Harry, Lincoln, and Me

Abstract

to say the least. My interests had been—and to some degree still are—in the great tradition of European political philosophy, to which I condescendingly regarded the American contribution as something of an afterthought. This attitude began to change when I took Nathan Tarcov’s class on the American political founding, where we read the classic exchanges between Federalists and Anti-Federalists, as well as key documents of the revolutionary period. It was in this class where I was also introduced to Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), Gordon Wood’s The Creation of the American Republic (1969), and Edmund Morgan’s The Birth of the Republic (1977), which for the first time opened my eyes to the philosophic sources of the American Revolution in radical English Whig political theory. At around the same time, I read John Pocock’s magisterial, albeit flawed, TheMachiavellian Moment (1975), which sought to put the American founding period in the long history of republican self-government going back to Machiavelli and before him to Polybius and Aristotle. Suddenly what had previously seemed to me something of an intellectual backwater had become a key moment in the revival of the great tradition of classical republicanism. Shortly thereafter, I was privileged to study with David Greenstone—of blessed memory—in whose class we read Louis Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in America (1955). Here I learned that it was the philosophy of John Locke that formed the philosophic core of American history and that helped to explain why America—at least in the height of the Cold War—seemed uniquely immune to the radical ideologies of both the Left and the Right that had been the legacy of European politics. This to me was a powerful insight and one that