This article focuses on the function of human rights as a foreign policy ideal in American foreign policy, particularly since the end of the Cold War. China became a challenging target of U.S. human rights policy after Tiananmen. Human rights as an ideal may be defended either by idealist or by realist means. Whereas the former are logically consistent with the ends, only the latter promises immediate results. The Clinton administration thus began with an attempt to manipulate trade policy to pressure China into improving its human rights policies. The administration then shifted to idealist means more consistent with idealist ends, including the resort to international organization sanctions. But here Washington failed even more conspicuously. The article concludes that human rights did not turn out to be a politically suitable ideal to orient U.S. foreign policy. The impact on China was fierce resentment. But human rights have improved.

For all of his well-known advocacy of “liberty”, Tocqueville might nevertheless be thought to have neglected a serious account of American liberties in Democracy in America. Yet there is a relatively systematic analysis of democratic liberties to be found in his study of the unprecedented openness which the regime of popular sovereignty provided for political parties, the press, and associations. In his comments on these components of democratic life, Tocqueville develops an evaluation of the political and psychological effects that he saw arising from them, and argues for the special priority he thought should be given to the liberty of association. His argument is among the earliest attempt to explore the actual practices, as distinguished from the theory, of modern liberty, and to examine the limits of democracy's emancipatory promise.

What moderns call technology is requisite to liberal democracy, for without the increase of wealth, knowledge, and opportunity that technology provides, the ruling majority could not be an enlightened middle class. Nevertheless, critics point to advancing technology's harmful side, with some hoping to prevent these harms by tight controls and others despairing that technology lies beyond our control. In a neglected 1858–59 lecture and related speeches, Abraham Lincoln wrestled with these issues and their implications for democratic statecraft. Although convinced that “discoveries and inventions” had rescued humankind from savage beginnings, produced abundance, and put genuine democracy within reach, Lincoln recognized that advancing technology alone would not guarantee freedom, but might bring new forms of mastery. Lincolnian statecraft seeks to moderate or limit this advance not through stringent controls, but by a moral teaching that builds on the natural right to oneself and includes a comprehensive doctrine of labor.

Drawing on Douglas-Wildavsky grid-group theory, the article shows how changing social circumstances prompt distinctive patterns of shifting cultural allegiance and intercultural coalitions which in turn distinguish three lengthy eras of American political development. The resulting portrayal of American political development is more complex than the oscillation between two poles depicted by Hirschman as well as McClosky and Zaller, for the characterization employed has three poles in two dimensions. But this more complex portrayal better explains the changing character of American political life across eras. The conclusion focuses on what I regard as the two most significant implications of this view, showing that: (1) contrary to widespread opinion, the most recent era of political development affords egalitarians an insecure position on the American political stage, and (2) this conception of political change reveals deeper insights about political life by distinguishing rival, culturally constrained rationalities.

We probe the connections linking the market, speech, and sympathy in the work of Adam Smith, stressing how individuals strive for social esteem and ethical credit while competing in markets. We demonstrate how Smith approached speech and rhetoric as constituting attributes of markets, the modern analogue of previous institutional foundations for social order. Thus, markets are not simply, or exclusively, arenas for the instrumental quest by competitive and strategic individuals to secure their material preferences. They are a central mechanism for social integration derived not from strategic self-interest but from the inexorable struggle by human agents for moral approbation. Part One retranslates the master concept of Moral Sentiments into a modern theory of recognition. Part Two considers how Smith, in his Rhetoric, established the mutual constitution of recognition and speech. Part Three carries this understanding to his Jurisprudence, the most integrative of his texts, which relocates these impulses inside the market itself.

The pivotal second chapter of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, “Of the Principle which gives occasion to the Division of Labour, ” opens with the oft-cited claim that the foundation of modern political economy is the human “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.” This formulation plays both an analytical and normative role. It offers an anthropological microfoundation for Smith's understanding of how modern commercial societies function as social organizations, which, in turn, provide a venue for the expression and operation of these human proclivities.