By Charles R. Kesler Posted May 15, 1998

How can politics help to restore a healthy American culture? The question assumes that politics can shape culture — indeed, can conduct us "towards the renewal of civilization," in the noble words of this volume's subtitle — but that assumption is, of course, itself controversial. In fact, in today's debates, one hears more of the threat that politics poses to culture than of any salvation politics might offer for culture.

Consider the character of the contemporary argument. To begin with, American conservatives claim that the Left, from its parapets of power in Hollywood, the universities, the national media, the federal courts, and the National Endowment for the Arts, has waged, for decades, a "culture war" upon the American people — a war that the people have been losing. The conservatives' complaint is commonly put this way: the Left has set out to "politicize" American culture, to force it to conform to a new orthodoxy of political correctness in everything from homosexual marriage to pronoun usage. The conservatives' point is that culture should be above, or at least separated from, the political order; that civil society — the realm of art, religion, family, and private property — should be protected, for the sake of liberty as well as culture, against political encroachments. Instead of politics trying tyrannically or arbitrarily to create culture, politics should devote itself to conserving culture (in the sense of the people's evolved sentiments, habits, and way of life). Thus in the conservative view, politics should grow out of culture and serve culture, not the other way around.

But at this point one sees that there are actually two conservative views of culture. They differ on the question of what it means to "conserve" culture: Does it mean to keep government's hands off it, to be neutral towards culture and allow it to develop however artists and citizens choose? Or does it mean a hands-on approach, an active promotion of "traditional American values" (not a traditional American phrase, by the way) against their would-be subverters in and out of government? Hands-off is the preference both of libertarians, who tend to take a democratic and laissez faire attitude towards culture, and of those neo-conservatives who defend high culture (and particularly one of its valuable prerogatives, academic freedom) against the public's attempts to influence it. The hands-on approach is preferred (in various ways, to be sure) by the so-called Religious Right, by most who refer to themselves as "cultural conservatives" or traditionalists, and by many neo-conservatives who are repelled by the prospect of American society's utter de-moralization. Even conservatives who are prepared to use government to shore up American culture, however, typically reject the notion that they are "politicizing" the culture. They argue that they are only using politics to get beyond politics — that is, to overcome the culture's artificial or forced politicization.

Seizing upon this contradiction or ambiguity, the Left today charges that conservatives are prepared, when they are prepared, to take a laissez faire attitude towards culture only because theirs — the white male bourgeois culture — is the dominant one. When its hegemony is challenged, liberal critics note, as it is being challenged currently, then conservatives cease to be defenders of a hands-off cultural policy and quickly become advocates of cultural protectionism.

Yet in challenging the supposed hegemony of patriarchal or conservative culture, most liberal intellectuals do not imagine themselves to be calling for the hegemony of their own culture. Today's liberals stand for "multiculturalism," for the replacement of ruling-class culture by the multiplicity of cultures belonging to oppressed, or formerly oppressed, classes and groups. In the past, white males had used their culture to justify and reinforce their rule over the rest of society; it was white males who "politicized" culture, according to the multiculturalists. Now, the rest of society — indeed, the world — can bring previously excluded cultures to bear in order to delegitimize the old "racist, sexist, homophobic" order and ordain a new, more inclusive one. Still, the new order will be "one," will be unified and organized around the idea of multiculturalism; so how will it escape the charge that it desires merely to substitute one ruling class for another — one ruling culture for another?

