Sublime

At the heart of our divisions is almost half a century of rising inequality and declining social mobility. Americans tolerate more economic inequality than citizens of other modern democracies: if anyone can become anything, today’s unequal results are fair and might well change tomorrow. That was never completely true, but now it’s plainly false.

Adams understood that liberty under the Constitution could only work if the people were virtuous, restraining their passions and directing them toward the good—as defined, presumably, by Adams’s rationalistic religious belief.

In Baltzell’s view, an aristocracy driven by talent is an essential feature of any republic. The challenge is ensuring that such aristocracies remain open to new members and do not descend into mere caste structures, which close their ranks along racial or religious lines. “If an upper class degenerates into a caste,” Baltzell wrote, “the

EDUCATION IS FREEDOM

Thomas Jefferson thought that only in a society of small farmers could the virtues flourish; and Adam Ferguson with a good deal more sophistication saw the institutions of modern commercial society as endangering at least some traditional virtues.

Today you will hear many presumably learned people say that there is

no such thing as human nature, or that human beings do not have a nature. Now, there is a long historical development back of this view, which we cannot deal with here, and it is not entirely without an important point. But that point is mismade in the statement that human beings