From Emerson's 'great guest' to Strauss's Machiavelli: Innocence, responsibility, and the renewal of American Studies

My dissertation explores the intense crisis of sensibility experienced by liberal intellectuals in cold war America, with special emphasis on the desire to renew liberal democratic culture by moving, in mind and spirit, from innocence to responsibility. The latter term, however, expresses sentiments of civic virtue or republicanism very much at odds with liberalism; hence the ultimate failure of liberals to consummate their own sense of what is most needful or necessary. Although liberals clearly desire the sensational execution of innocence, their inability to be "altogether evil" (Machiavelli) consigns them to the equivocating limbo of what R. W. B. Lewis called the "new stoicism." The liberal desire for renewal does find its consummation, however, in Leo Strauss's Thoughts on Machiavelli (1958), which instructs liberals in the salutary benefits of a philosophical republicanism. As embodied in Machiavelli himself, this mode of republicanism promises to emancipate liberals (if only they would listen) from the tyranny of innocence, thereby effecting the desired regenerative movement to civic responsibility.