From the standpoint of traditionalist conservatism, every society or people is defined by its culture, and therefore every culture is more or less an exclusive one. In John O'Sullivan's words, "A multicultural society is a contradiction in terms and cannot survive indefinitely. It either becomes monocultural or runs into trouble."¹ At this juncture, we urgently need some clarity on the meaning of "culture." The oldest or fundamental definition of "culture" (cultura) is something that grows as a result of cultivating, tilling, or planting. In common speech, "culture" means either high art or an ethnic group with its characteristic customs. The word's two contemporary senses cohere, however, when combined with the first meaning of "culture" as a kind of growth: a culture is a living social organism that has particular ethnic "roots" and develops from those roots, often flowering into unique, that is, characteristic achievements of high art. To understand a culture means therefore to appreciate it in its particularity, to see it as a unique historical growth — not as a mere exemplum of a common and unchanging human nature, much less as an imperfect embodiment of the best political or social order.²

Reason has little to do with culture in this sense, therefore, because the modern concept of culture emphasizes the ethnic, the particular, the authentic at the expense of the universal; whereas reason strives, even in practical affairs, to see particulars in the light of universals. An authentic culture is natural in the sense of being an uncoerced growth, not in the sense of containing universal principles that can be grasped and perhaps manipulated by reason. Accordingly, an authentic culture cannot be designed or planned because it cannot be thought through; it is always in the process of slow change or adaptation. Ever since Edmund Burke, whose defense of the British Constitution became the model for the Right's thinking on the cultural roots of politics in general, conservatives have argued that culture is neither a goal that politicians can seek to achieve nor a product that they can make — let alone export.

Oddly enough, the multiculturalists agree with the traditionalists on the primacy of culture over politics, and to some extent even on the definition of culture. What the multiculturalists insist on, however, is that culture does not have to be exclusive, or more precisely, that Americans can participate in many cultures without succumbing to any one of them and without ceasing to be American. But this is to pile absurdity upon absurdity. If cultures are unique, it means that they disagree with one another; if they are to be taken seriously, it's because they disagree about serious things in serious ways. Multiculturalism must overlook or minimize these serious disagreements in order to make it possible for diverse cultures to keep house with one another; and to enable Americans to experience this homogenized "diversity" openly and sympathetically. In general, it diminishes cultural disagreements to the level of differences in cuisine. So multiculturalism tries to view cultures as individual dishes on the great smorgasbord that it calls America, but is unable even to distinguish between main courses and side dishes at this potluck feast, since this would imply that some cultures are more central or substantial than others. Of course, multiculturalists make no secret of their own taste for the unusual foods of the Third World, but their preference shows, in effect, how boring it is to have to eat in a cafeteria of bland cultures.

Multiculturalists do not shun every disagreement, however. Despite their facile assertion of the equality of all cultures, they are in fact children of contemporary American culture. Their relativism yields, in the end, to their liberalism. Any culture that rejects multiculturalism or modern liberalism is, therefore, in principle, intolerable. To put it differently, the unholy trinity of what they call racism, sexism, and homophobia (which bears little resemblance to actual moral vice; "racism" in their vocabulary, for example, means insisting on colorblind law, etc.) is not relative. These attitudes are in fact wrong, as they see it, and cultures that embody them are wrong, too. Since they regard America's traditional culture — that of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution — as cursed by all three, they do not disguise their desire to replace it with a better one. Once the country has expiated these sins, however, the work of politics — of political correctness and "consciousness raising" — will be done, and a thousand multicultural flowers will presumably bloom freely.

For the contemporary Left as well as for the Right, therefore, the use of politics is to get beyond politics. In their own ways, liberals and conservatives alike assume that politics ought ultimately to reflect culture; that American politics, in particular, has always been based and ought to be based increasingly on race, ethnicity, and history. Both groups agree, loosely speaking, that American politics is essentially a legacy of white male bourgeois culture, though liberals deplore it and some conservatives, at least, celebrate the (alleged) fact. But there is another way to look at the relation between politics and culture, an older way that is nonetheless familiar to us; in fact, it is assumed in the very charges that liberals and conservatives fling against each other. Each accuses the other of using politics to impose a culture on society. Each admits then, in so many words, that it is possible for politics to overrule, and thus to rule over, culture.

