Overview

Rarely does scholarship anticipate the most dramatic events of the moment. In this timely work Gary Hart does just that, arguing for the restoration of republican virtues and for homeland security as an important first step. The American democratic republic has from its founding been a paradoxical success. Simultaneously attached to state and national power, citizens' rights and citizens' duties, American democracy has uniquely turned its reliance on consent from the governed into a powerful governing of the consenting. In a remarkable political feat, America's founders combined mixed government, the language of popular sovereignty and a self-conscious emphasis on checks and balances to forge a republic that has weathered the test of time. The complex realities of the twenty-first century, however, have fundamentally challenged the underpinnings of this enduring American experiment, repeatedly exposing the tensions at the heart of America's mixed system of government. What then is the nature of an American republic in an age of democracy? How can the democratic values of social justice and equality be balanced with republican values of civic duty and popular sovereignty? Bringing to light a long-neglected aspect of Thomas Jefferson's political philosophy-the ward republic -Gary Hart here offers a wholly original blueprint for republican restoration in which every citizen can participate democratically in the governing of his or her own life. Of crucial relevance for contemporary society, including its startlingly prescient plan for homeland security, Restoration of the Republic provides original insights into issues of national urgency as well as the timeless questions that bedevil the American democratic experiment.

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9780195155860

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Reviews

Politics corrupted by money and special interests. Citizens alienated from government. Much talk of rights, little mention of civic duty. This is the picture of a republic gone astray, according to Thomas Jefferson, who made citizen engagement and authentic democracy the focus of his mature political philosophy. In these pages, Gary Hart takes up questions Jefferson raised 200 years ago, and applies them to America today. He has written a timely, bracing book. John McCain, U.S. Senator, Arizona An elegant...re-reading of Jefferson for the new century...[Hart's] historical conversation with Jefferson's evolving ideas and shining ideals...reminds readers that we can never look forward without understanding where we've been. That alone, especially in a present forever altered last September, is a worthy message. The San Francisco Chronicle An insightful discussion of the problems in our civic life today...Hart's fine effort focus[es] our attention on the perils in our present [governmental] situation. The Washington Post Book World

Scholarly dissertation meets populist manifesto in politico Hart's case for increased citizen involvement in government. Disgraced when caught dallying with Donna Rice on the good ship Monkey Business, former US senator and presidential candidate Hart has spent the last decade or so restoring his image as a student and practitioner of statecraft. This phase of that attempt began its life as a doctoral thesis in politics at Oxford University. Hart's thoughtful critique of the centralized state under which Americans live today is, in the main, free of the me-first libertarianism of so many antifederal treatises. America in the twenty-first century, he writes, is a procedural republic deficient in the qualities of civic virtue, duty, citizen participation, popular sovereignty, and resistance to corruption. What is more, he adds, the state actively hinders citizens from exercising the republican virtues that informed the Founding Fathers' ideas of citizenship, with the result that the citizenry and the state have become remote from each other. Hart revisits arguments first offered in The Patriot (1996) and The Minuteman (1998) for increasing the involvement of the National Guard (the militia of the Constitution) in matters of national security, an argument given new timeliness in the aftermath of September 11. He also offers a consideration of Thomas Jefferson's idea that the growing union should develop ward republics by which power could be devolved and local decision-making encouraged. Arguing that the nation-state is increasingly ineffectual in the age of transnational economies and roving bands of terrorists, a time characterized by the erosion of national authority and the weakening of national sovereignty, Hart makes a strong case for the republican virtue of allowing local people to make some if not all of the day-by-day decisions that affect their lives-and for the ability of the populace to undertake that hard work. Despite some pie-in-the-sky elements, the argument merits discussion, and the prescriptions are delivered coherently and effectively. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Gary Hart, a former U.S. Senator for Colorado and Presidential candidate in 1984, received his D.Phil from Oxford University in 2001. Dr. Hart recently co-chaired, with Warren Rudman, the U.S. Commission on National Security / 21st Century. He will be a lecturer at Yale University in 2002. He is the author of 11 previous books, including The Patriot and The Minuteman.

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