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376 Epilogue Relevance for Today Lincoln concluded his 1863 Gettysburg Address with a call to renewed dedication to freedom, so that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Some eighty years later, Robert Maynard Hutchins exhorted that “either we must abandon the ideal of freedom or we must educate our people for freedom. . . . And since it is a long job, and one upon which the fate of our country in war and peace may depend, we shall have to start now.”1 In Gordon Wood’s examination of the events and nature of the American Revolution and their implications, he brings to light that from the outset challenges to the classical form of education for freedom, to liberal education, are part of the nation’s history. Moreover, in Wood’s analysis, these challenges have been bound up from the beginning with the issue of self-interest and so also with the question of what serves as the social adhesive to bind peoples together in community and nation. The “radicalism” of the American Revolution rests for Wood in the “transformations in the relationships that bound people to each other.”2 While we have traced the entrenchment of the primacy of the principle of self-interest in modern philosophical history, Wood’s account (based on quotes from the reformers themselves) elucidates its concrete embeddedness in and through the dynamics of the political and social revolution in which the classical, cosmopolitan republican ideal (propounded on the Federalist side) came head to head with the universal egalitarian demand (insisted upon by the populist anti-Federalists)—with both sides subscribing to essentially a Lockean sensationalist view of human nature. Republicanism as an Enlightenment ideal took its inspiration from such Roman writers as Cicero, Virgil, Sallust, and Tacitus; it recognized disinterestedness as indispensable for public leaders in particular and in fact 1. Robert Maynard Hutchins, Education for Freedom (1943; repr., New York: Grove Press, 1963), 14, 17–18 (emphasis added). 2. Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 5. Wood’s argument in his book (winner of the Pulitzer Prize) corroborates much of what Tocqueville observed two centuries earlier. 377 E P I L O G U E saw it as synonymous with civic virtue.1 The ideal held that “man was by nature a political being, a citizen who achieved his greatest moral fulfillment by participating in a self-governing republic,” and it held that “liberty was realized when citizens were virtuous—that is, willing to sacrifice their private interests for the sake of the community, including serving in public office without pecuniary rewards.”2 The reformers knew that such disinterestedness (“rising above private profit and private advantage ”) was fragile; persons involved in and dependent upon the marketplace , as well as those without a liberal education, were seen as unlikely to resist the temptations of power and private interests.3 Moreover, the Lockean sensationalist view of human nature posed the problem that “society composed only of fluctuating sensations was impossible; something had to bind people together intuitively and naturally.”4 Scottish moral or commonsense thinking supplied the notion of a “natural social disposition, a moral instinct, a sense of sympathy,” an “egalitarian moral sense” invoked even by “Jefferson and others” and deemed as the “real source of democratic equality.”5 The “gentleman’s cosmopolitanism” devolved into a “republicanized world” in which all “superior-inferior relationships tended to get sentimentalized” and “‘friendship’ became the term, the euphemism, most used to describe every conceivable personal relationship in the social hierarchy. . . . It was as if every patron-client and dependent relationship had to be smothered in benevolence.”6 Effectively we can see this as an effort to instantiate the mitigating principle of “love thy neighbor” invoked as a remedy by the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers. These social developments in the formation of the American nation were further yoked to an anti-intellectual sentiment which dismissed the link between freedom and liberal education: “A gentleman’s fancy 1. Gordon Wood, Radicalism, 100, 104. 2. Gordon Wood, Radicalism, 104. 3. Gordon Wood, Radicalism, 106. Wood includes the following quote: “Perhaps only a classical education that made ‘ancient manners familiar,’ as Richard Jackson once told Benjamin Franklin, could ‘produce a reconciliation between disinterestedness and commerce; a thing we often see, but almost always in men of a liberal education.’ Yet no matter how educated merchants might become, while they remained actively engaged in commerce...

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