American Political Thought Journal: Fall 2021 Issue
American Political Thought: A Journal of Ideas, Institutions, and Culture, has recently published its Fall 2021 issue, which includes pieces by JMC fellow Charles Zug and faculty partners Vincent Phillip Muñoz, Jeremy Bailey, and Nicholas Buccola.
>> Table of Contents <<
Articles:
- “To Break the Slave Power: Thaddeus Stevens, Land Confiscation, and the Politics of Reparations,” Lawrence Svabek
- “James Madison’s Political Science of Religious Liberty,” Vincent Phillip Muñoz
- “‘An Affair of History, Law, and Institutions’: William Graham Sumner’s Historical Method and the Responsibility of the Individual,” Simon J. Gilhooley
- “Creating a Demagogue: The Political Origins of Daniel Shays’s Erroneous Legacy in American Political History,” Charles U. Zug
Transcribed Lecture:
- “‘Two Foundings’: An Unpublished Lecture by John H. Schaar,” Joshua I. Miller
Book Reviews:
- “Fighting for the Higher Law: Black and White Transcendentalists against Slavery, by PeterWirzbicki,” Bob Pepperman Taylor
- “American Exceptionalism as Religion: Postmodern Discontent, by Jordan Carson,” Lucy Williams
- “Let’s Be Reasonable: A Conservative Case for Liberal Education, by Jonathan Marks,” Joel Schlosser
- “The Problem of Democracy: The Presidents Adams Confront the Cult of Personality, by Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein,” Jeremy Bailey
- “Calhoun: American Heretic, by Robert Elder,” James H. Read
- “A Declaration and Constitution for a Free Society: Making the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution Fully Consistent with the Protection of Individual Rights, by Brian P. Simpson,” Scott Douglas Gerber
- “What Were We Thinking? An Intellectual History of the Trump Era, by Carlos Lozada,” Nicholas Buccola
“James Madison’s Political Science of Religious Liberty,” Vincent Phillip Muñoz
“In Fulton v. City of Philadelphia (2021), Justices Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch called for the reversal of Employment Division v. Smith (1990), the Supreme Court’s leading Free Exercise Clause precedent. For years, Smith has been targeted by originalists who contend that, among other things, Smith is incompatible with a Madisonian understanding of religious freedom. This article challenges that conclusion. It attempts to do so not by employing the typical tools of originalist legal scholarship, but rather by setting forth Madison’s political science of religious liberty. The article argues the logic of Federalist 10 is incompatible with exemptions from generally applicable laws and, therefore, that a Madisonian construction of the Free Exercise Clause would not support a constitutional right to religious exemptions. Insofar as Federalist 10 articulates the Constitution’s underlying structural design, Free Exercise Clause exemptions undermine one of the principal mechanisms that Madison believed would protect liberty, including religious liberty.”
Click here to read the piece >>
Vincent Phillip Muñoz is the Tocqueville Associate Professor of Political Science and Concurrent Associate Professor of Law at The University of Notre Dame. He also serves as Director of Notre Dame’s Tocqueville Program for Inquiry into Religion and Public Life and the Potenziani Program in Constitutional Studies.
Dr. Muñoz writes and teaches across the fields of political philosophy, constitutional studies, and American politics. His research has focused on the theme of religious liberty and the American Constitution. His first book, God and the Founders: Madison, Washington, and Jefferson (Cambridge University Press, 2009), won the Hubert Morken Award from the American Political Science Association for the best publication on religion and politics in 2009 and 2010. His First Amendment church-state casebook, Religious Liberty and the American Supreme Court: The Essential Cases and Documents, was published in 2013 (Rowman & Littlefield, revised edition 2015) and is being used at Notre Dame and other leading universities.
Professor Muñoz is a JMC faculty partner.
Learn more about Vincent Phillip Muñoz >>
“Creating a Demagogue: The Political Origins of Daniel Shays’s Erroneous Legacy in American Political History,” Charles U. Zug
“What are the political consequences of negative political theory concepts such as demagoguery? What happens when they are deployed in a way that brands an innocent victim with a reputation he or she does not deserve? This article contends that Daniel Shays was just such a victim. Despite playing only a peripheral role in the erroneously named ‘Shays’s Rebellion’ of 1786–87, Shays himself was singled out by elites looking for ways to deflect blame away from themselves and their oligarchic Massachusetts regime. Subsequently labeling the movement ‘Shays’s Rebellion,’ these elites cemented the narrative that Shays had led protest movements in western Massachusetts. Shays thus entered American political vernacular as the paradigmatic demagogue—and ‘Shays’s Rebellion’ became the example of demagogue-led state failure—through the successful weaponization of a political idea. More broadly, the Shays case functions as a window into the relationship between ideas and political development in American politics.”
