Research
Interests
The motivating question for all of my research is, What do those with great endowments and privileges, whether talent, status, or education, owe to their fellow citizens? To answer this question this I study higher education through the lens of political philosophy. I am also passionate about American political thought, American constitutionalism, political economy, and the reception history of French ideas in the United States.
Dissertation
My dissertation argued for a renewed consideration of the classical idea of a mixed regime that harmonizes the elite and the people in order to address the vulnerabilities of democracy today. This requires examining the civic role of universities as moral communities that inevitably shape their graduates’ character. Since meritocratic and technocratic education does so much to form the contemporary elite, the project proposes a reformed education: a humanistic and liberal pedagogy to cultivate greatness of soul in those who will exercise leadership in democracy. The argument synthesizes the diagnoses and prescriptions of democracy made by Plato, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Irving Babbitt to re-imagine an education for excellence in the twenty-first century. It forms the basis of my book project, Beyond Meritocracy: The Pursuit of Excellence in America.
Articles, Chapters, Reviews, & Working Papers
“Moralism in an Ironic Age: Samuel Johnson and David Foster Wallace,” Genealogies of Modernity.
“Lucas Alamán and Tocqueville: Federalism in Mexico,” Political Science Reviewer, under review.
“Tocqueville as Educator: Stirring the Democratic Soul,” Political Theory, under review.
Review of Emily Finley: The Ideology of Democratism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. xii, 218.)
“Montesquieu's Case for Honor in Publius and Adams: Transposing the Society of Orders to the Commercial Republic,” Modern Intellectual History, revise and re-submit.
“Liberal Honor Between States: The Afterlives of Montesquieuian Nobility,” in Montesquieu: A Philosopher for the American Republic, Oxford Studies in the Enlightenment, Liverpool University Press, forthcoming.
“‘Socratic Remnant’ vs. ‘Creative Democracy’: Irving Babbitt’s anti-Deweyan Vision of Leadership,” American Political Thought, Volume 11, Number 4, Fall 2022.
“Can the Great Books Serve the Common Good? Tocqueville on Aristocratic Education in a Democratic Age,” Tocqueville Review/Revue Tocqueville, Volume 43, Issue 1, 2022.
“The Duty of the Clercs to the Nation: Why Schmitt, Strauss, and Eliot Tie Intellectuals to Liberalism,” Political Science Reviewer, Volume 45, No. 2, 2021.
“Tocqueville on the Mixed Blessing of Liberal Learning: Higher Education as Subversive Antidote," in Exploring the Social and Political Economy of Alexis de Tocqueville, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.
“Britain, Europe, and the borders of markets: TS Eliot and F. Hayek on postwar internationalism,” in Reading the Postwar Future: Textual Turning Points from 1944, Bloomsbury Press, 2019.
“Wilson, Boutmy, and the Training of a Republican Civil Service Elite.”
“Founding the American University: Jefferson, Adams, and Rush on Educating Elites.”
Book Projects
Beyond Meritocracy: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Democratic Age.