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Chapter 5 Woodrow Wilson: Keeping the World Safe from Philosophy I have conceived the (perhaps whimsical) purpose of combining Montesquieu, Burke, and Bagehot. Montesquieu often plays with his subject, but with a subtle mockery: he should play with it with the more manly, though equally pointed, humour—with the unflagging vivacity and the wide-eyed tolerant look straight upon life—of Bagehot. Both these masters in politics, however, lack the seriousness of Burke, his full-voiced eloquence, his ardent highstrung consciousness of the weight, the beauty, the delicacy of liberty. Combined, the three men stand for all that has force in political thought. —Woodrow Wilson, memoranda for “Modern Democratic State,” December 1885 What commends Mr. Lincoln’s studiousness to me is that the result of it was he did not have any theories at all. Life is a very complex thing. No theory that I ever heard propounded will match its varied pattern; and the men who are dangerous are the men who are not content with understanding, but go on to propound theories, things which will make a new pattern for society and a new model for the universe. Those are the men who are not to be trusted. —Woodrow Wilson, “Abraham Lincoln: A Man of the People,” February 12, 1909 Presidents are ambitious people; many of them have wanted to wield political power from an early age. Woodrow Wilson was one of these. As a Princeton undergraduate Wilson made a pact with a classmate, Charlie Talcott, to gain power in order to advance the principles they held in common.1 As a young man, he put aside his hope to be a politician for an 104 105 Woodrow Wilson academic career. Yet he never lost the burning ambition to be elected, and he pursued a course which allowed him to jump to a political career in his middle age. As president, Wilson reminisced that he had been preparing for the office since his undergraduate days.2 Wilson’s ambition is hardly unusual for a president, but his view of how to pursue his political goals is strikingly unusual. Wilson remembered that in his undergraduate “covenant” to gain political power, he and Talcott had agreed “that we would acquire knowledge that we might have power.”3 The belief that knowledge could be translated into political power may be the most telling thought in Wilson’s mental constellation. Wilson felt that success in a political career did not lie primarily in forging the right personal or group alliances or in crafting an effective policy platform, though he understood the importance of these things. Rather, he staked his chance to make a political mark on becoming a preeminent scholar of politics. Wilson , the only president to have earned a Ph.D., would parlay his academic reputation into a meteoric political career. He was confident that his studious or, as he called it, his “literary” approach to politics would make him a better president than those without that background. The knowledge Wilson gathered in his academic path to the White House was not about policies so much as the operation of government institutions and the nature of political development. These are subjects of interest to political theorists. Yet Wilson consistently denigrated political theory as too abstract to be useful and too radical to be of benefit. His own political thought consisted of ideas borrowed from the thinkers whom he judged to have bucked this tendency. More conservative and practical were Edmund Burke, Baron de Montesquieu, and Walter Bagehot, among others. Wilson was not the brilliant formulator of a new philosophy. He did not claim to be. As he noted to himself, he had worked out a synthesis of these three thinkers’ views. Wilson would be the voice who skillfully presented the views of these practical philosophers to the public in compelling narratives and stirring speeches. Together the political thinkers from whom Wilson borrowed emphasized the primacy of public opinion in shaping a polity. Most of them stressed that because public opinion defines regimes, political change is inevitable—as opinions change, so will a nation’s government. Yet opinion change takes place gradually rather than wholesale, typically building on the public’s prior views. Leaders help to direct opinion change through their words. It is no accident that in the opening quote Wilson focuses on the writing style of Montesquieu, Bagehot, and Burke. If public opinion is the coin of the political realm, then to be a leader, one must be a skilled...

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