WHO ELSE SHOULD BE ON OUR MONEY? A Shrubblogger asks who should be on our currency, if not politicians. While I appreciate the way other countries use cash to honor geniuses in other fields (I especially like Maria Montessori’s appearance on Italian money), I do think the US “all politicians all the time” approach works best for us, for two reasons:

1) Most of the best and most unique stuff we have given the world has been political. Madison, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Franklin (…in about that order) are the distinctive Americans, the creatures no other country could produce, par excellance.

2) Our great artists don’t work well on money. Either they were satirists of the first order (Mark Twain) or they defined themselves starkly against the competing Enlightenment visions that animated the country’s Founding (e.g. Hawthorne, Dickinson in her own insane way, Faulkner, West, Roth). Neither of these categories seems to me best honored by a spot on a ten-spot.

For my own part, I think the most important project of contemporary political philosophy is to re-ground the effects and “platform planks” of the Founding on post-Enlightenment principles. First Things is the only journal I know of that has really taken up this challenge, mainly via Fr. Neuhaus’s work; I’ll write more about it if I can make my brain work, later. But basically, I want the American literary genius to reshape and revivify the American political genius. If we can do that–we will be greater than Periclean Athens. If we can’t–we will be a fine idea at the time.