Woodrow Wilson is the only American political scientist to have served as President of the United States. In the time between his political science Ph.D. (from Johns Hopkins, in 1886) and his tenure as president (1913–21), he also served as president of Princeton University (1902–10) and president of the American Political Science Association (1909–10). Wilson is one of the most revered figures in American political thought and in American political science. The Woodrow Wilson Award is perhaps APSA’s most distinguished award, given annually for the best book on government, politics, or international affairs published in the previous year, and sponsored by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation at Princeton University.

Wilson has also recently become the subject of controversy, on the campus of Princeton University, and in the political culture more generally, in connection with racist statements that he made and the segregationist practices of his administration. A group of Princeton students associated with the “Black Lives Matter” movement has demanded that Wilson’s name be removed from two campus buildings, one of which is the famous Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs (see Martha A. Sandweiss, “Woodrow Wilson, Princeton, and the Complex Landscape of Race,” http://www.thenation.com/article/woodrow-wilson-princeton-and-the-complex-landscape-of-race/). Many others have resisted this idea, noting that Wilson is indeed an important figure in the history of twentieth-century liberalism and Progressivism in the United States.

A number of colleagues have contacted me suggesting that Perspectives ought to organize a symposium on the Wilson controversy. Although we do not regularly organize symposia around current events, given the valence of the controversy and its connection to issues we have featured in our journal (see especially the September 2015 issue on “The American Politics of Policing and Incarceration”), and given Wilson's importance in the history of our discipline, we have decided to make an exception in this case. We have thus invited a wide range of colleagues whose views on this issue will interest our readers to comment on this controversy. —Jeffrey C. Isaac, Editor.

After summarizing the ways in which Progressive intellectuals attacked individualist understandings of rights and mechanistic understandings of constitutional government, a series of second thoughts on this argument are pursued. The first centers on the ways in which progressivism differed from New Deal liberalism, especially regarding “big government.” Progressive understandings of politics rest on a distinction between “government(s)” and “state,” derived from Tocqueville and Lincoln’s understandings of popular sovereignty. Secondly, this distinction is reinforced by their stress on an articulate and coherent public opinion that would provide democratic legitimacy to all forms of governing institutions, both “public” and “private,” that serve the common good. The Civil War experience was their model, one which they first thought would be reincarnated in the preparation for World War I. Given both private and public assaults on free speech, Progressives in the 1920s often led the movement for protections of civil liberties and for a new respect paid to the First Amendment. The conclusion examines the continuities and discontinuities of Progressive political thought in contemporary political discourse.

Students of Mill's political theory know that he was both a political reformer and a social philosopher. An important part of Mill's life involved political struggles over the electoral franchise and schemes of parliamentary representation, the legal and social emancipation of women, land law and economic policy, and freedom of speech and the press. When turning to his best known writings such as On Liberty, Considerations on Representative Government, Principles of Political Economy and The Subjection of Women, issues of reform intrude at almost every point. Even his more philosophical writings—Utilitarianism, An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy and System of Logic — can be seen as attacks on or supports for those theories of man and society which Mill sees as hindering or furthering ‘the improvement of mankind’. Moreover, Mill's subsidiary careers as a journalist, editor of the London and Westminster Review and member of parliament further demonstrate his commitment to political reform.

The story of American political thought has been told in many different ways. Three genres stand out. The first is written within the larger framework of intellectual history and takes the form of anthology and narrative summary. Among its most prominent features are an eclecticism of sources (from Roger Williams to Walt Whitman to Erich Fromm) and a heavy emphasis on the period from the first New England settlements through the victory of Jeffersonian democracy. A second form is constitutionalist. Charting the major struggles over legal and institutional relationships through time, this perspective gives prominence to landmark court decisions and articulations of major constitutional issues by party and political leaders. As articulated in the late nineteenth century, it examines the major forms of constitutionalist thinking that lie behind these constitutional and institutional struggles. The third genre, I label populist-progressive. Here, the story of American political thought is Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Southwestern Political Science Association annual meeting, March 23–26, 1988, Houston, Texas, and at the American Politics Group meeting in Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University, January 4–6, 1988.

Progressive intellectuals at the turn of the last century founded the modern American university, created its disciplines and edited the journals that codified their thoughts. They created the ligaments of the national administrative and regulatory state; they helped legitimate the creation of a national financial and industrial corporate economy. Through the writings of Lyman Abbott, Albion Small, and Simon Patten, three features of progressive thought are underlined: the primacy of a narrative, their hostility to “principled” or abstract-philosophical forms of political and social thought, and their confidence that historical modes of social inquiry would produce “laws”? of progress that would guide practice and anchor values integrating self and society on a democratic basis. Five topics contain these animating features: national patriotism, the new industrial economy, a new democratic ethic, social Christianity, and their critique of the dominance of constitutional jurisprudence and law in American political institutions and practices.

The Politics of Liberty in England and Revolutionary America. By Lee Ward. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 470p. $90.00.

This is a study of the origins and development of Whig political thought in England and America. James Tyrrell, Algernon Sidney, and John Locke all wrote during the Exclusion Crisis in England that ended in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Their common enemy was divine right absolutism and its chief spokesman, Sir Robert Filmer. Their common starting point was the premise of man's “natural liberty” as requiring political orders to be grounded in some form of consent creating constitutional limitations on power and justifying resistance to tyranny. The core of the study is an analysis of Tyrrell's Patriarcha, Non Monarcha, Sidney's Discourse Concerning Government, and Locke's Two Treatises of Government. Lee Ward asks us to “imagine [these] foundational works … to be intellectual and philosophical genetic markers placed in the bloodstream of the tradition” of Whig political and constitutional thought in England and America (p. 325).

The Biblical Politics of John Locke, Kim Ian Parker, Editions SR, Volume 29; Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2004, pp. ix, 211.

Parker's study is on the foundational role played by the creation story of Genesis in Locke's moral and political philosophy. Locke's First Treatise against patriarchalism was not only a refutation of Filmer's reading of Adam and original sin, it was a positive rereading of that story suggesting “an emancipation of humanity almost unprecedented in theological writings” (38). Locke's distinction between paternal and political power, then, is not merely a way of “scoring polemical points against Filmer” but becomes a way “to form the basis of his political theory” (120). What can too easily be read as “merely” exegetical polemic in the First Treatise is translated into philosophical argument in the Second Treatise.

Parallel statements through the 1970s and 1980s can be found regarding study of the religious elements in early modern liberal political thought, notably that of Hobbes and Locke. By any measure, the study of religion in American politics, history, and culture, and in political philosophy today, is not only flourishing, it threatens to overwhelm us. This is true not only in the bureaucratic sense of the Religion and Politics Section of the APSA, but in the focus on religion across the discipline and in the use by these political scientists of the work of political, social, cultural, racial, and gender historians and literary critics. And where enough entrepreneurial academics go, grant-giving foundations are sure to follow.