Abstract This article outlines the notions of aspirational memory and nodal memory, then uses the combined concept of aspirational memory node to illustrate how the Nebraska capitol’s architecture and aesthetics draw upon the past to inspire Nebraskans to enact a moral vision of “noble living.” The capitol imagines this future good society by gathering a collection of public memories and molding them into (1) a political vision of democratic and just government as a sacred obligation and (2) a social vision of caring, harmonious living.

Abstract The following article argues that the idea, values, and practices of cultivating and sustaining the commonwealth from America’s higher education and democratic history provide multiple resources for addressing today’s challenges of polarization, fragmentation, authoritarianism, and degradation of the public world. It analyzes the declining public support for higher education and other public commons, including government, as the result of a widespread process of marketization across society. Exploring several different meanings in American history, including wide use in higher education, the article proposes that new developments, including the transdisciplinary field of Civic Studies and examples of practice, provide substantial resources for revitalizing a robust sense of the commonwealth that can push back against hopelessness.

Abstract As political polarization increasingly shapes public discourse and even students’ choice of college, higher education must equip students with the skills to engage across difference. This article explores a pedagogical model developed in “Religion in Public Life,” an undergraduate course at the University of Virginia, designed to counter the binary thinking that fuels polarization. Specifically, the course integrates four key components: diagnosing partisan tribalism as a lack of moral vision, introducing Aristotelian virtue ethics as an alternative framework, challenging reductive binaries through case studies of religion in public life, and cultivating deliberative democratic skills to engage complex social issues. By fostering critical thinking, moral reflection, and inclusive dialogue, this model offers a way to strengthen civic identity in higher education. To illustrate the model, this article draws from both theory and practical classroom examples. Ultimately, the article argues this approach can be adapted across disciplines to prepare students for engaged, ethical participation in a pluralistic society.

Let me begin by expressing my deep gratitude to Dr. David Ragazzoni for his energy and persistence in organizing this forum, and especially to my distinguished interlocutors, eminent experts all, for their serious and stimulating engagement with a very long book containing a great deal of unfamiliar material. No author could hope for greater generosity. Each of the responses in this forum has helped me see how readers from different points on the scholarly compass converge on the concept of humanist virtue politics. Collectively, they have made me think hard about the value of virtue politics, both in the Renaissance and today. Above all, they have made me consider the charge that virtue politics was a failure in the Renaissance (as Machiavelli believed) and that its revival in any form today would be inadvisable and possibly even harmful to democratic governance (as two of its critics in this forum suggest).Professor Ryan Balot makes several excellent points about the differences between ancient and Renaissance virtue theory as it applies to politics. In classical Athens and Sparta, regimes were aimed at different tele that required different kinds of virtue. In order to produce the kind of virtue that would achieve the telos of a given polis, whether freedom or military dominance or wealth, the regime itself had to take on an educational role. Different regimes had distinctive forms of education—the Athenians had their paideia and the Spartans their agōgē—but they also continued, via participation in political life, to train adults in the moral arts of self-government. By contrast, the virtue politics of the Renaissance appears to Balot to be "bookish."The teaching of virtue in the Renaissance was certainly more generic and more bookish. The texts taught in humanist schools were pretty much standard: Aristotle's Ethics and Politics, Xenophon's Hiero, Isocrates's Cyprian Orations, and Cicero's De officiis and De legibus were the ones most important for politics. Most Renaissance educators did not work out special curricula for different regimes, though they did produce them for different professions, like artists (Leon Battista Alberti), military officers (Roberto Valturio) or musicians (Johannes Tinctoris). The greatest teachers took in students from all over Italy and Europe, young men who had careers before them in kingdoms and republics, the Church and the Empire. The kind of education famous schoolmasters like Guarino of Verona or Vittorino da Feltre gave could not be regime-specific. However, the movement I've called virtue politics was not merely bookish, confined to men and women of letters. The chief theorists of virtue politics, apart from Petrarch, were not retired literary men or teachers in philosophical schools (like Plato and