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Ben Peterson, a doctoral student in the Texas A&M Department of Political Science, has also written for the Intercollegiate Review, Public Discourse, Ethika Politika, and the New York Times.

October 30, 2017|Aedanus Burke, Declaration of Independence, Gentlemen Revolutionaries, Henry Knox, Property Rights, Tom Cutterham

Of Gentlemen and Justice

by Ben Peterson|3 Comments

An uncharitable reading of Tom Cutterham’s new book would suggest the alternative title: “An Economic Interpretation of the Buildup to the Constitutional Convention.” But Cutterham, a lecturer in U.S. history at the University of Birmingham in Britain, is up to something more interesting, and perhaps more controversial, than Charles Beard was. Gentlemen Revolutionaries: Power and Justice in the New American Republic contends that the political institutions and values adopted after the American War for Independence stemmed from class-based struggles to define justice that animated the young republic. These institutions, on Cutterham’s reading, did not abolish hierarchy but created new anti-egalitarian social…

July 25, 2017|Civic Virtue, Concurrent Majority, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, John Calhoun, Term Limits, The Federalist, Tyranny of the Majority, Willmoore Kendall

Political Institutions Can’t Foster Virtue, They Can Only Channel Vice

by Ben Peterson|9 Comments

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In the July Liberty Forum essay, Joseph Postell boldly takes on the core problem of representative government: how a representative legislature can be made to serve the common good instead of the parochial interests to which its members are tied. While the argument is strong—that congressional deliberation requires patience and tolerance of “inherent messiness,” and that the design of political institutions matters a great deal—none of the solutions from Willmoore Kendall that Postell proffers solves the problem. More critically, the idea that political institutions can foster virtue, civic or otherwise, is alien to the political thought of the Framers of the…

June 29, 2017|American Citizenship, Cicero, Immigration, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Robert Nisbet, William B. Allen

What’s True about Citizenship?

by Ben Peterson|4 Comments

Littleton, Colorado

Two decades ago, during a wave of handwringing about “the new nationalism” sparked by the war in Bosnia, the late political philosopher Jean Bethke Elshtain wrote that the nation-state remains “the best way we have thus far devised for protecting and sustaining a way of life in common.” Yet the nation-state is an abstraction, meaningful only insofar as it shapes the way individuals understand and order their interpersonal relationships. As Roger Scruton has written, citizenship defines the relationship between the individual and the state—which is to say between the citizen, other citizens, and non-citizens. William B. Allen, whose kind remarks on…

January 10, 2017|French New Right, Giuseppe Mazzini, Greg Ip, League of Nations, Mark Lilla, national sovereignty, Samuel Huntington, Steve Bannon, Theresa May

National Sovereignty, Political Idea of the Year

by Ben Peterson|7 Comments

The year 2016 demonstrated the enduring relevance of political ideas. A political idea is distinct from and more fundamental than a stance on a policy or issue. It is a way of understanding political phenomena in light of a worldview. A political idea connects the dizzying array of available facts, forming a coherent vision of what is really happening in the world.

Nearly every political idea involves at minimum three components, corresponding to these questions:

What is a good society—in other words, what should the world look like?
Why doesn’t it look that way?
What would set things right?

Scholars, journalists, and analysts have attributed Trump’s victory, Brexit, and other nationalist advances to the forces of populism, demagoguery, and xenophobia.

October 13, 2016|human nature, John Adams, Relic, Terry M. Moe, William G. Howell, Woodrow Wilson

The False Promises of Presidential Leadership

by Ben Peterson|16 Comments

This century witnessed the “return of history” in international affairs, and has now shown that we Americans are not immune from the tendencies of human nature toward excessive ambition, and of political society—particularly democracy—toward oligarchy and tyranny. Americans are not exceptional.

February 22, 2016|Alan Ehrenhalt, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Our Kids, Robert Nisbet, Robert Putnam, The Quest for Community

Putnam’s Quest for Community

by Ben Peterson|9 Comments

Robert Putnam is on a quest for community, but in his recent bestseller Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, he’s looking in the wrong place. Thinking more collectively will not restore America’s depleted “social capital.” We need a revival of human-scale institutions, based on a more realistic understanding of community. For that, we should turn to the late Robert Nisbet, a conservative sociologist who presaged Putnam’s quest, and Alan Ehrenhalt, a senior editor at Governing magazine and an accomplished journalist who supplies us concrete pictures of community in action. Our Kids is about the expanding opportunity gap facing kids in…

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