ON THE PERILS OF BEING JAMES WILSON

I'm flattered by OxBlog's designation (they put me in the "James Wilson" category). Josh knows that I would be happy with the comparison: Wilson is one of the people who comes off pretty well in my dissertation because of his relative optimism concerning the capacities of ordinary citizens to engage in democratic politics. There are some problems with his view on this score, though: he seems to me excessively reliant on a theological interpretation of law, and he explicitly relegates women to the separate sphere of "republican motherhood." But we can still appropriate the optimism without these limitations and consider ourselves inspired by Wilson.

Of course, Wilson died young (malaria), penniless, and fleeing debtors prison. He also angered George Washington with an inept attempt to become Chief Justice. His reputation didn't really rebound until the middle of the twentieth century, and his works are (I think) still out of print and hard to find. I'm hoping to avoid these aspects of Wilson's life, partly by keeping my credit cards at home and being a little more circumspect about self-promotion. . .