Aristotle and the scholastics) but high-level officials and diplomats like the Florentine chancellors Coluccio Salutati and Leonardo Bruni, papal secretaries like Biondo Flavio, and even major political figures such as Giovanni Pontano, prime minister of the kings of Naples.Balot is certainly correct to say that humanist virtue politics was not regime-specific. However, I don't think it's quite right that the teaching of virtue was entirely indifferent to regime type or that Renaissance humanists cared only for the education of elites. True, the great medieval manual of political education, Giles of Rome's De regimine principum (1277/80), was directed at all civic leaders (principes) indifferently, though Giles himself preferred monarchy over the power-sharing arrangements of popular communes. Petrarch's works on educating princes, however, were aimed more narrowly at turning tyrants into virtuous princes or preventing young princes from becoming tyrants. Leonardo Bruni tried to show that virtue politics could be adapted to republics, and indeed argued that republics with virtuous citizens were better governed than principalities. By the time we get to Francesco Patrizi of Siena in the 1460s, as I show in my new book, we have a humanist who designs an educational system specifically to produce well-educated citizens of good character who can serve as republican magistrates and on citizen committees. Patrizi wrote a second treatise on the education of princes (1483/84) that presents the same basic curriculum but adapted for the needs of princely rule.1Balot suggests that Renaissance virtue politics was not really politics at all since it did not side in a partisan way with one particular regime type: it was supra partes. I agree with this assessment up to a point, but it should be noted out (as Gabriele Pedullà does in his brilliant Machiavelli in Tumult), that pre-Machiavellian polities was "ideologically holistic," and regarded partisanship as tantamount to sedition.2 In republican Venice you could be tried and executed for questioning the Venetian regime or publicly, outside the councils of government, opposing any of its acts. Tongues in Florence wagged more licentiously than elsewhere, but this was regarded as a moral weakness of the community and not valued as "free speech." I would amend Balot's point to say that humanist virtue politics was not political, but only in the modern sense of that word. Debate could be vigorous in the councils of government, and that is where virtue was supposed to shine out, but for the whole city to engage in disorderly partisan strife was regarded as a disgraceful and dangerous.Balot's point is also well taken that the laws and institutions of classical Greek city-states were more integrated with their soulcraft than was the case in Renaissance states. As I describe in Virtue Politics, there was a centuries-long tradition of rivalry between legal and literary education that only intensified in the quattrocento, and this may account in part for the relative lack of integration between elite education and regime type in the Renaissance period. All powerful states wanted to have their own universities, for example, but young gentlemen continued to seek out the few really prestigious ones, mostly outside the borders of their home states. Some humanists followed the naïve view of Isocrates that the regime type didn't matter so long as the competent and just ruled (Panathenaicus 132).Early modern states on the whole regarded laws as regulative and punitive rather than educative. Political institutions could become training grounds for civic leaders, but not, as a rule, for the average citizen. Medieval communes encouraged popular participation in politics but Renaissance humanists, with their meritocratic bias, did not think the many-headed had much to offer to the councils of the wise. The humanists here invoked the practice of the Roman republic, which did not encourage deliberation in its popular assemblies. Cicero praises this as a point of Roman superiority over the Greeks (Pro Flacco 15–17), that the Greeks allowed ordinary citizens to engage in political shouting matches while seated in theaters, while the Romans insisted that deliberation should take place in an orderly way among the wise and experienced, in the Senate house. The people should be quietly herded into voting pens on the Campus Martius to record their votes, but not asked to express their opinions in public. In this way (said Cicero in Laws 3.39) the people could be made content with the libertatis species, the appearance of liberty. If some commoner were to show merit and practical wisdom he could always be taken into the ruling group (a practice sociologists call "sponsored mobility"). This was in general the practice of Renaissance republics too: deliberation was confined to the well informed, whereas the people in their councils were only allowed to vote up or down on legislation formulated by their betters. Guicciardini wrote in his Ricordi that the Florentine people had less idea of what was going on in the public palace than they had of what was done in India.To regulate the behavior of the people the Romans relied less on paideia and political participation than on religion. This was also the case with Renaissance