Research
My research engages the history of political thought in order to reflect on timely questions related to liberalism and its critics. In particular, I have examined the role of desire and emotion in modern political thought, and their implications for political life in general. My research is guided by a broad interest in the relationship between the individual and society in liberalism, and the uneasy interaction between individual desires and emotions on the one hand, and the professed ideals of liberal democracy on the other. I have written broadly on the culture of liberalism and the role of compassion in liberal political thought, as well as the political thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, the American Founders, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Friedrich Hayek.
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My research statement is available upon request.
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Dissertation:
Liberalism and the Problem of Compassion in Rousseau, Smith, and Tocqueville
Committee: Andrea Radasanu (Chair), Dennis C. Rasmussen, Michael Clark
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Abstract: Liberal democracy has historically owed its attractiveness to the promise of a more compassionate society structured around pluralistic and tolerant principles. Yet recent events in western democracies seem to indicate a lack of compassionate social bonds. Why has a politics of compassion failed to materialize and what must be done to make good on the original promise of liberal democracy? To answer these questions, I provide a historically and theoretically grounded account of compassion as a principle of liberalism, with special attention to the political thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, and Alexis de Tocqueville. In particular, I seek to understand why these thinkers, remarkable for their emphasis on other-directed sentiments, expressed uncertainty regarding the efficacy of compassion. I argue that the fundamental commitments of liberalism, as articulated in modern political philosophy, necessarily bring compassion to the forefront of our moral consciousness, but in a way that is insufficient to offset the more dissociative tendencies of liberal democracy. In order for compassion to foster strong, equitable, and charitable bonds in our political life, it must be augmented with external moral resources that may be hard to come by in liberal modernity. The thinkers examined here attempted to provide such resources with varying degrees of success, providing us with a useful template as we attempt to navigate the crisis of liberalism in the early twenty-first century.
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Publications:
"Corruption and Congressional Design: The Federalist’s Dual Fear of the Abuse of Power and Abuse of Liberty,” with Katherine Hoss, in Corruption and Scandal in Congress, ed. Michael J. Pomante II (Emerald Publishing, 2022).
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Abstract: Corruption is a fundamental concern for all political regimes, but particularly for republics where power is vested primarily in a legislative body. While political thinkers across times and places have grappled with this perennial problem, this chapter focuses on the modern American republic and its founders. The authors begin with a brief historical sketch that illustrates the continuity and evolution of corruption discourse, spanning the distance between ancient political philosophy and modern political science. Turning to the American founding, and focusing particularly on the debates at the Constitutional Convention and the essays of The Federalist, the authors show how the framers of the U.S. Constitution engaged with this tradition as they confronted the threat of corruption head on. Although these early American documents provide an ambiguous definition of corruption, the authors endeavor to parse the separate but intertwined meanings of corruption: constitutional, institutional, and moral. While the framers' system draws upon both ancient and modern approaches, their final position is that correct institutional design can provide the solution to political corruption. Ultimately for the framers, this comes down to the design of the legislature and its relationship to the other branches. The authors suggest that while contemporary readers may find much to be dissatisfied with in the framers' proposed solutions, their subtle and wide-ranging conceptualization of the problem of corruption might usefully inform contemporary theory-building in this area.
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"Freedom as an Artifact: The Cultural Foundations of Ordered Liberty," in Culture, Sociality, and Morality: New Applications of Mainline Political Economy, eds. Paul Dragos Aligica and Virgil Storr (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022).
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Abstract: The concept of culture has an ambiguous place in the classical liberal tradition. On the one hand, critics of liberalism contend that commercial society is destructive of culture. On the other hand, proponents of liberalism like F.A. Hayek maintain that a robust culture is necessary for the sustenance of a free society. To shed some light on these matters, this chapter aims to show that Hayek and the liberal tradition he follows embrace a nuanced understanding of culture as the nebulous middle ground that lies between human nature and human reason. This tripartite approach to understanding social order is not unique to modern thinkers, but has deep roots reaching back through the history of western thought to classical political philosophy. Moreover, those who adopt this general approach resist the urge to collapse disparate social phenomena into a monolithic conception of "culture," but instead try to treat each of those phenomena as individually important aspects of political life in their own right. Of special importance are two particular aspects of human “culture:” cultivated habits and promulgated conventions. The free society depends crucially on the former, and thus requires a robust culture understood in terms of the cultivation of habits that dispose individuals to adhere to the general rules of an impersonal market order, over and against the inclinations of natural instinct or reason. In this way the liberal tradition and the free society it seeks is predicated on an intimate and indispensable bond between sociality, morality, and culture.
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Book Reviews:
"Doubting Progress." Review of Matthew W. Slaboch, "A Road to Nowhere: The Idea of Progress and Its Critics," Interpretation Vol. 45, No. 1 (2018): 141-145.
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Articles In Progress:
"In Search of Noble Compassion: Adam Smith on the Virtue of Beneficence" (under review).
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"Tocqueville's Charitable Critique of Democratic Compassion" (under review).
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"Celebrity Politics and Modern Democracy: The Burkean Dynamics of Fame and Shame" (in progress).
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"Nietzsche's Temple of Joy" (in progress).
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