Spring 2010 - Interpretation

Book Review: The Dilemma of Progressivism
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Will Morrisey, The Dilemma of Progressivism: How Roosevelt, Taft, and
Wilson Reshaped the American Regime of Self-Government. Lanham, MD:
Lexington Books, 2009, 278 pp., $75.
W. B . A l l e n
Michigan State University
W_B_Allen@williambarclayallen.com
To understand the valuable contribution made in this work,
the reader must begin in the precursor work Morrisey published in 2004,
Self-Government, The American Theme: Presidents of the Founding and Civil
War. It re-directed interpretative energies concerning the American regime.
The unexpected focus on these five presidents, one of whom is Jefferson Davis
(the others are Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Lincoln), set up a unique
debate about the meaning of America that focuses upon the question of selfgovernment
(with liberty and equality as necessary conditions) rather than
the question of the role of interests or states’ rights.
Self-government is a matter of antique interest in political
philosophy and “an intellectual framework that has been available for centuries”
to statesmen. That so glibly stated fact invites readers to discover an
“old science” in the “improved science of politics” (the actual language of
Federalist 9 in Jacob Cooke’s edition, rather than a “new science of politics”).
It neither disappointed nor surprised, therefore, immediately
to discover that the discussion of “self-government” is rather a discussion
of “virtue” than of methodologies of political decision. Morrisey derives the
modern discussion of self-government from the ancient discussion of autarchia
(self-sufficiency) and enkrateia (self-mastery). By this I mean not that the
founders cite the usage of Plato or Aristotle. The “rational self-rule” Morrisey
discovers in the usage of the founders is the political expression of the “rule
of reason over the other parts of the soul.”
© 2010 Interpretation, Inc.