomes the study and practice of the obligations as well as the rights of democratic citizenship. Obligations: justice, equality, authority, participation, truth, and patriotism. Rig...

Hume as Moralist: a Social Historian's Perspective

In this paper I want to discuss David Hume's views about morals, politics and citizenship and the role of philosophers and philosophizing in modern civil society - what I shall call his theory of civic morality. This is a subject which has been neglected by philosophers, presumably because it is of limited philosophical interest. But it is of considerable interest to the historian who wants to understand Hume's development as a philosopher, to locate his thought within a specific, Scottish context and to arrive at some understanding of his surprisingly close and cordial relations with the literary and social world of enlightened Edinburgh. These are large claims and I cannot hope to substantiate them fully in a short paper. My purpose is first, to show that, historically speaking, Hume's preoccupation with civic morality was of central rather than peripheral interest to him as a philosopher and that it helps to explain his otherwise rather puzzling decision to give up philosophizing systematically in the manner of Hobbes and Locke, in favour of polite essay-writing in the manner of Addison and Steele. My second purpose is to suggest that Hume's interest in civic morality, his neo-Addisonian (or perhaps I should say, neo-Ciceronian) mode of philosophizing about it and the nature of his understanding of politics, citizenship and philosophizing in a modern age was, unlike his thought about religion, responsive to and consonant with some of the most important ideological preoccupations of his Scottish contemporaries. It was, I suspect, a shared interest which helped to contain some of the anxieties Hume's notorious religious scepticism caused his contemporaries. Without it, he could not possibly have emerged as one of the leaders of Edinburgh's intellectual life in the age of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Hume as Moralist: a Social Historian's Perspective

In this paper I want to discuss David Hume's views about morals, politics and citizenship and the role of philosophers and philosophizing in modern civil society - what I shall call his theory of civic morality. This is a subject which has been neglected by philosophers, presumably because it is of limited philosophical interest. But it is of considerable interest to the historian who wants to understand Hume's development as a philosopher, to locate his thought within a specific, Scottish context and to arrive at some understanding of his surprisingly close and cordial relations with the literary and social world of enlightened Edinburgh. These are large claims and I cannot hope to substantiate them fully in a short paper. My purpose is first, to show that, historically speaking, Hume's preoccupation with civic morality was of central rather than peripheral interest to him as a philosopher and that it helps to explain his otherwise rather puzzling decision to give up philosophizing systematically in the manner of Hobbes and Locke, in favour of polite essay-writing in the manner of Addison and Steele. My second purpose is to suggest that Hume's interest in civic morality, his neo-Addisonian (or perhaps I should say, neo-Ciceronian) mode of philosophizing about it and the nature of his understanding of politics, citizenship and philosophizing in a modern age was, unlike his thought about religion, responsive to and consonant with some of the most important ideological preoccupations of his Scottish contemporaries. It was, I suspect, a shared interest which helped to contain some of the anxieties Hume's notorious religious scepticism caused his contemporaries. Without it, he could not possibly have emerged as one of the leaders of Edinburgh's intellectual life in the age of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Right, Utility, and Rousseau

NTITHETICAL strands in Rousseau's thought are often noted: primitivistic anarchism and civicism,1 individualism and collectivism.2 Our thesis is that antithetical nature of Rousseau's thought results from his failure to synthesize and utility as he intended. Our immediate aim is to demonstrate this failure in hope that once Rousseau is understood for what he was, a poor systematizer, apparently contradictory interpretations of his thought will be seen to be largely complementary. Rousseau does not give us precise definitions or systematic expositions of right and utility! However, hiis general meaning is clear. Right is here taken to mean devoirs iternels de la morale, that is, system of ethical norms prior to all experience and guiding behavior of all intelligential beings. Utility means public expediency. As a principle of behavior utility would emphasize those actions which lead to maximizing of social welfare. Rousseau did not believe that principles of and utility lead to two different moral orientations. Like Plato, he assumed that conditions which make a society integrated and efficient are those that make it just. Like Hegel, he recognized the secular as capable of being an embodiment of Truth. 4 It is one thing to believe; quite another to demonstrate. What in fact emerges from a close analysis of Rousseau is two sometimes conflicting moral theories corresponding to principles of and utility. He regards moral on one hand as that which conforms to eternal justice and on other, as that which is conducive to general interest. I shall refer to these concepts of morality as universal and civic morality respectively. In what follows I shall derive these two moral theories and show consequences of their uneasy reconciliation for Rousseau's

Social and Civic Ethics

Social and Civic Ethics