Books

These books amount to a series of thoughts on political thought—the moral and strategic thought of statesmen, as well as the more comprehensive thoughts of religious and philosophic writers.

Reflections on De Gaulle: Political Founding in Modernity. Lanham: University Press of America. ISBN 0-7618-2217-8. Originally published in 1983. But the revised 2002 edition has many fewer typographical errors and a much-improved font. I argue that Charles de Gaulle was above all a founder; his regime, France’s Fifth Republic, combined philosophic principles of both `the ancients’ and `the moderns’ in a way not seen in any other 20th-century founding.

Reflections on Malraux: Cultural Founding in Modernity. Lanham: University Press of America, 1984. ISBN 0-8191-4240-9. Novelist, art historian, and Minister of Cultural Affairs throughout de Gaulle’s presidency, André Malraux sought to effect what I called a “cultural” founding. Whereas de Gaulle aimed to found a regime of liberty in the modern world, Malraux wrote in defense of moral and intellectual liberty against the various forms of historical determinism that challenged the life of the mind in the West.

Our Culture “Left” or “Right.” (With Paul Eidelberg). Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1992. ISBN 0-7734-9171-6. Then a professor at Bar-Ilan University in Jerusalem, Eidelberg contributed the introductory chapter and edited the subsequent chapters I wrote on the pervasive influence of the doctrine of moral relativism in several domains of American life: foreign policy, economic and social policy, moral and religious thought. The most substantial chapter concerns the influence of John Dewey’s educational theories on ‘values clarification, a contemporary approach to moral education.

Culture in the Commercial Republic. Lanham: University Press of America, 1996. ISBN 0-7618-0291-6. Culture and commerce entwine tensively; this book consists of essays on their relationship. It includes pages on Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Carlyle and several other English Victorian essayists, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ezra Pound, the Modern Language Association journal PMLA, Allan Bloom, and Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park.

A Political Approach to Pacifism. 2 vols. Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1996. ISBN 0-7734-8910-X (vol. 1)—ISBN 0-7734-8912-6 (vol. 2). I had intended to title this book Pacifism and the Political Orders, but the publisher demurred. The book has three sections: on pacifism and the American founding; on pacifism as seen—or not seen—in the New Testament; and on secular doctrines of peace and peacemaking.

Self-Government, The American Theme: Presidents of the Founding and Civil War. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2004. ISBN 0-7391-0708-9. Studies of the political ideas of the American founders and of the debates leading to the Civil War have piled up impressively, mostly centering on such familiar themes as equality and natural rights on the one hand and American constitutionalism on the other. Almost entirely neglected, the idea of self-government nonetheless pervades the writings of early American statesmen. This book considers self-government as understood by presidents Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Lincoln, along with Confederate States of American president Jefferson Davis.

The Dilemma of Progressivism: How Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson Reshaped the American Regime of Self-Government. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009. ISBN 13: 978-0-7425-6074. This books follows the theme of self-government as reformulated by Progressive-era presidents, who addressed the problem in light of the new administrative state and, in the case of Wilson, broke with the American founding principle of natural right.

Churchill and De Gaulle: The Geopolitics of Liberty. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. ISBN 978-1-4422-4119-0. At a time of ‘globalization,’ consideration of two statesmen mindful of differences among geographic territories, political regimes, and national experiences remains not only timely but urgent. Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle wrote and acted during three worldwide conflicts—the two world wars and the Cold War. Their teachings and examples can continue to guide thoughtful students of geopolitics.

Herman Melville’s Ship of State. South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2020. ISBN 978-1-58731-368-4. What would an American tyranny look like? Melville addresses this question in his most celebrated novel, Moby-Dick, a meditation on democracy, natural right, and tyrannicide presented in the form of an unforgettable sailor’s yarn.

Shakespeare’s Politic Comedies. South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press. 2023. ISBN 978-1-58731-847-4. Shakespeare’s comedies are festive but also politic—portraying statesmanlike character and action that avert tragedy.

In addition to these books, there is also a long pamphlet or very short book:
Regime Change: What It Is, Why It Matters. Tucson: Fenestra Books, 2004. ISBN 1 58736-180-9. Fenestra Books is a self-publication house; my purpose was to respond to the then-current American policy of “regime change” in Afghanistan and Iraq by discussing what a regime is and why attempts to change the regimes of foreign countries have featured in U. S. foreign policy since the administration of George Washington.