Learn to Apply The Timeless Principles Of Statesmanship to Our Present Moment

Throughout history, people of character and conviction have studied the timeless principles that built Western civilization and have applied them to the challenges of their day. The George Washington Statesmanship Program will offer a new generation the opportunity to learn from those individuals and discover what their insights can teach us about our current problems.

George Washington Fellowship

This competitive program will bring together a select group of twelve ISI alumni and young/mid-career professionals from across the U.S. with top ISI faculty

This is a 16-week fellowship. The program will be followed by a capstone trip during the summer. Applications for this program close on December 8, 2023.

  • study prominent thinkers and statesmen like Aristotle, Edmund Burke, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, Alexis de Tocqueville, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, and of course, George Washington.
  • a series of ‘modern-day application’ sessions like “How Identity Politics Works,” “How Foreign Policy Works,” and “Race, Rights, and Identity.”
  • sessions will take place on Tuesday evenings from February to May 2024. Participants will come to each session having previously viewed a 30-minute lecture and should be prepared for a 90-minute, virtual Socratic discussion with an ISI faculty member.

From Former Participants

“It was a transformative experience — coupling an international perspective of freedom and liberty with foundational texts and thinkers coalesced into an amazing intellectual journey for me. I would highly recommend the fellowship to anyone who thinks that our intellectual forefathers not only have much wisdom for the present age but that an intimacy and familiarity with the Western giants will be necessary in order to preserve the rare gift of liberty that we’ve been given.”

Garrett Ballengee
2022 GWS Fellow and Executive Director, Cardinal Institute for West Virginia Policy

“This program was a life changing experience and I am so sincerely thankful for having been extended such and opportunity. Politics, philosophy, and economics are what cultivate and transform minds in leadership…My views and politics lens has become far more informed [as well as] expanded. This is the education that I have been so yearning for where tradition is being lost elsewhere.”

Melany Bennett
2023 GWS Fellow and Founder and Executive Director, The Tampico Project

Featured Program Faculty

Josh Mitchell

Joshua Mitchell is a professor of political theory at Georgetown University. His most recent book is American Awakening: Identity Politics and Other Afflictions of Our Time. Dr. Mitchell is a Tocqueville scholar, and also serves on the steering committee of the Tocqueville Conversations conference.

Anne Bradley

Anne Rathbone Bradley is the George and Sally Mayer Fellow for Economic Education and the academic director at The Fund for American Studies (TFAS), and also delivers lectures around the country and oversees curriculum development and evaluation for economics courses. In addition, Bradley continues to teach economics courses to TFAS students and consistently receives outstanding marks in students’ post-program evaluations.

Bradley is coeditor and author of Counting the Cost: Christian Perspectives on CapitalismFor the Least of These: A Biblical Answer to Poverty, and Be Fruitful and Multiply: Why Economics Is Necessary for Making God-Pleasing Decisions.

Dan McCarthy

Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age and the vice president of ISI’s Collegiate Network. Previously, he served as the director of the Robert Novak Journalism Fellowship Program at the Fund for American Studies and as editor of the American Conservative. McCarthy is a columnist for Spectator USA and has written for The New York TimesFirst ThingsUSA TodayReason, and The National Interest, among other publications. He has been interviewed on the BBC, NPR, the Fox Business Channel, and many other media outlets. An ISI alumnus, he edited an ISI Collegiate Network student newspaper as an undergraduate at Washington University in St. Louis.

Yuval Levin

Yuval Levin is the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). He also holds the Beth and Ravenel Curry Chair in Public Policy. The founding and current editor of National Affairs, he is also a senior editor of The New Atlantis and a contributing editor to National Review. Dr. Levin served as a member of the White House domestic policy staff under President George W. Bush. He is the author of several books on political theory and public policy, most recently A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream. He holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

Dan Mahoney

Daniel J. Mahoney is a senior writer at Law & Liberty, professor emeritus at Assumption University, and senior fellow at the Real Clear Foundation. For the 2020-2021 academic year, he was the Garwood Visiting Fellow in the James Madison Program at Princeton University. Among his many books are Bertrand de Jouvenel: The Conservative Liberal and the Illusions of Modernity (ISI, 2005), The Other Solzhenitsyn: Telling the Truth about a Misunderstood Writer and Thinker (St. Augustine’s Press, 2014) and The Idol of Our Age: How the Religion of Humanity Subverts Christianity (Encounter Books, 2018). His latest book, The Statesman as Thinker: Portraits of Greatness, Courage, and Moderation, was released by Encounter Books on May 24, 2022.

Robert P. George

Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. He has served as chairman of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), and before that on the President’s Council on Bioethics and as a presidential appointee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights. He has also served as the U.S. member of UNESCO’s World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology (COMEST). He is a former judicial fellow at the Supreme Court of the United States, where he received the Justice Tom C. Clark Award. A graduate of Swarthmore College, he holds J.D. and M.T.S. degrees from Harvard University and the degrees of D.Phil., B.C.L., D.C.L., and D.Litt. from Oxford University. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Apply Now

Applications will open this fall