* * *

The fully worked-out and thought-through account of politics' ability to rule over culture may be found in Aristotle's Politics. For Aristotle, the highest theme of politics — and of political science — is founding. Founding a city or political association means to give it the law, the set of authoritative institutions, offices, and precepts, that chiefly makes the city what it is — that gives it its distinctive character as a democracy, aristocracy, monarchy, etc., but also as this particular democracy, say. This authoritative arrangement of offices and institutions is what Aristotle calls the "regime," which establishes who rules in the city and what ends or purposes their rule serves. The regime is the fundamental fact of political life; and because the character of those who rule shapes the character of the whole people, the regime imparts to the city its very way of life. So, for instance, Lycurgus and his famous laws made or formed the Spartans by commanding them to live the Spartan way of life. Similarly, the children of Israel became a unified, pious, and warlike people only as a result of the laws of Moses; without his laws (which were, of course, God's laws), the Jewish people would not be the same people.

The phenomenon of founding thus shows that politics can shape or rule culture — but not completely. Aristotle is careful to say that it is with regard to the regime "above all" that the city may be said to be the same or different; that is, the regime chiefly but not exclusively determines the character of a city.³ In his account, Aristotle compares the regime's relation to the city to the relation between form and matter. As a sculptor combines the form or look of Pericles, say, with the matter of a marble block in order to fashion a statue of the Athenian statesman, so the regime or form of government, when combined by a founder with the "matter" of the city, results in a democratic city, an aristocratic city, and so forth. By the "matter" of a city, Aristotle means its location, population, ethnic stock, customs, economic skills and resources, distribution of wealth, levels of education, and so forth.⁴ Aristotle recognizes that, in any particular case, matter limits the forms that can be combined with it, even as the size, shape, and quality of a block of marble limit what a sculptor can create from it.

To be sure, in political life there are very few virgin blocks of marble, whatever their quality. Most foundings are refoundings or revolutions, in which legislators have to start from a pre-existing way of life or culture — as though a sculptor were to take a statue of Henry VIII and try to turn it into one of George Washington. Aristotle does not use the term "culture," but his notion of "matter" refers to much the same thing, and more. The essential difference is that for him, culture is really, or at least mainly, past politics, the residue of previous regimes, laws, and customs. By subordinating culture to politics, Aristotle emphasizes the capacity of men to shape their own destiny or govern themselves by choosing in politics; he emphasizes, in other words, that men are free, that they are not enslaved to the past or to their "culture." But this is not complete or existential freedom, in which men are free to disregard the past or recreate themselves however they will. For Aristotle, men are free enough to face up to, and thus take responsibility for, the limitations on their own choices — the cultural, economic, geographical, and other factors that may constrain, but cannot abolish, their freedom. No political choice is ever entirely free, therefore, nor completely determined. Yet against the dogmatic determinism of the cultural approach and of so much of contemporary social science — including cultural anthropology, "cultural studies," sociology, psychology, and other fields — Aristotle reminds us that man does have freedom, a freedom that is especially visible in politics or statesmanship; and within statesmanship, a freedom that shines clearest in the phenomenon of founding.⁵

* * *

It is important to remind ourselves of these facts because the United States had a founding. The general theory of the American founding is expressed forthrightly in the Declaration of Independence, The Federalist, and other great documents of the era, which explain that American republicanism is based on the doctrine of the social contract. But what does that doctrine mean? In one Enlightened rendering, the doctrine holds that individual men, animated by self-interest or the desire for comfortable self-preservation, contract together to escape the terrors and inconveniences of the state of nature by entering into civil society and establishing government. Each individual then keeps his promise to obey the civil law out of fear of punishment and a sense of his enlightened self-interest. A more populist version of the contract doctrine, popular among some Americans in the founding period, holds that once individuals have contracted together to form a proper republican polity, a kind of spontaneous republican virtue would emerge to keep citizens faithful to the law and willing to sacrifice on its behalf.

