Eidelberg on the "politics of compassion"

A Discourse on Statesmanship is in large part a contrast between the politics of the American founders, especially Madison and Hamilton, and those of Woodrow Wilson, whom Eidelberg sees as the intellectual founder of a new American republic, greatly inferior to the original. Wilsonianism succeeded in transforming American politics so that it no longer aimed at justice or equality of opportunity, but rather equality of personal condition. The first Eidelberg sees as a felicitous synthesis of aristocratic and democratic principles, tending to protect the exercise of individual faculties by securing the economic differences to which they give rise; the second, as an unfettered democratic principle which ultimately leads to moral relativism . . . . CONTINUE