The Moral Center & America’s Future: James Bryce’s “American Commonwealth”

By |2022-10-04T14:31:09-05:00October 4th, 2022|Categories: Alexis de Tocqueville, American Republic, Featured, George W. Carey, James Bryce, Timeless Essays|Tags: |

James Bryce’s relatively optimistic view of America’s future relies on the tacit premise that its people will retain the moral center, inherited largely from their English forebears. His work, then, is valuable, if only to remind us of that heritage. It is also foreboding in suggesting that without this moral center troubled times await the [...]

Public Opinion in James Bryce’s “The American Commonwealth”

By |2019-11-21T19:44:26-06:00February 7th, 2019|Categories: Books, Community, Democracy, James Bryce, Political Philosophy|

We see that the creation of one’s own opinions is to a large degree a community affair. According to James Bryce, the individual has a powerful role in crafting a nation’s political discourse, but can only be involved in doing so if they act in concert with others. This neither denies the possibility of conflicting beliefs [...]

A Masterpiece of Political Thought: James Bryce’s “The American Commonwealth”

By |2019-06-13T12:23:19-05:00July 1st, 2013|Categories: American Republic, James Bryce, Mark Malvasi, Political Philosophy|Tags: , |

The best that E. L. Godkin, the editor of the liberal journal The Nation, could say about United States congressmen in 1874 was that “we underrate their honesty, but we overrate their intelligence.” Henry Adams, another patrician critic of late nineteenth-century American politics, remarked that to disprove Darwin’s theory of evolution one need only study [...]

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