Abraham Lincoln Philosopher Statesman

2015 ISHS Superior Achievement Award What constitutes Lincoln’s political greatness as a statesman? As a great leader, he saved the Union, presided over the end of slavery, and helped to pave the way for an interracial democracy. His great speeches provide enduring wisdom about human equality, democracy, free labor, and free society. Joseph R. Fornieri contends that Lincoln’s political genius is best understood in terms of a philosophical statesmanship that united greatness of thought and action, one that combined theory and practice. This philosophical statesmanship, Fornieri argues, can best be understood in terms of six dimensions of political leadership: wisdom, prudence, duty, magnanimity, rhetoric, and patriotism. Drawing on insights from history, politics, and philosophy, Fornieri tackles the question of how Lincoln’s statesmanship displayed each of these crucial elements. Providing an accessible framework for understanding Lincoln’s statesmanship, this thoughtful study examines the sixteenth president’s political leadership in terms of the traditional moral vision of statecraft as understood by epic political philosophers such as Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas. Fornieri contends that Lincoln’s character is best understood in terms of Aquinas’s understanding of magnanimity or greatness of soul, the crowning virtue of statesmanship. True political greatness, as embodied by Lincoln, involves both humility and sacrificial service for the common good. The enduring wisdom and timeless teachings of these great thinkers, Fornieri shows, can lead to a deeper appreciation of statesmanship and of its embodiment in Abraham Lincoln. With the great philosophers and books of western civilization as his guide, Fornieri demonstrates the important contribution of normative political philosophy to an understanding of our sixteenth president. Informed by political theory that draws on the classics in revealing the timelessness of Lincoln’s example, his interdisciplinary study offers profound insights for anyone interested in the nature of leadership, statesmanship, political philosophy, political ethics, political history, and constitutional law.

By analyzing many of Lincoln's most important speeches, The Mind and Art of Abraham Lincoln, Philosopher Statesman shows him to be a profound and systematic thinker who tries to get at the root of issues, not all of them strictly political. Lowenthal emphasizes Lincoln's manner of writing, which enables him to conceal his most radical thoughts, and pays special attention to the reasoning and artfulness with which he treats a wide variety of subjects. The book follows Lincoln from his Perpetuation or Lyceum address in 1838 to his last speech just after Lee's surrender, as he confronts the great issues of the day and lays out the fundamentals of American politics. Along the way, Lowenthal's careful analysis frees Lincoln of the charge of racial prejudice with which he has been saddled in recent years.

In his acclaimed book Lincoln's Virtues, William Lee Miller explored Abraham Lincoln's intellectual and moral development. Now he completes his "ethical biography," showing how the amiable and inexperienced backcountry politician was transformed by constitutional alchemy into an oath-bound head of state. Faced with a radical moral contradiction left by the nation's Founders, Lincoln struggled to find a balance between the universal ideals of Equality and Liberty and the monstrous injustice of human slavery. With wit and penetrating sensitivity, Miller brings together the great themes that have become Lincoln's legacy—preserving the United States of America while ending the odious institution that corrupted the nation's meaning—and illuminates his remarkable presidential combination: indomitable resolve and supreme magnanimity.

A collection of original essays by ten eminent historians that explore religion, education, middle-class family life, the antislavery movement, politics, and law in "Lincoln's America."

James Madison: Philosopher, Founder, and Statesman presents fresh scholarship on the philosophical statesman who served as the nation’s fourth president and who is often called both the father of the U.S. Constitution and the father of the Bill of Rights. These essays by historians and political scientists from the United States and abroad focus on six distinct aspects of Madison’s life and work: his personality and development as a statesman; his work at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and contributions to larger constitutional design; his advocacy for the adoption of the Bill of Rights; his controversial role as a party leader; his presidency; and his life after leaving office. James Madison continues to be regarded as one of America’s great political theorists, a man who devoted his life to, and who found fulfill- ment in, public service. His philosophical contributions remain vital to any understanding of the modern American polity. This book will be of great interest to political scientists and theorists, as well as to historians of early American history and politics.