republics. The role of religion in improving the behavior of the common people leads to a key point that also bears on the question of the utility of virtue politics today. Balot opens the window onto a major insight when he suggests that the huge gulf between ancient and modern virtue politics can be explained above all by the dominant position of Christianity in premodern Europe. This, I think, is exactly right. Once Christianity becomes the established religion of the Roman empire in the fourth century CE, and a fortiori once we have the peculiar situation of medieval Christianity, where the temporal and spiritual goods of the population are overseen by separate authorities, each with its distinctive hierarchy and legal system, the old perfectionism of the ancient city-state is simply inconceivable. (In practice, of course, it had been dead for centuries.) The view of Aristotle that man is a political animal who achieves his full flourishing through self-rule in a polis is no longer tenable, at least by orthodox Christians. Human beings now are said (and by canon law as well as by Aquinas) to have both a natural and a supernatural end. Human politics can have at best an instrumental role in achieving our highest end, salvation in a future life.This was a point generally accepted by humanists, who quite often depended on the patronage of the Church for their livelihood. What they developed was a kind of moderate perfectionism (a term I borrow from the Confucian theorist Joseph Chan). The telos of the state for them is more limited. In the version theorized by the movement's greatest political philosopher, Francesco Patrizi of Siena, the state should aim at achieving concrete human goods in this life: peace, security, justice, social harmony, prosperity, and a desirable way of life. The humanists believed that virtue education of both princes and citizens could help achieve these ends. They thought that the moral character and practical wisdom of political leaders and citizens could be improved, and that would lead to better government. Cultivating the classical virtue of pietas might even improve the practice of religion.Now I admit to believing that an education in the traditional humanities might still be of benefit to political life today, but I don't think (as Balot suggests) that there is any necessary linkage between virtue politics and a public world shaped either by Christian or liberal-individualist principles. Balot, if I am reading him correctly, seems to think that education in democracies should be more regime-specific, as it was in antiquity, which would mean, I suppose, more civic education in democratic principles and more citizen participation. I take him to be preferring ancient to Renaissance models of paideia in something like a communitarian spirit, as more fitting to modern liberal-democratic and republican traditions. He seems to associate humanist virtue politics, by contrast, with modern procedural liberalism, indifferent to any conception of the good life, and implies that it can do less to support democracy given its compatibility with multiple regime types. These include (as I point out in chapter 17 of Virtue Politics) an absolutism unconstrained by any constitutional limits at all.These are deep waters and I hesitate, as a mere historian, to wade into them. I do agree with Pareto that all government is oligarchical in the sense that all government implies the rule of a few over many. I think this was true even of Athens in its most democratic period in the late fifth century BC. The important questions are whether political elites are closed or open to merit (as the humanists advocated), and whether they are constituted by decent people of good character who accept a duty of care towards the poor and the powerless. Modern democracies are nothing like ancient ones and in practice resemble oligarchies; and they are yearly becoming less liberal. In modern Western societies small groups of the wealthy and powerful dominate government, the economy, and the wider culture (while talking incessantly of equality). It is still possible and, in my view, highly desirable to have a democratic check on ruling elites, but I believe, with the humanists, that, as things now stand, the best way to improve our governments is to improve our governors. The advantage of humanist virtue politics is that it is potentially compatible with modern pluralistic societies where citizens profess many faiths, including scientism and secular humanism, but also share common political institutions. For those institutions to function well, we need our societies to share a least a few common principles of practical reason—what Justus Lipsius called a civil wisdom—as well as common models of what constitutes civilitas in Suetonius' sense (Augustus 51–56), that is, the correct comportment of citizens. These standards are most likely to be widely accepted when derived from common traditions and from teaching common classical texts (not necessarily those of Greco-Roman antiquity).Reading Prof. Michelle Clarke's comments brought to mind one way in which humanist virtue education could make—and has in fact made—a beneficial contribution to modern pluralistic societies: namely, through its careful attention to precision of language and