Luke Foster

Montesquieu’s philosophy of moderate government offers only a qualified endorsement of commercial republics. Recent scholarship has increasingly recognized the extent to which he advocated a monarchy balanced by an aristocracy. This article explicates Montesquieu’s understanding of honor as a vital aristocratic motive and one more consistently favorable to liberty than mercantile self-interest. It then compares this argument to the constitutionalism of the American Federalists. Whereas Publius attempts to create a balance of powers on the basis of representing aggregates of individuals, Adams throughout his writings affirms Montesquieu’s assumption that the impulse for honor creates enduring hierarchies in society, which must be explicitly accounted for in constitutional design. It concludes by suggesting that, amid today’s concerns about oligarchy, inequality, and populism, Adams’s realism points toward a healthier relationship between elites and people.

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.

The foundation of new centers for civic education has sparked a new round of debate over the political independence of the public university. Do legal mandates by state legislatures undermine academic freedom? The underlying debate concerns alternative visions of elite formation, as comparing Benjamin Rush and Thomas Jefferson's arguments during the Founding period makes apparent. Both believed that the American constitutional order depended on educated citizens of a certain character, requiring coercive authority in education to instill moral and political commitments. But whereas Jefferson made an exception for educational coercion, Rush viewed education as an aristocratic element that could complement democracy. Rush's prioritizing of duties over rights offers a more helpful framework for the task of reforming elite education today to restore trust between leaders and people.

This article engages two established modes of analyzing Tocqueville’s theory in Democracy in America—the institutionalism of Volume 1 and the “art of association” of Volume 2—to argue for the importance of a Platonic theme in Tocqueville, that of education for leadership. After establishing why Tocqueville argues that democracy struggles to cultivate quality leadership, the article turns to examining one proposed solution: education in the classical humanities. Tocqueville’s argument for this pedagogy is overtly aristocratic, in contrast to many contemporary arguments for liberal education. Following this logic carefully permits us to understand another aspect of Tocqueville’s characteristic effort to incorporate aristocratic elements into democratic society and challenges us to reconsider our own role as educators.