James Madison, among others, thought that both of these accounts of the social contract were defective. In the first place, he doubted that such a calculated attachment to the law would be sufficient to institute republican government, or to sustain it in the long run. In the second place, he doubted that republican virtue could be counted on to arise spontaneously from democratic society — and during the Critical Period of the 1780s, in fact, such virtue had not emerged from the small republican polities of the states. Madison corrected these theories in the political science of The Federalist, which argued that a certain popular "reverence" or "veneration" for the Constitution and laws (not just enlightened self-interest) was necessary to perpetuate American republicanism; and that this reverence for the law would not arise spontaneously, but only as the result of a wisely structured Union and Constitution. Furthermore, The Federalist maintained that to institute good republican government required "some patriotic and respectable...number of citizens" to take the lead and propose to the people "some informal and unauthorized propositions," i.e., the Constitution. There had to be lawgivers even in the modern setting of social contract theory, in other words. Neither the people's virtue nor their interests could lead them to write a good constitution, though they were certainly capable of deliberating on one once it had been proposed to them.⁶

The American people's reverence for the laws needed to extend to the lawgivers, too, and The Federalist did its best to honor and accentuate the Constitution-makers' wisdom, patriotism, and love of justice. The country took this lesson to heart — and for this very reason, there are in the popular imagination no "founders" of the Articles of Confederation — and surely it is important that "we the people" continue to trace our nationhood to the "founding fathers" of 1776 and 1787, to ancestral lawgivers as it were, somewhat in the manner of the ancient city. The Federalist itself, written under the pseudonym of a founder of the Roman republic, "Publius," functions as a perpetual oracle of our "ancestral" lawgivers' wisdom.

But of course America is not an ancient city — and it is by reflecting on this fact that we may gain some additional perspective on our present-day problems of politics and culture. What separates America from the polis is not merely such modern advantages as science, technology, federalism, and so forth, but also something that modern America lacks — the gods of the ancient city. In the ancient world, every city or people had its own gods, and every city had divine or semi-divine founders. America belongs to a world decisively transformed by the presence of universal religion, of Christianity; a world in which there is an endemic separation or conflict between the city of God and the city (really, the cities) of man, between religious loyalty and civic loyalty. That is to say, however much God may bless the United States, He is the God of all mankind, not ours alone; but in the ancient world it would have been a poor people indeed who lacked their own local, special, and favoring deities or deity ("the Lord God of Israel"). Thereafter in the Christian West, the uncertain distinction between the temporal and the spiritual played itself out as the conflict between Pope and Emperor in the High Middle Ages, and as horrific wars of religion between Catholics and Protestants, and among Protestants, in the 16th and 17th centuries.

America in its founding attempted to resolve this problem. Our founders did not indulge the favorite methods of the preceding centuries — trying to impose a religious tyranny over politics, or a political tyranny over religion — but took the unprecedented course of separating church and state. At the national level, the First Amendment forbade Congress to establish a national religion or to prohibit religion's free exercise; and at the state level, a campaign to disestablish state churches began in the mid-1780s with Virginia and gradually spread throughout the Union, culminating in the disestablishment of Congregationalism in Massachusetts in 1833. By these actions, America marked itself as a liberal or modern republic, in the sense that unlike the ancient city, the American republic would not try to prescribe a comprehensive or total way of life for its citizens. In America, each citizen would enjoy a realm of freedom of conscience in which he would be free to cultivate his relation to God, and over which government would have no direct authority.

Madison, writing on behalf of religious liberty is his great "Memorial and Remonstrance" of 1785, argued that freedom of conscience was an "unalienable" or natural right, not only because religion was a matter of "reason and conviction," and thus men must be free to follow their own "conviction and conscience," unconstrained by force or violence; but also because "what is here a right towards men, is a duty towards the Creator." It is every man's duty "to render to the Creator such homage, and such only, as he believes to be acceptable" to Him; and "this duty is precedent both in order of time and degree of obligation, to the claims of Civil Society."⁷ In short, Madison argues that the natural rights of conscience derive from man's rational nature and from his status as a created being, born with duties to his Creator. What those duties comprise, however — what is true religion, in other words — is a question that every man's "conviction and conscience" must wrestle with, to his own satisfaction.