Click here to read the piece >>
Charles Zug is an Assistant Professor in the Center for the Study of Government and the Individual at the University of Colorado – Colorado Springs. His dissertation, “The Uses and Abuses of Demagoguery in American National Government,” argues for a descriptive theory of demagoguery through comparative case-studies of Constitutional officers in the three branches of American government and has been nominated for the E.E. Schattschneider and Walter Dean Burnham Dissertation Awards. Zug’s scholarly work has been published in Critical Review, Interpretation, The Australian Journal of Politics & History, and Perspectives on Political Science. Additionally, he is currently pursuing two book projects. The first, under contract at the University Press of Kansas, examines Dwight Eisenhower’s leadership of the 1956 Federal Highway Act. The second, currently under review at Oxford University Press, is on demagogues in the American constitutional order.
Professor Zug is a Jack Miller Center fellow.
Learn more about Charles Zug >>
“The Problem of Democracy: The Presidents Adams Confront the Cult of Personality, by Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein,” Jeremy Bailey
Jeremy Bailey reviews The Problem of Democracy: The Presidents Adams Confront the Cult of Personality by Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein, praising the book as “a readable, but sound study” of John and John Quincy Adams, a father and son that both struggled with the “cult of personality.”
Click here to read the full review >>
Jeremy D. Bailey is Professor and Sanders Chair in Law and Liberty and Director of the Institute for American Constitutional Heritage at the University of Oklahoma. He teaches in the Constitutional Studies program, and his research interests include the political thought of the early republic as well as constitutional controversies concerning executive power. His books include The Idea of Presidential Representation: An Intellectual and Political History (University Press of Kansas, 2019), James Madison and Constitutional Imperfection (Cambridge University Press, 2015), The Contested Removal Power, 1789-2010 (University Press of Kansas 2013, coauthored with David Alvis and Flagg Taylor), which was named a 2014 “Outstanding Academic Title” by Choice, and Thomas Jefferson and Executive Power (Cambridge University Press 2007). His articles have appeared in American Political Science Review, History of Political Thought, Review of Politics, Political Research Quarterly, American Politics Research, Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, Publius, Presidential Studies Quarterly, and Critical Review. With Susan McWilliams, Bailey is editor of American Political Thought: A Journal of Ideas, Institutions, and Culture, published quarterly by University of Chicago Press, as well as the American Political Thought book series published by University Press of Kansas.
Professor Bailey is a JMC faculty partner.
Learn more about Jeremy D. Bailey >>
“What Were We Thinking? An Intellectual History of the Trump Era, by Carlos Lozada,” Nicholas Buccola
Nicholas Buccola reviews What Were We Thinking? An Intellectual History of the Trump Era by Carlos Lozada, describing the book as “not, really, about Mr. Trump. It is, as its subtitle suggests, about an ‘era’ in which Mr. Trump is a central figure. This book deals hardly at all with Trump as a man and deals with him instead as a symbol, or cultural indicator, and how the reactions to him from various points of view might help us make sense of who we were, who we are, and who we might yet become.”
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Nicholas Buccola is the Elizabeth & Morris Glicksman Chair in Political Science at Linfield College. His teaching and research interests are in political theory and public law. Professor Buccola is the founding director of the Frederick Douglass Forum on Law, Rights, and Justice, a partner program in JMC’s Pacific Northwest Initiative, and has written extensively on the political thought of Frederick Douglass. He has published essays on a wide variety of topics including the debate over same-sex marriage, Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique of socialism, and the political philosophies of Judith Shklar and Leo Strauss. He is a recipient of the Allen and Pat Kelley Faculty Scholar Award, and a two-time recipient of the Samuel Graf Faculty Achievement Award. Professor Buccola is also the book review editor for the JMC supported journal, American Political Thought.
Professor Buccola is a JMC faculty partner.
Learn more about Nicholas Buccola >>
American Political Thought: A Journal of Ideas, Institutions, and Culture is a JMC supported journal that bridges the gap between historical, empirical, and theoretical research. It is the only journal dedicated exclusively to the study of American political thought. Interdisciplinary in scope, APT features research by political scientists, historians, literary scholars, economists, and philosophers who study the foundation of the American political tradition. Research explores key political concepts such as democracy, constitutionalism, equality, liberty, citizenship, political identity, and the role of the state.
Click here to learn more about American Political Thought >>
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