[The Lecturer’s Art: Gems of American History by Walter A. McDougall. Encounter Books, 2025. xxii + 291 pp.]

The historian Walter McDougall is not a libertarian, but he criticizes the Progressives and Woodrow Wilson in a similar way to Murray Rothbard. He does so from the perspective of “realism.” Although people benefit from cooperation, realists maintain, their desires for wealth and power often lead them to act in ways that violate morality and go against their long-run self-interest. Things will go better if people, especially policy makers, act in awareness of these tendencies rather than hope that their avowal of idealistic motives suffices to enable them to act unchecked.

The founders of the American republic were realists in this sense, McDougall says. They had learned from Machiavelli that checks and balances were essential to counter untrammeled power. This by no means implies that they were Machiavellians, as most people understand this term. They had other sources for their view, especially the history of Venice, the longest-lived republic. “The Founders all saw the wisdom of such Machiavellian notions as separation of powers, checks and balances, an independent judiciary, sacrosanct private property, robust commerce, and occasional political tumult.”

Woodrow Wilson saw matters differently. He supported a powerful presidency that would be able to do good, as he interpreted this:

Wilson was a High Progressive who, as one of the earliest participants in the then-new discipline of political science, cheered America’s rise to world power because he believed that vigorous foreign policies would empower the presidency. He was also a liberal Presbyterian whose modern theology imagined Jesus Christ a social reformer who called followers to build heaven right here on earth.