1
“A TEACHING GOVERNMENT”: FOREIGN POLICY
AND EDUCATION IN LIBERTY
David Clinton
Tulane University
The title of this panel–“Is Liberty Learned?”–is a question, not an affirmation. It is a
question posed with some frequency in contemporary American foreign policy, given President
Bush’s determination to spread democracy in troubled regions of the world that at present lack it,
both to improve the lives of people who have lived under oppression and to safeguard the
security of the United States, by giving those fellow human beings a degree of hope of improving
their lives through peaceful means and thereby making them less easy prey for the blandishments
of terrorists. In this sense, the question, which might also be phrased “Can Liberty Be Taught?”,
refers to the debate over the capacity of the United States or any other democratic country to
transfer the mores and institutions of democracy to societies that have not experienced them.
Can a country learn the practices of democracy and liberty through the precepts, and even the
active intervention, of another country, or must each people find its way to this form of
government on its own–profiting, perhaps, from the examples of others, but necessarily feeling
its own way, making its own mistakes, and arriving at its own solutions to the perennial problem
of maintaining an orderly and just society?