The Words That Made Us
Revisit key constitutional questions through the lens of history and law.
In 1776, the Declaration of Independence announced a new political order founded on equality, natural rights, consent, and self-government. It began a spirited conversation about liberty and equality, commerce and virtue, union and slavery, memory and hope; it did not settle the meaning of America.
Marking the 250th anniversary of the United States, this seminar brings together five distinguished teachers for five concentrated encounters with texts that have shaped, challenged, and deepened the American experiment. Fellows will study The Declaration of Independence with Yuval Levin, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations with Ryan Hanley, George Washington’s Farewell Address and Federalist Papers 10 & 51 with Darren Staloff, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Earth’s Holocaust and Robert Frost’s Mending Wall with Christopher Scalia, and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address with Diana Schaub.
Taken together, these five sessions ask what America has claimed for itself and what kind of people a free republic requires. The course treats the anniversary as an occasion for reflection and judgment.
Watch the America at 250 course trailer.
This course is offered by Humanities at Hertog. It takes place weekly on Tuesday, via Zoom, from 6 PM to 8 PM ET. Fellows who complete the seminar in good standing, including full participation, timely completion of the response paper, and submission of the course evaluation, will receive a $150 Amazon gift card. Required course materials will be provided.
Faculty
Yuval Levin
Yuval Levin is a Resident Scholar and Director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute and the Editor of National Affairs magazine. Mr. Levin served on the White House domestic policy staff under President George W. Bush.
Yuval Levin
Yuval Levin is a Resident Scholar and Director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the founding Editor of National Affairs magazine. Prior to joining AEI, he was Vice President of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and EPPC’s Hertog Fellow.
He is a Contributing Editor of National Review and The Weekly Standard and a Senior Editor of EPPC’s journal The New Atlantis. Author and editor of numerous books, including The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left (2013), The Fractured Republic: Renewing America’s Social Contract in the Age of Individualism (2016), and he most recently published A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream (2020). His essays and articles have appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, and others.
Before joining EPPC, Mr. Levin served on the White House domestic policy staff under President George W. Bush. He has also been Executive Director of the President’s Council on Bioethics and a congressional staffer. He holds a B.A. from American University and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He is a recipient of a 2013 Bradley Prize for intellectual achievement.
Ryan P. Hanley
Ryan Patrick Hanley is Professor of Political Science at Boston College. His research in the history of political philosophy focuses on the Enlightenment. He is the author of Our Great Purpose: Adam Smith on Living a Better Life and Love’s Enlightenment: Rethinking Charity in Modernity.
Ryan P. Hanley
Ryan Patrick Hanley is Professor of Political Science at Boston College. Previously, he was the Mellon Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Marquette University. His research in the history of political philosophy focuses on the Enlightenment.
He is the author of Our Great Purpose: Adam Smith on Living a Better Life (Princeton University Press, 2019), Love’s Enlightenment: Rethinking Charity in Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 2016), and Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue (Cambridge University Press, 2009). His edited volumes include Adam Smith: His Life, Thought, and Legacy (Princeton University Press, 2016), the Penguin Classics edition of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (Penguin, 2010), and with Darrin M. McMahon, The Enlightenment: Critical Concepts in History, 5 vols. (Routledge, 2010).
His articles have appeared or are forthcoming in American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, European Journal of Political Theory, Review of Politics, Social Philosophy & Policy, History of Political Thought, Journal of the History of Philosophy, Revue internationale de philosophie, and Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie.
Professor Hanley received his B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, his M.Phil. from Cambridge University, and his Ph.D. from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Prior to Marquette, he was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University’s Whitney Humanities Center.
Christopher Scalia
Christopher J. Scalia is a senior fellow in the Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies department at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on literature, culture, and higher education. Prior to his role at AEI, Dr. Scalia was an English professor with a specialty in 18th-century and early 19th-century British literature.
Christopher Scalia
Christopher J. Scalia is a senior fellow in the Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies department at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on literature, culture, and higher education.
