Drawing from both the medieval Scholastic philosophical-theological tradition and Aristotelian virtue ethics, Thomas Aquinas offers a comprehensive and nuanced account of the virtuous life – one that suggests fruitful relationships not only with contemporary philosophical and theological discussions but also with recent empirical work. In this short chapter, I sketch the big picture using an Aristotelian, four-causes approach. Section 1 mainly addresses the final cause or telos of virtue: ultimately, perfect happiness in eternal life – although a good earthly life affords “a certain participation” in happiness. Section 2 considers virtue’s quasi-material causes: reason and the appetites, including the intellectual appetite or will. Section 3 focuses on the formal causes (modes) of virtue in general and of the cardinal and theological virtues in particular, as well as the relationships between various virtues in the larger structure of Thomistic virtue ethics – including the possibility of a unity of the virtues. And Section 4 discusses proposed efficient causes of such virtues, drawing on the various ways in which virtues are developed and related to each other in the Thomistic picture. Throughout, I consider connections between Aquinas’s account of the virtuous life and contemporary work in ethics, psychology, and education.

Abraham Lincoln began his political life as an adherent of henry clay's Whig party, which was formed in the 1830s in opposition to the democratic party, whose chief figurehead at that time was Andrew Jackson. As a Whig, Lincoln Promoted the public funding of "Internal improvements," a national bank (to create a uniform medium of commercial exchange) and tariffs to protect American production from foreign competition. He condemned what he considered the lawlessness of the democrats, and occasionally condemned slavery as well.

The virtue of temperance, or moderation, is central to a discussion of responding to climate change by showing restraint. In this chapter, we discuss the idea that temperance is not about despising goods or pleasures, but about ordering them, being willing to forgo lesser goods for the sake of greater goods. Attention to the need for temperance helps us to be realistic that the climate challenge we face does require some sacrifice, some letting go. Approaching that in terms of the ordering of goods helps us to find motivation: we do it for the sake of the things we love most, among which we might list God, the earth, human societies and other people, not least those who will come after us.

Mid-nineteenth-century American stories of self-making increasingly oriented toward material ambition rather than service. Values evolved within cultural venues as diverse as advice literature, temperance advocacy, business guidance, and phrenology. Expanding expectations for “self-reliance,” for example, promoted beliefs that alcoholism and status were entirely matters of personal choice and moved mainstream Americans toward accepting self-made success and failure. After the Civil War, more stories offered some version of self-making—always judging, prodding, urging, and rewarding. But no consensus had yet emerged on what it meant, what qualified someone as self-made, or how to measure a “self-made” man’s worth. Whereas Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1872 compilation of traditional biographies praised service and disdained wealth, James D. McCabe, Jr.’s 1871 anthology embraced wealth as a measure of worth. Despite her fame, his volume sold vastly better. His often repeated “We are emphatically a nation of self-made men” glorified a materialist American exceptionalism and a social and economic system that demeaned many while it praised a few.

Temperance is a condition of a person’s physical appetites (for food, drink, and sexual contact) in which those appetites themselves conform to a rational standard. Temperance is possible for human beings because of the sophistication with which we can conceptualize the objects of our appetites and because an appetite’s object is internal to the appetite’s identity. A salmon steak construed as poisoned appeals to our appetite (and thus affects the pleasure of satisfying it) differently than one construed as healthful. Temperance differs from self-control, which doesn’t involve a conformity of the appetites themselves, but imposes rational control on unmodified appetites. The rational standard for temperance is the human good, which is the object of the virtues of caring. Thus, the temperate person’s physical appetites are such that, without being controlled, they fit the person to participate in an order of peace.