Human rights thus rest upon a prior human duty to God. And human government must acknowledge this duty by respecting a realm of private freedom for every man to discharge the duty conscientiously. Precisely from the highest point of view, then, government must be limited in order to be just; it would be impious for government to attempt to decide questions of ultimate religious truth by putting them up to majority vote. The problem of religion and politics that had bedeviled the West for so many centuries found a practical solution in America, then, a solution that required the limiting of government's scope and power, and the corresponding emancipation of "civil society" from what had been, in principle, comprehensive political control.

The independence and dignity of civil society depended, however, on its ability to remain "civil," i.e., civilized or suitable for free men and women, for citizens (cives). So civil society had to be capable of sustaining free government without itself being part of the government; put another way, in a free society there had to be a form of "government" in civil society that was not part of the state as such. To be sure, one great purpose of forming government in the first place was to enable it to restrain and punish lawbreakers; but if every member of civil society were a lawbreaker, there would soon be no civil society left and no limited government, either — a situation that America may be approaching today in certain areas of its largest cities. Civil society had then to be self-governing, by and large, if limited government in the political sense were to be viable. The independence and dignity of civil society, the home of "culture," depended on its containing high and noble purposes of its own, in light of which self-government made sense. These purposes — seeking the truth about God, worshipping God according to conscience, living a godly or virtuous life — to the extent that they gave a tone to civil society, helped to ensure that the "pursuit of Happiness" would be respectable, from the traditional or Aristotelian point of view of politics itself.

If the highest purpose of private freedom, however, were to be reduced to the love of money or the pursuit of bodily pleasure, then civil society would cease, pro tanto, to be very respectable; and the moral government that is essential to political self-government would devolve back to the state, and perhaps in the end, political freedom would prove simply impossible. Hence Madison's observation that if "there is not sufficient virtue among men for self-government," then "nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another."⁸ But the other side of the American founders' solicitude for private freedom was their affirmation of a public morality that honored religious liberty — and civil liberty — as based on natural rights and natural law. This morality consisted of the commonsense teachings of reason and revealed religion alike, the overlapping precepts indicated by the very phrase "the laws of nature and of nature's God." The founders sought to incorporate this morality into American culture, or rather to make it the basis of American culture.

This they did not accomplish directly, by creating, let us say, a federal Department of Morality and Culture — an approach they would have regarded as unconstitutional, unwise, and unavailing. Nor did the founders attempt to order artists and writers around. They proceeded indirectly, careful not to trample the very liberty they were trying to save, by a series of exhortations and legal encouragements at the national level, and by founding a new set of institutions at the state and local level. In the end, most of their efforts converged on this new set of institutions, namely, the public or common schools. At the time of the Revolution, only the New England states (Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire) had laws requiring youngsters to attend publicly financed common schools. But beginning in the 1780s, the great men of the Revolution began to turn their attention to the education of youth. The Northwest Ordinance, passed by the Congress under the Articles of Confederation and repassed by the First Congress, adjured that "Religion, Morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, Schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged." Under its provisions, a sixteenth part of every township formed out of the Northwest Territories was granted to the new state governments for the maintenance of public schools. The same grant was made afterwards to most other new states; and beginning with California's admission in 1850, the grant's size doubled, and with the admission of Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico, quadrupled.⁹

By the early 19th century, the public schools movement had taken root in the majority of states. These schools were not only new — no other country in the history of the world had ever erected such a system — but they were new kinds of schools, dedicated to inculcating the skills, habits, and principles of republican self-government. Benjamin Rush, the Pennsylvania revolutionary leader who was one of the earliest supporters of public education, distinguished in 1787 between "the late American war" and the "American Revolution." The war is over, he wrote, but the Revolution properly so-called was just beginning: "It remains yet to establish and perfect our new forms of government, and to prepare the principles, morals, and manners of our citizens for these forms of government after they are established and brought to perfection."¹⁰ The real "American Revolution" was the moral and intellectual education of her present and future citizens — the growth an an American culture to confirm American independence and to fulfill the promise of American republicanism.

