Globalizing America: Reading Woodrow Wilson’s Messages after Hobbes and Kant (original) (raw)
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Woodrow Wilson and the Spirit of Liberal Internationalism
Politics, Religion & Ideology , 2021
Woodrow Wilson is among most influential presidents in U.S. foreign policy history, and the most pious. The challenge for scholars is joining Wilson’s faith and his foreign policies. What was the role of religion in Wilson’s worldview? What is the place of religion in Wilsonianism? This article uses original archival sources and a synthesis of historical research to intervene in IR theory, demonstrating that Wilsonianism is a product of Wilson’s specifically Southern Presbyterian upbringing, his admiration for other Christian idealists, and the influence of the budding movement of the Social Gospel. This finding raises a historiographic puzzle: why did late twentieth century IR scholars erase religion from theories of liberal internationalism? The article suggests Wilson’s religion has been erased as part of the broader project of desacralizing and universalizing liberal internationalism. Wilson’s worldview was a mirror for the kind of social and political order he witnessed and propagated in America, a Janus-faced spirit of universalism and exceptionalism, internationalism and parochialism, that continues to motivate the liberal internationalist project. As a result, unearthing the Protestant origins of Wilsonianism helps to explicate the missionary spirit driving the liberal internationalist project.
Rhetoric and Public Affairs, 2004
From a comprehensive study of the public addresses of Woodrow Wilson in the period following the outbreak of the war in Europe in August 1914 to the war's conclusion in June 1919, this essay examines Wilson's transformation of the long-held vision of America as merely a great example of liberty to its embodiment as the self-sacrificing champion of liberty. It will demonstrate how this transformation of the American "self" was inextricably connected to a changing image of the war and the construction of an enemy image of the German government.
Fallen Angell: Woodrow Wilson's Conflicted Rhetorical Transformation
In 1909, Norman Angell's book, The Great Illusion, claimed that war was futile because nations were economically intertwined. Angell's book saw widespread acceptance and garnered international attention by winning the Nobel Peace Prize and acceptance by President Woodrow Wilson. Focusing on Wilson's addresses leading up to and during the war, this study examines the rhetorical transformation by President Wilson from isolationism, to neutrality, and finally to a declaration of war. But all the while Wilson's addresses struggled under conflicted transformation with the ideas outlined in Angell's award-winning work.
The Wilsonian Chimera: Why Debating Wilson's Vision Hasn't Saved American Foreign Relations
White House Studies, 2011
Woodrow Wilson saw the League of Nations as the embryo of a fuller global polity. To illuminate his vision, this essay turns to Wilson’s elaborate theories of how national polities develop. The result significantly revises prevailing portrayals of Wilsonianism, both scholarly and popular. They emphasize Wilson’s determination either to spread liberal democracy abroad or to support international law and organization. On both counts, however, Wilson’s principles and actions betrayed deep ambiguities. Mixing Burkean organicism with a loosely neo-Hegelian teleology, Wilsonianism was a capacious set of ideas that, on principle, could and did cut either way on whether to implant democracy by force of arms. It gave Wilson a particular conception of liberal democracy, one that challenges Wilson’s reputation as a champion of the rule of “global public opinion.” Wilson meant “public opinion” non-literally. Statesmen in the League were supposed to divine the latent general will of international society through introspection, not to obey momentary mass preferences. Nor was Wilson the wholehearted advocate of binding international institutions that he might seem. His progressive, teleological vision allowed him to skate over the tensions between unilateralism and multilateralism, national interests and common concerns. Rather than decisively prioritize one value over the other, Wilson assumed there was no need, for national and common interests would draw ever nearer to one another. Moreover, Wilson in 1919 rejected popular proposals to strengthen the League’s commitments to international law and collective security. He did so to preserve the League as a flexible and thus formally weak organization that would constantly remold itself around an organically growing world spirit. In sum, Wilsonianism is unintelligible except by understanding the categories Wilson employed himself. His assumptions are so unlike those currently popular in international-relations discourse that it is difficult to apply Wilsonianism to present dilemmas.
rejection of ideological rigidity created a safe distance from the "radicals" of his day. Yet his legislative accomplishments in office mark him as one of the most radical reformers to occupy the presidency. In fact, the sweeping changes he effected in office can only be understood as the product of a skeptical and deliberative yet creative and adaptive mind-as the work of a radical empiricist in politics.
Introduction: Retrieving a ‘Global’ American Philosopher
2016
There are two requests I should like to make to readers of the volume, not to forestall criticism but that it may be rendered, perhaps, more pertinent. Three lectures do not permit one to say all he thinks, nor even all that he believes that he knows. Omission of topics and themes does not, accordingly, signify that I should have passed them by in a more extended treatment. I particularly regret the enforced omission of reference to the relation of liberalism to international affairs. I should also like to remind readers that not everything can be said in the same breath and that it is necessary to stress first one aspect and then another of the general subject. So I hope that what is said will be taken as a whole and also in comparison and contrast with alternative methods of social action.