In The Statesman as Thinker, Daniel J. Mahoney provides thoughtful and elegant portraits of statesmen who struggled to preserve freedom during times of crisis: Cicero using all the powers of rhetoric to preserve republican liberty in Rome against Caesar’s encroaching autocracy; Burke defending ordered liberty against Jacobin tyranny in revolutionary France; Tocqueville defending liberty and human dignity against blind reaction, democratic impatience, and revolutionary fanaticism; Lincoln preserving the American republic and putting an end to chattel slavery; Churchill defending liberty and law and opposing Nazi and Communist despotism; de Gaulle defending the honor of France during World War II; and Havel fighting Communism before 1989 and then leading the Czech Republic with dignity and grace. Mahoney makes sense of the mixture of magnanimity and moderation that defines the statesman as thinker at his or her best. That admirable mixture of greatness, courage, and moderation owes much to classical and Christian wisdom and to the noble desire to protect the inheritance of civilization against rapacious and destructive despotic regimes and ideologies.

Our ideas of statesmanship are fraught with seeming contradictions: The democratic statesman is true to the people’s wishes and views—but also capable of standing against popular opinion when necessary. The statesman rises above conflicts and seeks compromise between parties—but also stands firmly for what is right. Abraham Lincoln, perhaps more than any other political figure in US history, affords us an opportunity to evaluate the philosophical, political, and practical implications of these paradoxical propositions. Asking whether and how Lincoln acted in a statesmanly manner at critical moments, the authors of this volume aim to clarify what precisely statesmanship might be; their work illuminates important themes and events in Lincoln’s career even as it broadens and sharpens our understanding of the general nature of statesmanship. One of Lincoln’s abiding themes was foreshadowed in his Lyceum Address, delivered when he was not yet thirty: the call for the prevalence of a sort of public opinion that he characterized as a political religion. As it relates to democratic statesmanship, what does Lincoln’s political religion have to do with religion per se? How, in his role as statesman as a master of democratic speech, did Lincoln handle the two major issues he faced as a political leader: slavery and the war? In attempting to meet the demand that he use acceptable means to achieve his ends, did Lincoln—can any statesman—keep his hands clean? Are there inevitable transgressions that a statesman must commit? These are among the topics the authors take on as they consider Lincoln’s democratic and rhetorical statesmanship, on occasion drawing comparisons with his contemporaries Henry Clay and Stephen Douglas or even such a distant forerunner as Pericles. Finally, framing statesmanship in terms of three factors—knowledge of the political good of a community, circumstance, and the best possible action in light of these two—this volume renders a nuanced, deeply informed judgment on what distinguishes Lincoln as a statesman, and what distinguishes a statesman from a (mere) politician.

This bold, groundbreaking study of American political development assesses the presidency of Abraham Lincoln through the lenses of governmental power, economic policy, expansion of executive power, and natural rights to show how Lincoln not only believed in the limitations of presidential power but also dedicated his presidency to restraining the scope and range of it. Though Lincoln’s presidency is inextricably linked to the Civil War, and he is best known for his defense of the Union and executive wartime leadership, Lincoln believed that Congress should be at the helm of public policy making. Likewise, Lincoln may have embraced limited government in vague terms, but he strongly supported effective rule of law and distribution of income and wealth. Placing the Lincoln presidency within a deeper and more meaningful historical context, Abraham Lincoln’s Statesmanship and the Limits of Liberal Democracy highlights Lincoln’s significance in the development of American power institutions and social movement politics. Using Lincoln’s prepresidential and presidential words and actions, this book argues that decent government demands a balance of competing goods and the strong statesmanship that Lincoln exemplified. Instead of relying too heavily on the will of the people and institutional solutions to help prevent tyranny, Jon D. Schaff proposes that American democracy would be better served by a moderate and prudential statesmanship such as Lincoln’s, which would help limit democratic excesses. Schaff explains how Lincoln’s views on prudence, moderation, natural rights, and economics contain the notion of limits, then views Lincoln’s political and presidential leadership through the same lens. He compares Lincoln’s views on governmental powers with the defense of unlimited government by twentieth-century progressives and shows how Lincoln’s theory of labor anticipated twentieth-century distributist economic thought. Schaff’s unique exploration falls squarely between historians who consider Lincoln a protoprogressive and those who say his presidency was a harbinger of industrialized, corporatized America. In analyzing Lincoln’s approach, Abraham Lincoln’s Statesmanship and the Limits of Liberal Democracy rejects the idea he was a revolutionary statesman and instead lifts up Lincoln’s own affinity for limited presidential power, making the case for a modest approach to presidential power today based on this understanding of Lincoln’s statesmanship. As a counterpoint to the contemporary landscape of bitter, uncivil politics, Schaff points to Lincoln’s statesmanship as a model for better ways of engaging in politics in a democracy.