It is easy to dismiss the contrast that Washington, Paine, and others drew between the morals of a republic and the appetites of an empire.
From the stage at a hotel ballroom in nearby Nashua a few nights ago, Alan Keyes was scorching another Republican audience with a speech about, among other things, the depravity of President Clinton, the moral crisis endangering the Republic, and most of all, Mr. Keyes's conviction that he alone could save his party from losing the White House for a third time in a row.
That resolution rests on the division of the soul into three parts by which the Republic places moral psychology at the heart of political philosophy.
And no government of India will be allowed to move the country from the ethical compass and moral ballast of our Republic.
Speaking of the need for elected officials to embody a spirit of idealism as well as pragmatism, he said, "Under no form of government is it so necessary thus to combine efficiency and morality, high principle and rough common sense, justice and the sturdiest physical and moral courage, as in a republic".
Lincoln's appeal to the "self-evident truth" of equality in the Declaration of Independence provided the moral touchstone of the American republic.
The latter, in particular, would have interested More, not least because Augustine in the City of God praises his analysis of the moral collapse of the Roman Republic.
Callicles' genealogy of morals, like Glaucon's in Republic II, presents pleonexia as an eternal and universal first principle of human nature; and he goes further than either Thrasymachus or Glaucon in taking this nature as the basis for a positive norm.
As for Rwanda, many people dare not speak against the crimes that Rwandan troops are committing in the Democratic Congo Republic because of the moral legitimacy President Paul Kagame gained by stopping genocide in his country.
The founders also believed that a religious and moral citizenry was required for the republic to survive.
