The Ford Leadership Forum is dedicated to reanimating our understanding of the importance of virtue to public life, as well as developing the programs necessary to cultivate virtue in both our leaders and citizens. One of the biggest debates around the ratification of our Constitution involved the degree to which it either created or presupposed a republic of virtue. Critics of the Constitution worried that the Constitution traded too much on interest and passion and not enough on virtue, while defenders of the Constitution often argued that virtue was not something we could always count on. In the words of James Madison, “Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.” 

Both parties agreed, however, the “our system of government presupposes virtue in a higher form than any other,” and that virtue would be best developed and cultivated in our private associations. Only when people had shown themselves dependable and trustworthy in normal human interactions could they be counted on to handle the demands of political authority and power. In other words, all the institutions of society had to work together to form persons capable of ordered liberty. In the words of Alexis de Tocqueville: “It cannot be repeated too often that nothing is more fertile in prodigies than the art of being free; but there is nothing more arduous than the apprenticeship of liberty. Such is not the case with despotic institutions: despotism often promises to make amends for a thousand previous ills; it supports the right, it protects the oppressed, and it maintains public order. The nation is lulled by the temporary prosperity which accrues to it, until it is roused to a sense of its own misery. Liberty, on the contrary, is generally established in the midst of agitation, it is perfected by civil discord, and its benefits cannot be appreciated until it is already old.”

Our age of political agitation and civil discord is thus an opportunity for us to relearn and internalize liberty’s hard lessons. At the Ford Leadership Forum, we embrace this moment and this opportunity, just as our namesake did fifty years ago in the depths of one of our nation’s greatest crises. We will accomplish this through reengagement with and strengthening of the institutions of civil society such as schools, churches, businesses, and other civic associations.