1. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, abridged ed. (New York: Mentor Books, 1956), 163, 143, 58.
2. Ibid., 48.
3. Ernest Tuveson, The Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role (1968; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
4. As summarized in J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975).
5. See Adams’s remarks on America’s fate to be corrupted by its own prosperity, quoted in Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic 1776–1787 (New York: Norton, 1969), 570–71.
6. James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), 319.
7. For example, George Will, Statecraft as Soulcraft: What Government Does (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), 37–41.
8. Madison, Federalist Papers, 320; Hume, “Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth” in David Hume, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, 529.
9. Ibid., 321.
10. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 198.
11. Ibid., 201.
12. Ibid., 201–2.
13. Michael Novak, The Fire of Invention (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), 35.
14. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 52, 42.
15. Ibid., 154.
16. Madison quoted in Roger Ketcham, James Madison: A Biography (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1990), 667.
17. For example, Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, October 13, 1813, in The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Adrienne Koch and William Peden (New York: Modern Library, 1944), 632.
18. Jefferson quoted in Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004).
19. E.g., Brooks Holifield, Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003), 175.
20. See Mark Noll, America’s God from Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); and Michael Knox Beran, Forge of Empires 1861–1871 (New York: Free Press, 2007), 199–200.
21. Abraham Flexner, Daniel Coit Gilman: Creator of the American Type of University (New York: Harcourt Brace,1946).
22. Charles S. Peirce, “First Principles,” in Peirce, Values in a Universe of Chance: Selected Writings, ed. Philip P. Wiener (New York: Doubleday, 1958), 349.
23. Twain quoted in Alfred Kazin, An American Procession (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), 255.
24. Herman, Idea of Decline, 174.
25. Charles S. Peirce, Values in a Universe of Chance: Selected Writings (1839–1914), ed. Philip P. Wiener (New York: Doubleday, 1958), xvi.
26. Charles S. Peirce “Issues of Pragmatism,” ibid., 214.
27. Ibid.
28. William James, Pragmatism and Other Essays, ed. Giles Gunn (New York: Penguin, 2000), 10–11.
29. Ibid., 11, 14.
30. Peirce’s actual term was “pragmaticism,” but the identification was clear enough.
31. Charles S. Peirce, “What Pragmatism Is,” in Peirce, Values in a Universe, 183–85.
32. William James, “Does Consciousness Exist?” in James, Writings, 1902–1910 (New York: Viking, 1987), 1141–58.
33. Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (1945; repr., New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 812.
34. The weather was Chauncey Wright’s favorite example. See Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001), and Peirce, “What Pragmatism Is,” 182–83.
35. William James, “Pragmatism and Common Sense,” in Bruce Kuklick, ed., William James: Writings 1902–1910 (New York: Viking, 1987), 559.
36. James, Pragmatism, 27. However, James also saw Socrates as the ancestor of pragmatism, with this restless probing of the meaning of words like courage, justice, and piety in concrete situations.
37. Ibid.
38. For instance, Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 683–84.
39. Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. J.A.K. Thomson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), II, 91–92.
40. James, Pragmatism, 97.
41. William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897; repr., New York: Dover, 1956), 25.
42. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Random House, 1952), 283.
43. Philipp Frank, Modern Science and Its Philosophy (1949; repr., New York: Collier Books, 1961), 106–8, and Ayer, Logical Positivism, 12–13. For James’s impact on Wittgenstein, see Russell Goodman, Wittgenstein and William James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
44. Noted by A. J. Ayer, Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (1982; repr., New York: Vintage, 1984), 71.
45. William James, “Is Life Worth Living?” in James, Pragmatism, 239; James quoted Ayer, Logical Positivism, 72.
1. The referendum that approved it by 99 percent was “a genuine reflection of German feeling” in both countries. A.J.P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (New York: Fawcett, 1966), 145.
2. The eyewitness was Germany’s ambassador Franz von Papen, quoted in William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York: Fawcett, 1960), 473.
3. Ibid., 477.
4. Karl Popper, Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography, quoted in David Edmonds and John Eidinow, Wittgenstein’s Poker (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 86.
5. Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966), 7.
6. Karl Popper, Logik der Forschung (1934); translated into English as The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959; repr., New York: Harper & Row, 1965).
7. Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (New York: Harper & Row, 1961), 8.
8. Plato, The Laws, trans. Trevor J. Saunders (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 93 (690b).
9. Ibid., 448.
10. Popper, Open Society, 1:199.
11. See Aristotle, The Politics of Aristotle, trans. and ed. Ernest Barker (1946; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), III, 12, 1 (1282b): “Justice is something that pertains to persons.”