eloquence. Clarke takes seriously, I think, Machiavelli's critique of humanist eloquence: that when humanists read texts, their obsession with correct latinity and their practice of hunting for examples of fine conduct blinded them to what the ancients, above all the Romans, actually did to achieve political success. Machiavelli did not read Livy to polish his Latin or for moral improvement in the conventional humanist way, but to see what actually made the Romans great, which for him was their militarized society, their readiness to go to war, and their regular practice of using terror and fraud to win empire.3As Clarke points out, the humanists believed, beginning with Petrarch (and following Cicero), that good speech was important because it made men better. To attempt to find the most correct and powerful words to express one's thoughts forced a speaker to examine his own character and desires and to relate them to his audience and to the particular situation in which he was making his case. These were the circumstantiae of classical rhetoric. That is why an orator-statesman has to be a vir bonus dicendi peritus (Quintilian's report of Cato the Elder's ideal). It is the desire to be, and to be considered, a good man by his hearers that makes a man truly eloquent. The truly eloquent man thus will advocate a course of action that is good for the whole republic and the common good. Machiavelli, with his cynical view of human moral potential, thought the ancient and humanist ideal of eloquence was naive and likely to lead to poor statecraft.I would like to develop a couple of points here that are relevant to humanism's utility in modern democratic societies. The humanists (like Cicero) valued eloquence in part because it offered an alternative to violence. The "good man skilled in speaking" could (as Isocrates and Cicero argued) create social harmony through persuasion. This required his audience to be persuadable, meaning both rational and brought up to value the right things in the right way, to have educated thoughts and emotions. In other words, the humanist ideal of eloquence implies an educated citizenry. It should be no surprise that Francesco Patrizi of Siena was, I believe, the first writer in Western history to call for all citizens in a republic to be literate (and in Latin!). Sophisticated users of language (as Clarke notes) are also better able to judge the character of political leaders, which reveals itself in speech.Humanists like Patrizi criticized the scholastics for relying too much on "tortured" logical proofs. Scholastic dialectic, he wrote, "seems more to extort (extorquere) what it tries to prove, and by certain abrupt speeches drags us into [the speaker's] own way of thinking, and it compels us to confess things in words which we by no means assent to in mind." Humanist oratory is more civil, "because it draws minds towards one's will in a softer way, by persuasion and dissuasion." Severe logic may appeal to those living in religious orders, he writes, but ordinary human beings, those who live in civil society, require "gentler belief" (mitior opinio), which indulges our softer mores. "For those harder arguments are more suited to contemplation than to action and cannot easily persuade readers, but through shrewd argumentation extort (extorquent) confessions that those beliefs are true rather than [producing voluntary] assent to them." They might dazzle for a moment, but soon the undertow of the audience's prepossessions and social commitments will cause them to lapse back into its customary beliefs.In other words, humanist eloquence is better suited to civil society than scholastic logic (or its modern counterpart, the analytic method in philosophy). Under modern conditions, if citizens cannot be educated and persuaded to in civil and to the common they be and I think it is not widely that the great traditions of civic oratory in and the are from In the the republic the most work of civic was a as The made by in This a of Renaissance humanism, speeches by and but also many ancient all to and the of like and their eloquence on In we no longer have eloquent public is the only but if we had and more virtuous it would be to create common in our think I can Prof. as an in my that Renaissance virtue politics was a failure in its time a poor for the of modern democratic politics. author of a stimulating on is by the of between the humanists with their virtue politics and those of the and the modern republic of more might this the Venetian humanist Francesco was the one who the term in He the to to to his humanists as for works of classical from in would like to the I noted in Virtue between the character of both their on the of and to a in their political as For both or of that the of the Church and both wanted to absolutism and create on is by of of societies and It of of modern republics their ancient am to go a certain down this but I have a few The humanists, including Petrarch, Patrizi and were certainly critics of it as a form of education that was (as they were of scholastic legal and and this the of scholastic In however, by the and in develop a kind of This is best in the educational system, where the were to of and while more students were given a in scholastic and canon for the to it for humanists was a form