Sex and the city: Private vice and public scandal in the American republic.

摘要

The dissertation examines political sex scandals in America at the national level. Studying these events over time with an emphasis on the evolving responses of both statesmen and citizens reveals the republic's deteriorating moral health. Essential to this woeful degeneration has been the collapse of several virtue-cultivating institutions the Founders hoped would help to avert America's dangerous tendency toward servitude: moral education; participation in civic life through voluntary associations; and religion. Using political sex scandals as a lens through which to glimpse the deterioration of these important institutions, the dissertation identifies a trajectory of decline beginning in the twentieth century, by which Americans became less tutored in virtue, less spirited in citizenship, less agreed on questions of moral significance, and ultimately less dexterous in exercising the skills of self-government. The dissertation seeks to show that the freedom from virtue won through the collapse of moral education, voluntary associations, and religion has produced an American citizenry increasingly prone to the kind of dependence and enslavement Tocqueville cautioned against in the 1830s, and argues that the level of our degradation is observable in our response to political sex scandals.