12. The Chekist M. Y. Latsis, quoted in Paul Johnson, Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties, rev. ed. (New York: Harper Perennial, 2001), 71.
13. See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992), 63.
14. Quoted in Popper, Open Society, 45.
15. Borrowing the title, if not the theme, from George Will, Statecraft as Soulcraft: What Government Does (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983).
16. Bruce Kuklick, Churchmen and Philosophers: From Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985), 233–39. Dewey is usually described as a follower of William James. However, Kuklick shows that the formative influence on Dewey’s thought was Hegelian long before he read any of James’s works. Dewey saw his own philosophy as a fusion of Idealism and Pragmatism, or Instrumentalism, as he called it.
17. David Noble, The Paradox of Progressive Thought (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958).
18. In fact, Croly argued, it was this American shibboleth of individualism that allowed this unjust concentration of wealth to take place. Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (1909; repr., Boston: Northwest University Press, 1989), 147.
19. Ibid., 50.
20. Ibid., 266, 274.
21. Ibid., 278.
22. Ibid., 280, 267.
23. Ibid., 169, 202.
24. Wilson quoted in Ronald Pestrilto, Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005).
25. Wilson quoted in John M. Cooper, The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1983).
26. John Maynard Keynes, Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919; Project Gutenberg eBook, 2005), chapter III.
27. Harold Nicolson, Peacemaking 1919 (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1965), 36–37.
28. Johnson, Modern Times, 233, 235.
29. See John Kenneth Galbraith, The Age of Uncertainty (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977).
30. Fritz Machlup, “Hayek’s Contribution to Economics,” in Machlup, ed., Essays on Hayek (Hillsdale, Mich.: Hillsdale College Press, 1976), 17.
31. Friedrich von Hayek, “Ernst Mach and Vienna Social Science, “in J. T. Blackmore, R. Itagaki, and S. Tanaka, eds., Ernst Mach’s Vienna (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic, 2001), 123–24.
32. See Max Alter, Carl Menger and the Origins of Austrian Economics (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1990), 112–20.
33. Machlup, “Hayek’s Contribution,” 17–18.
34. Friedrich von Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 79.
35. Ibid., 83–85.
36. Friedrich von Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 2:29.
37. Friedrich von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944).
38. See Arthur Herman, Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II (New York: Random House, 2012).
39. John Steele Gordon, An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 205.
40. Robert Barro, Getting it Right: Markets and Choices in a Free Society (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), 111.
41. Francis Walton, Miracle of World War II: How American Industry Made Victory Possible (New York: Macmillan, 1956), 550.
42. Quoted in Michael Novak, The Fire of Invention (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), 6.
43. Quoted in Herman, Freedom’s Forge, 206.
44. Walton, Miracle of World War II, 540–41.
45. Ayn Rand, For the New Intellectual (New York: Random House, 1961), 23.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid., 27.
48. Quoted in Paul Johnson, Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties, rev. ed. (New York: Harper Perennial, 2001).
49. Stéphane Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), passim.
50. Aristotle, The Politics of Aristotle, trans. and ed. Ernest Barker (1946; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 48–55 (bk. II, chap. 5).
1. Victor McElheny, Drawing the Map of Life: Inside the Human Genome Project (New York: Basic Books, 2010).
2. Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong: The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East (New York: Harper Collins, 2003).
3. Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Penguin, 2003), 208.
4. A point explored at length, from a slightly different angle, in Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (New York: Random House, 2010).
5. Alex Pollock, Boom and Bust: Financial Cycles and Human Prosperity (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute Press, 2011).
6. Ibid., 82, 7.
7. Mircea Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), 58–9; Victor Turner, The Ritual Process (University of Chicago Press, 1979).
8. Kevin Clinton, Myth and Cult: The Iconography of the Eleusinian Mysteries (Stockholm, 1992), 17–8, 84–5.
9. George Mylonas, Eleusis and the Eleusinian Mysteries (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961), 266–68. Plato was very much aware of the Eleusinian mysteries and its Orphic rites, even if he never became an adept himself. His descriptions of the underworld in the Republic and elsewhere closely correspond to the descriptions in the Eleusinian Hymn to Demeter and other sources.
10. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J.G.A. Pocock (1790; repr., Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 83.
11. Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (New York: Norton, 1978).
12. Mike Davis, A Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006); Robert Neuwirth, Shadow Cities (London: Routledge, 2006).
13. Kurzweil, Singularity, 98–99.
14. For example, Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009).