* * *

But it is this American culture, and the education appropriate to it, that have been under sustained attack for the past century. Strangely, many conservatives attribute today's cultural crisis not to the abandonment of our country's political and cultural principles, but to their victory. Judge Robert H. Bork, for example, argues in his recent book that the extreme egalitarianism and libertarianism of today are simply the founders' premises of equality and liberty, victorious at last over the traditions of law, inherited morality, and religion. These saving traditions had concealed the founders' radicalism from themselves, had moderated it for many generations after, but now have fallen away, revealing the Enlightenment extremism that had been there all along.¹¹ About the only hope he sees for America is in the on-going revival of revealed religion. This is a peculiar hope, inasmuch as the Enlightenment cut its teeth on the critique of revealed religion in the 17th century. If its critique was plausible then, why should it not be more so today, given our cultural decline? Bork attacks modern liberalism wittily and passionately, but he does so because he does not think it can be attacked rationally or philosophically; he thinks liberalism represents the triumph of reason (i.e., Enlightenment) over faith and tradition. He does not think that Enlightenment radicalism can be refuted on the basis of reason, and so he stakes his case on results: he tries to show that extreme egalitarianism and libertarianism ("the Sixties") are bad because their consequences (the Seventies, Eighties, and Nineties, roughly speaking) are bad. Bork thus implies that Americans are not so far gone as to be unable to recognize bad social policy when they see it; but surely this implies that they have access to some knowledge of good and bad, right and wrong, independently of legal and moral traditions that many of them, alas, have never known.

Bork has no great confidence in the possibility of such natural knowledge, that is, in what can be known by human reason as opposed to "Enlightenment" reason. For him, the hope for religious revival is not a reasonable one but a desperate, last-chance hope — a Hail Mary pass if there ever was one! Bork does not see that modern, multicultural liberalism is really an attack on reason, especially on the reasonable morality of the American founders, in the name of will and authenticity. For the contemporary Left, after all, culture is not something reasonable. The "cultures" of multiculturalism are rooted in ethnicity, race, and gender — in our bodies, in the subrational parts of human nature. But more important than the bodily origins of the self is the will, which must shape or assemble these bodily facts into an identity. It is nowadays possible to have a sex change operation, for example, which shows that will can trump gender; but only in the name of gender, "the real you" who must have your bodily nature adjusted to match your authentic self. Everything, starting with personal identify, becomes "socially constructed," which means in turn that everything is ripe for social de-construction.

Against liberal relativism and deconstructionism, religion needs the assistance of reason. Without reason's authority, revelation is prey to the same easy-going egalitarianism and relativism of which Bork complains in regard to liberty and equality. Now, in its highest sense, divine revelation is the disclosure of something suprarational, of something that cannot be known by human reason alone. If reason cannot by its own operations arrive at any important truths about good and bad, right and wrong, the purposes of human life and liberty, then the suprarational becomes an empty category, waiting to be filled with anybody's "values," however frivolous, however evil. Without reason's support, in other words, the suprarational tends to deconstruct into the subrational.

So waiting around for religion to save the culture — though it is certainly true that Christianity and Judaism must play an indispensable role in any moral-cultural revival in America — is self-defeating. Nor should we look for the salvation of our culture from culture alone. Politics has an important, indeed a crucial role to play, too.

* * *

Perhaps the single most compelling lesson that we can learn from the American founding is that we need to begin to think of ourselves as founders, or more particularly as refounders of our civilization. The founders spoke of "civilization" rather than "culture," because they took their bearings from nature not history, from reason not passion or will, from mankind not ethnic groups, from freedom not determinism, and from politics not sociology. Nonetheless, the founders may be said to have deliberately set out to shape, through the influence of laws, mores, and their own example, the first American culture. In doing so, they did not begin with a pristine block of marble; they began as Englishmen, the inheritors of centuries of constitutional, religious, and artistic development. This impressive inheritance deserves greater consideration than we have time and occasion for here, needless to say. For despite this inheritance — and partly, of course, because of it — the Americans of the founding generation chose to cease being Englishmen and become something else.