A former English professor, Dr. Scalia specialized in 18th-century and early 19th-century British literature. He also spent three years as director of AEI’s Academic Programs department, where he led educational and professional-development programs and events for college students around the country. His articles, essays, and reviews on literature, music, higher education, and other topics have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, USA Today, Commentary, National Review, First Things, the Washington Free Beacon, the Times Literary Supplement, the Spectator World, and FoxNews.com, among other outlets.
Dr. Scalia is the coeditor of On Faith: Lessons from an American Believer (Crown Forum, 2019), and Scalia Speaks: Reflections on Law, Faith, and Life Well Lived (Crown Forum, 2017). His forthcoming book, Eleven Conservative Novels You Must Read . . . but Probably Haven’t, will be published by Regnery Publishing in 2024.
Dr. Scalia has a PhD and MA in English from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He has a BA in English with a minor in history from the College of William & Mary.
Diana Schaub
Diana Schaub is a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where her work is focused on American political thought and history, particularly Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, African American political thought, Montesquieu, and the relevance of core American ideals to contemporary challenges and debates. Concurrently, she is Professor Emerita of Political Science at Loyola University Maryland, where she taught for almost three decades.
Diana Schaub
Diana Schaub is a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where her work is focused on American political thought and history, particularly Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, African American political thought, Montesquieu, and the relevance of core American ideals to contemporary challenges and debates. Concurrently, she is Professor Emerita of Political Science at Loyola University Maryland, where she taught for almost three decades.
An expert in political philosophy, Dr. Schaub has lectured on a variety of topics and participated in conferences around the country. She has contributed chapters to multiple books on Shakespeare, liberal education, women, and religion, and she is the author of three books: His Greatest Speeches: How Lincoln Moved the Nation (St. Martin’s Press, 2021); What So Proudly We Hail: The American Soul in Story, Speech, and Song, coedited with Amy and Leon Kass (ISI Books, 2011); and Erotic Liberalism: Women and Revolution in Montesquieu’s “Persian Letters” (Rowman & Littlefield, 1995). Her monograph Emancipating the Mind: Lincoln, the Founders, and Scientific Progress (AEI, 2018) is based on her remarks at the 2018 Walter Berns Constitution Day Lecture.
Dr. Schaub has also been published in the popular press, including in the Baltimore Sun, the Claremont Review of Books, Commentary, and the Wall Street Journal.
Dr. Schaub has a PhD and an MA in political science from the University of Chicago. Her BA in political science is from Kenyon College.
Darren Staloff
Darren Staloff is a retired Professor of History from the City College of New York and the Graduate Center of CUNY. Professor Staloff has published numerous papers and reviews on the subject of early American history.
Darren Staloff
Darren Staloff is a retired Professor of History from the City College of New York and the Graduate Center of CUNY.
Professor Staloff has published numerous papers and reviews on the subject of early American history and is the author of The Making of an American Thinking Class: Intellectuals and Intelligentsia in Puritan Massachusetts (1998) and Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson: The Politics of Enlightenment and the American Founding (2005).
He has recorded dozens of audio and video tapes (nationally distributed) on U.S. and world history and major philosophers. He has received many fellowships, including The James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University as well as an NEH grant and a post-doctoral fellowship from the Omahundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. He earned his B.A. from Columbia College and his M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. from Columbia University.
Jacob Dowd
Teaching Assistant
Jacob Dowd is a junior at Purdue University, where he studies physics and philosophy and minors in classics and music. He has served as an undergraduate preceptor in philosophy and a teaching assistant in physics, and his research has included biophysics and NASA mission-design work. A Hertog alumnus, Jacob has also been a Civics Research Fellow with Purdue’s Program on American Institutional Renewal and a legislative intern for Senator Todd Young. He will serve as teaching assistant for America’s 250th.
Download the Full Syllabus
Preview the Syllabus by Week/Session
October 6 — Session I: The Declaration of Independence with Yuval Levin
Readings:
- The Declaration of Independence (Stone Engraving, body only)
Discussion Questions:
- Who is the audience to which the Declaration seems to be directed?
- How does the Declaration regard the nation from which the American people are separating? What is its attitude toward Britain and its political order?
- Is the Declaration a revolutionary or a traditionalist document?
- What does the second paragraph of the Declaration suggest about the purposes of government and the nature of political legitimacy?