of since a very of humanists were either on Church or to who tried to the temporal in his famous on the of a of the Church once he to and was into the system of The same in his to the the Church for the empire of Latin and continued its This made the empire even greater than the political empire of the this was not In the humanists their movement as to the of the of them (like many wanted to the Christian not their wanted to improve Christian practice by the of classical eloquence to the to its eloquence and to its in the The Humanist was potentially to be as in and work on the which for the of the before the humanist was if to the religious at least not to the that and at the of the himself to the Church the of humanists to their to and society less and more than those in Renaissance Italy did of course include wealthy republics by men who had in and No Renaissance republic its from in the way the Romans and the kind of for we find in Plato and Aristotle was Francesco so as to that all the citizens of his republic should engage in some kind of whether or No one should live on and should take on some in the governance of the the humanists was politics and political to the wealthy to the state to for a good deal of for this the for the of ancient Sparta, distinguished between good and was such as who his to politics in the of his own was by the of De the the needs of his humanists using examples from Livy and but many also wealth, if it was fraud or and if its were to a the or the military needs of the the other I of no humanist who for its role in or in the way was a good a of good government (as in the famous in the humanists a life to by If there was to be among elites it should be a rivalry in the best rivalry in human or virtue. That too is a teaching of virtue politics that could be today. democracy needs the right kind of as much or even more than it needs me to Prof. Gabriele contribution to the forum, which I for as he is the most of virtue politics both in its Renaissance form and as a for modern politics. For virtue politics was a As he states by me with not to the of humanist political theory in the of and in particular with the work of Giovanni He presents this charge as a that a of the might the of humanist political thought I in Virtue To this charge I In Virtue I was to attention to less political or to I believed had been in the modern I was well that much work had been done on the above all by and Pedullà with I generally In there was also the of though it more on than politics. I also with a at the of and who was what out to be an excellent on political and I did not to too much on his I don't think I can be of in the I Renaissance to only in to the to I hope that with the of my new on Francesco Patrizi of Siena, who the of his life in and his two great political that the charge of will now be I agree with Pedullà that of the in the is highly desirable and may well my of virtue politics. for suggests that political thought in the a kind of moral that the work of Renaissance like Giovanni and with the of more serious my of the term to describe humanist virtue politics. I think the is He in its modern sense to of social for from the to in government and society, with the of greater and a He that what in is called a for all to and was using in a more general in the way it is by modern Confucian theorists like and Joseph to political to the and improve the moral and of ruling elites. Political as from the more is as just in that in society has an in well This form of political is not necessarily regime-specific. Modern theorists between meritocratic regimes, such as that of and governance in which may any form of government. now as since the required education in the Confucian its to produce moral in ancient wisdom of literary and an ideal of both to the state and to the of the common general idea in Virtue is that Renaissance humanists at least some of these and The form of virtue politics for well over and can be a failure simply in of its relative and Renaissance virtue politics as oligarchical in and as its for merit in all with political He points to the fact that most people in Italy who a classical in humanist were in from the of "sponsored were I this means that, for humanists like or who with popular politics were I he also as or the form of

Abstract This essay argues that experiential education, when used intentionally and in its full expression, can be an effective strategy in higher education to help students and faculty to bridge the divide between professional and civic roles. It draws on the story of Augsburg University’s long history with experiential education as well as lessons from a yearlong strategic initiative to show how experiential education can, on the one hand, help students understand themselves as civic agents—both before and after graduation. On the other hand, the case of Augsburg shows that experiential education can be an important expression of a university’s institutional public mission as a community member, knowledge creator, employer, and problem-solving partner with other members of the local community. The essay concludes with a discussion of the tension between Augsburg’s educational and public missions—a tension that is particular to Augsburg but, perhaps, not unique to it.

