Program Dates: July 15–18, 2024
Location: Online (Broadcast from Princeton, New Jersey)
Cost: Free
Image Source: James Madison by Gilbert Stuart, ca. 1805–1807 (Bowdoin College Museum of Art)
The eighteenth century followed the Enlightenment’s move toward reason in politics by developing new concepts of statesmanship. There was a very delicate transition to be managed between the traditional statesmanship of the Renaissance and the absolute monarchies of the seventeenth century on the one hand, and the new democratic republics of the American and French Revolutions. George Washington is a particular example of a republican statesmanship (and all the more important for how so many other attempts at crafting a revolutionary or republican statesmanship failed) and of the statesmanship of founding.
Register
This session examines excerpts from The Autobiography of Theodore Roosevelt and selected essays from Roosevelt’s The Strenuous Life. The purpose of the session is to consider the role character, self-discipline, moral decency, and grit play in the formation and education of a young statesman.
Register
Woodrow Wilson, the only political science professor to be president of the United States, thought deeply and published widely as a scholar of the American political order and its history. As a teacher, scholar, and president of Princeton University, Wilson emerged as a leading Progressive thinker, advancing a reinterpretation of the American constitutional order as an evolving, organic charter for a changing country. How Wilson thought about the Constitution, and about the role of the presidency in its adaptation, will be the focus of this session.
Register
The disasters of the twentieth century seemed to undermine the possibilities of enlightened, democratic statesmanship, and threatened to replace them with a new, totalitarian brand of statesmanship. The miracle that delivered Europe from those disasters belongs almost entirely to statesmen of re-founding—especially Charles de Gaulle, Konrad Adenauer, Margaret Thatcher, and Václav Havel. Have we now run out of statesmen and statecraft?
Register