Four ways of considering partisanship and factionalism dominated the political landscape of the nineteenth-century United States: the residual anti-party views of classical republicans, who were often drawn to a traditional politics of deference involving voluntary allegiance to leaders of a higher class who would advance the “common good”; James Madison’s view that multiple factions, in shifting configurations extending across a large geographic expanse, could prevent majorities from dominating minorities; the stance of those like Andrew Jackson who believed that parties harnessed the power of the people, whose interests would otherwise suffer neglect or worse from elite leaders; and finally, the fear of a polarizing, two-party system expressed by John Adams evolved in the views of a Mugwump like Henry Adams, who held himself apart from partisan corruption without aspiring to restore the elite politics of deference. This chapter explores the presence of these varied approaches to partisanship and factionalism in literary works by Henry Adams, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, James Fenimore Cooper, William Ellery Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Albion Tourgée, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mark Twain, and Simon Pokagon.

The first ladies of the United States are often not thought about as activists. But in fact, many used their political position strategically to advocate for important reforms that benefited minorities and other underrepresented groups. Their activism from the White House helped social and political causes in different eras. Their unsung work contributed to their administration’s public profile and legacy. It also aided larger social justice campaigns going on throughout US history. This chapter explores the frequently unsung efforts of US first ladies in the realm of social advocacy to shed greater light on the significant work done by these women. It challenges the notion that first ladies were simply ornaments or companions for their husbands and highlights the actions that they took to create change.

The chapter begins with a paradox, namely that the liquor laws were liberalised in the early 1960s at precisely the moment when the apartheid regime was becoming distinctly illiberal. It argues that part of the reason was that the temperance movement had failed to reproduce itself generationally while its influence on the National Party government was marginal. Moreover, Afrikaner nationalists hitched wine to the bandwaggon of cultural nationalism. Successive commissions of enquiry targeted excessive drinking amongst the Coloured population, but attempts to extend the reach of racialised prohibition stalled. Indeed, the racial provisions of the 1928 Liquor Act were repealed in 1962, following the Malan Commission which maintained that the law was being routinely flouted. After a heated parliamentary debate the law was amended such that that wine could be purchased by all South Africans. Moreover, the distribution became freer with the creation of grocers’ licences for wine and promises of intervention to reverse vertical integration in the liquor industry. This outcome signalled a defeat for temperance interests and pointed to the greater influence wielded by the wine lobby.

The first substantive chapter addresses the structural problem facing wine farmers at the Cape. Much like in France, there was a serious problem of overproduction of wines of indifferent quality leading to unstable prices. The chapter details the struggle between wine merchants and farmers, which led to the constitution of the Koöperatieve Wynbouwers Vereniging van Suid-Afrika (KWV) in 1918. It shows how the KWV successfully lobbied the Smuts government for devolved regulatory powers that enabled it to control the pricing for distilling wines from 1924. At the same time, the chapter shows that the market was constrained by low consumption amongst whites, including the Afrikaner wine farming community itself. This was compounded by the efforts of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and its allies in the South African Temperance Alliance (SATA) to pursue local option for whites and a form of temperance for the black population. The former failed, but the passage of the 1928 Liquor Act prevented the majority of the population from purchasing wine or brandy. Hence the victory of the KWV over the merchants was tempered by the legislative success of the temperance movement.

This chapter analyses in detail the major part of Socrates’ long and complex discussion with Critias about the nature of temperance. Central to the discussion is Critias’ proposal that temperance is knowing oneself. It is argued that this discussion brings out several important ways in which Socrates and Critias differ from one another. One is in their respective attitudes towards interpretation: while Socrates is negligent of interpreting the words of others, Critias shows a keen interest in the interpretation of texts. A second difference is in the pair’s conception of self-knowledge. It is argued that Critias’ conception is based on what I call a social authority model, while Socrates’ is based on what I call a reflective model. It is shown that, despite the heavily aporetic nature of the discussion, a substantive conception of temperance can be gleaned from critical engagement with that discussion.

This chapter develops in detail a conception of temperance, based on a critical engagement with the dialogue’s resources, which I dub temperance as self-realisation. I explore how this conception is modelled in the dialogue, with particular reference to Socrates’ own procedure as depicted therein. The model enables us to address questions of Socrates’ own relation to temperance, and of how temperance can be regarded as of benefit on this conception. Emphasis is placed on the exercise of temperance as a continuous process and to that extent on self-realisation as something that is necessarily imperfectible. However, it is argued that this makes sense both of the status of temperance as a branch of practical knowledge and of its ability to characterise a whole life.