Becoming American was initially a political and constitutional choice, but finally it necessitated a series of profound transformations in business, speech, dress, religion, literature, education, heroes, holidays, civic ceremonies — in character. The public schools movement was one of the most important, as well as one of the most obvious, of these subsequent efforts to conform the American people to their new republican institutions. It is an old political observation, echoed in Montesquieu and countless other writers, that in the beginning men make the institutions, and after that the institutions make the men. The American founders had this maxim very much in mind as they built the institutions that would guide the nation's destiny, and today it is worth pondering anew. Perhaps it is time to build some new institutions, if we are to have a real chance to rehabilitate American culture.

The Left took this path, beginning in the 1870s and 1880s, when it began to build America's first research universities and graduate schools, mostly on the German model, which its intellectual pioneers knew and intended would have a close, symbiotic relation with the modern state they would also eventually construct. Experts from one would baptize the other, for the modern welfare and administrative state would be constantly in need of scientific civil servants, and the modern research university would be constantly honing its sense of social justice and administrative expertness or ambition. Conservatives today have made a fair beginning at counterrevolution, establishing think-tanks and policy journals galore; but much more needs to be done to found new elementary and secondary schools, colleges, and graduate programs, taking the founders' own precepts as the intellectual point of departure. Without intellectual support and legitimation from such new or renovated institutions, conservatives have little chance of achieving lasting political and cultural reformation — much less the renewal of our civilization.

1 John O'Sullivan, "Reinventing the American People?" in Robert Royal, ed., Reinventing the American People: Unity and Diversity Today (Washington, D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1995), pp. 275-284, at 278. href="#footnote1return" mce_href="#footnote1return">(Return)

2 2 Cf. Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., "The Twofold Meaning of 'Unum,'" in Robert Royal, ibid., pp. 103-113, at 105-6. href="#footnote2return" mce_href="#footnote2return">(Return)

3 Aristotle, The Politics, trans. Carnes Lord (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 1276b9-10. href="#footnote3return" mce_href="#footnote3return">(Return)

4 Consider Aristotle, The Politics, 1267a17-40, 1280b29-1281a7, 1281a40-1281b17, 1282a13-19, 1288b10-34, 1289b26-13, 1295a25-1296a12, 1296b13-40. href="#footnote4return" mce_href="#footnote4return">(Return)

5 Cf. Harry V. Jaffa, "On the Necessity of a Scholarship of the Politics of Freedom," in Harry V. Jaffa, ed., Statesmanship: Essays in Honor of Sir Winston S. Churchill (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 1981 ), pp. 1-9. href="#footnote5return" mce_href="#footnote5return">(Return)

6 The Federalist Papers, ed. Clinton Rossiter (New York: Mentor, 1961), No. 1, p. 33; No. 40, p. 253; No. 49, pp. 314-315. href="#footnote6return" mce_href="#footnote6return">(Return)

7 James Madison, "Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments," in Marvin Meyers, ed., The Mind of the Founder: Sources of the Political Thought of James Madison (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1973), pp. 7-16, at 9. href="#footnote7return" mce_href="#footnote7return">(Return)

8 The Federalist Papers, No. 55, p. 346. href="#footnote8return" mce_href="#footnote8return">(Return)

9 See Charles R. Kesler, "Education and Politics: Lessons from the American Founding," The University of Chicago Legal Forum (1991), pp. 101-122, at 111. href="#footnote9return" mce_href="#footnote9return">(Return)

10 Reprinted in G. Brown Goode, "The Origin of the National Scientific and Educational Institutions of the United States", in Papers of the American Historical Association, vol. 4, part 2 (1890), pp. 82, 84. href="#footnote10return" mce_href="#footnote10return">(Return)

11 Robert H. Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah (New York: Regan Books, 1996), pp. 56-58, 66-67. href="#footnote11return" mce_href="#footnote11return">(Return)