The era of self-absorbed Western liberal democratic triumphalism is long gone—good riddance—even if the ghosts of that post–Cold War period still seem to haunt debates about democratic theory and practice. Clear and fresh thinking about democracy’s value(s) is needed, especially in contexts where it is difficult to disentangle democracy and colonialism. To risk stating the obvious: the reemergence of authoritarianism across the globe only heightens the need for creative democratic theorizing.Sungmoon Kim’s Democracy After Virtue is a book for this moment. Kim makes an important contribution to the kind of problem-oriented and place-based theorizing that The Good Society has long been partial to. Developing his normative democratic vision in conversation with thinkers ranging from John Dewey to Mencius to Benjamin Barber, Kim offers a democratic ideal for East Asian political communities deeply rooted in Confucian practices and virtues.Kim, of course, is not the first to theorize democracy in East Asia. But he aims to fill a democratic gap in burgeoning scholarship on Confucian political philosophy and East Asian democratic theory. Confucian political meritocrats and Confucian democrats, Kim argues, both fail to account for the “circumstances of East Asian politics.” Kim contends that the former, the political meritocrats, neglect the emergence of value pluralism in a “modern” East Asia. As such, their claims are too perfectionist—too committed to a single account of the good—to be justified to diverse East Asian publics. Confucian democrats, on the hand, do not offer a convincing case for democracy given the aforementioned circumstances; according to Kim, their instrumental defense of democratic institutions is tenuous, at best, because nondemocratic institutions may prove better at delivering personal well-being than democratic ones.Kim’s pragmatic Confucian democracy offers a way out of this dilemma. Pragmatist rather than perfectionist, the fact of value pluralism poses no theoretical or practical problem for Kim. And because Kim invokes a specifically Deweyan pragmatism, he provides a stronger justification for democratic institutions than the instrumental accounts advanced by Confucian democrats. A pragmatic Confucian democracy, then, is pragmatic insofar as it is both nonfoundational and justified on no instrumental, pragmatic (in the Deweyan sense) terms. It is Confucian insofar as it recognizes the existence of Confucian moral virtues in East Asian political communities, including a moderate Confucian perfectionism. And it is democratic insofar as it opens space for the free exchange of views regarding the political implications of those (moral) virtues.Participants in this symposium, convened and edited by Brooke Ackerly, raise important questions about the promise and potential pitfalls of Kim’s project. Stephen Macedo celebrates Kim’s ambitious comparative project, but he is skeptical of Kim’s pragmatic commitments and expresses concerns about Kim’s criticisms of political meritocracy. John Dryzek commends Kim’s (Confucian) democratic vision. He believes, however, that Kim’s project needs more empirical support if it is to be justified on pragmatic grounds. Zhuoyao Li is less concerned about empirical evidence than the competing and, potentially conflicting, accounts of pragmatism he thinks underpin Kim’s theory. He, too, however, welcomes Kim’s effort to break new ground on old debates about democracy and Confucianism. Among other things, Brooke Ackerly suggests that Kim pays too much attention to John Dewey and, as a result, overlooks pragmatic resources internal to Confucian political thought. Drawing more on the latter than the former would only strengthen Kim’s project, Ackerly argues. And Ackerly, like the other symposium participants, thinks that Kim’s latest intervention merits the attention of Confucian democrats, Confucian political meritocrats, democratic theorists more generally.Kim has the final word, of course, dismissing some criticisms while grappling with others. His response concludes with a hope that the comparative project undertaken in Democracy After Virtue enriches the pragmatic, Confucian, and democratic traditions. I think the reader will find that in both the book and the symposium, Kim delivers.

Abstract Our nation is experiencing a convergence of social, political, and structural forces that threaten our democracy. Acknowledging our current moment, this article discusses the idea of “civic renaissance” as a movement to transform social and institutional life by regaining trust and friendship among the American people. Civic renaissance as a social movement stands in contrast to other social movements in that it focuses on means rather than ends of political engagement as the ultimate goal. Drawing on examples of nonviolent traditions lead by Martin Luther King and Mohandas Gandhi, this article explores the power of constructive nonviolence in catalyzing individuals, organizations, and institutions to serve the common good. A contemporary expression of these ideals and practices is seen in the work of Braver Angels, America's largest bi-partisan organization dedicated to the work of political depolarization. In describing the goals and initiatives of this organization, this essay articulates the hope, challenges, and possibilities of developing a “beloved community” that binds Americans together in creating and sustaining a common life. The idea of civic renaissance—building community and restoring integrity to our institutions—is an idea well suited to addressing the problems facing the United States in our current moment.