Why did people petition and why did they continue to do so when petitions were rarely successful in securing immediate change? The point of petitioning was extensively discussed within nineteenth-century political and social movements. Critics questioned the wisdom of petitioning and argued in favour of electioneering or more direct forms of protest. Tellingly, however, many of these alternatives were either petitions by another name or were facilitated by subscriptional activity. Even if they were ignored or rejected by authorities, petitions were indispensable to political campaigns and social movements, including Chartism, anti-slavery, women’s suffrage, anti-Catholics, and the Anti-Corn Law League, for a variety of reasons. This explains why so many Victorian activists were indefatigable petitioners. Petitioning was the key method for mobilising popular support and pressuring Parliament; an important way of recruiting activists and developing formal political organisation, at both national and local level; raising public awareness and political consciousness; and finally, for forging valuable networks with elite politicians. Petitioning thus underpinned and made possible a broader repertoire of modern campaigning.

Socrates here draws on the cyclical and kinship arguments to further explain nearly every claim made earlier in the defense speech (Chapter 3). He provides an interconnected account of virtue, happiness, moral psychology, reincarnation, and soul–body interaction. He first describes how coming to know the divine will ultimately allow the philosopher’s soul to spend the afterlife with the gods, eternally happy. By contrast, non-philosophers reincarnate because their desire for the body-like pulls them into a new body after death. Understanding this mechanism requires clarifying how Socrates thinks of the impurities in non-philosophers’ souls. After examining this, the chapter turns to how the body deceives the soul into desiring things that are not good for it. Socrates develops the account of true courage and temperance from the exchange passage (69a–e) to explain how the philosopher avoids and resists the body’s insidious effects so that the soul can pursue wisdom and so be eternally happy.

That David Foster Wallace designed his fiction to serve a therapeutic function for readers is, at this point, axiomatic. Timothy Aubry (Reading as Therapy) has effectively demonstrated how it serves this function, as well as how his fiction’s contingent relation to addiction and recovery stories enabled Wallace to reinject what he saw as a dispassionate and exhausted postmodern form with moral and affective urgency. Rob Short (Big Books) has thoroughly documented how Wallace’s own adherence to the twelve-step recovery program of Alcoholics Anonymous (1939) shapes the aesthetic practice of his novels. Wallace also frequently used the text to stage “the production and elision of intimacy between the (male) author and the (male) reader.” In conversation with this sections other chapters on gender and sexuality, this chapter explores the ways in which Wallace’s writing occupies queer spaces in its representation of the fractured contingency of the addicted self in recovery. Specifically, the chapter draws a comparison with Whitman, through his first and only novel Franklin Evans or The Inebriate: A Tale of the Times (1842), by far his largest commercial success during his lifetime despite being generally forgotten and, like Wallace, a first novel he would often disavow. For Whitman, masking his exact intention to connect with the reader in his poetry, as well as through this addiction and recovery novel, was the very mechanism by which he could construct the queer intimacies socially and politically foreclosed during his lifetime. As scholars like Michael Warner (“Whitman Drunk”) and Michael Moon (Disseminating Whitman) have documented, Whitman too attended alcohol recovery meetings in part to listen to “dirty” stories about same-sex encounters. Through this connection, I hope to accomplish two goals: first, to recontextualize the fantasy of pre-postmodern and even pre-realist novels imagined to be better suited to the aesthetic project of therapy and recovery in a post-postmodern America, and second, to bring Wallace’s aesthetic practice in closer contact with issues of sexuality that the universalizing gesture of fiction-as-therapy can too often elide. While the chapter does not argue that Wallace was a queer writer, it elucidates the disruptive potential of queer readings within the context of late postmodernist constructions of self.