- What does the list of grievances suggest about the purposes of government and the nature of political legitimacy?
October 13 — Session II: Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations with Ryan Hanley
Readings:
- Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Glasgow Edition, vol. 2, pp. 588–631 (IV.vii.b.58–64 and IV.vii.c.1–91)
Discussion Questions:
- Why is Smith so troubled by trade regulations, and by monopolies in particular? Who does he think benefits from them? Who suffers from them? How does he use his account of the British monopoly over American tobacco to illustrate his claims?
- How does Smith account for the resistance of the American revolutionaries? What motives does he attribute to them? What does he find especially admirable in their characters?
- Smith saw in American independence not just the birth of a new nation but the birth of a new set of global relations. What sort of new global order does he see emerging in the short term? What sort of global order does he see emerging in the long term?
October 20 — Session III: George Washington's Farewell Address and Federalist Papers 10 & 51 with Darren Staloff
Readings:
- George Washington, Farewell Address
- James Madison, Federalist 10
- James Madison, Federalist 51
Discussion Questions:
- What is the account of human nature offered in these three readings, and how is it meant to impact the theory and practice of politics?
- In the conclusion to Federalist 10, Madison writes that “the extent and proper structure of the Union” provides “a republican remedy for the diseases most incident to republican government.” Part of that remedy for the “violence of faction” is ascribed to the fact that the “extended sphere” of the Union embraces such a vast range of opinions, passions, and interests that it will be extremely difficult to establish an enduring majority faction capable of seriously threatening the rights of the minority. Given subsequent changes in our economy, media, and modes of communication, does Madison’s “remedy” still work?
- How would you characterize the foreign policy Washington proffers in his Farewell Address? What is his estimation of geopolitical relations?
- Federalist 51 argues that the limits to the separation of powers in the Federal Constitution create checks and balances by giving “each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others” (paragraph 3). In the next paragraph it is claimed that “this policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public.” How does this policy manifest in private life? What are the moral as well as political implications of this policy?
- In his Farewell Address, Washington stresses the importance of religion in upholding morality, itself an essential requirement for a free and popular government. Midway through the speech he warns that “whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” Who do you think he is referring to by “minds of peculiar structure,” and to whom is this sentence particularly addressed?
October 27 — Session IV: Nathaniel Hawthorne's Earth's Holocaust and Robert Frost's Mending Wall with Christopher Scalia
Readings:
- Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Earth’s Holocaust”
- Robert Frost, “Mending Wall”
Discussion Questions:
Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Earth’s Holocaust”
- According to Russell Kirk, “the substance of Hawthorne’s resolute conviction [was] that moral reformation is the only real reformation; that sin always will corrupt the projects of enthusiasts who leave sin out of account; that progress is a delusion, except for the infinitely slow progress of conscience.” Do you agree with that interpretation of the story? Why or why not?
- What does the tale suggest about the nature of radical reform? Can the tale be understood to be a warning about the American project?
Robert Frost, “Mending Wall”
- What is the speaker’s attitude toward his neighbor? How does he characterize him, particularly toward the end of the poem? To what extent is this attitude justified or reasonable?
- The neighbor is unable to explain why good fences make good neighbors. Can you think of any?
November 3 — Session V: Lincoln's Gettysburg Address with Diana Schaub
Readings:
- Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
- Everett-Lincoln comparison packet and sentence diagram
Discussion Questions:
- Why does Lincoln begin his speech in the past: “Fourscore and seven years ago”?
- Lincoln describes the nation’s founding in his one-sentence opening paragraph. How does his account compare to the Declaration of Independence? Does Lincoln use the words “liberty” and “equality” in the same way that our founding charter does?
- Lincoln had been asked by the organizers to make a few appropriate remarks to dedicate the Soldiers’ National Cemetery at Gettysburg. Does he perform his assignment? Does he have other aims in view? If so, what are they? Are they compatible with or in tension with the official purpose of his remarks?
- What role do the “honored dead” play in preserving self-government?
- What is meant by the “new birth of freedom”? Why is it necessary or desirable?
- What does it mean for the nation to be “under God”? What effect does being “under God” have on freedom?
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