If you are a graduate student or professor that is devoted to the preservation of the Western tradition…
Join us from October 9-11, 2025 for the 2025 American Politics and Government Summit as we explore the theme: Statesmanship and Leadership in the Age of Mass Society!
Statesmanship and Leadership in the Age of Mass Society
2025 marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of Winston Churchill’s “Mass Effects in Modern Life”, an article focused on the transformational changes in society, culture, and politics due to the technological, economic, and intellectual developments of modernity. Churchill’s basic contention was—that in an age of progress, equality, and sophistication, individual leadership and agency is diminished and hero worship is dead. As the world moves towards greater comfort, he observed that systems of management would increasingly organize and control the functions of political, economic, and social existence, ensuring stability. In light of this development, he lamented the underbelly of this phenomenon: life would become bleak and stultifying, people would become more anonymous and mediocre, and that we will “mourn the towering grandeur which surrounded and cheered our long painful ascent.”
Churchill joins a larger list of thinkers who warned about the psychological, moral, and political problems of modernity and progress: Burke, Tocqueville, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Pieper, Del Noce, Eliot, Havel, Arendt, Strauss, Kirk, and Lewis saw the limitations of “modernity” and offered various remedies and alternatives. As for Churchill, he left us with a number of predictions and questions:
The idea of war will become loathsome to humanity. The military leader will cease to be a figure of romance and fame. Youth will no longer be attracted to such careers. Poets will not sing nor sculptors chisel the deeds of conquerors. It may well be that the chemist will carry off what credit can be found. The budding Napoleons will go into business, and the civilization of the world will stand on a surer basis.
Is not mankind already escaping from the control of individuals? Are not our affairs increasingly being settled by mass processes? Are not modern conditions at any rate throughout the English-speaking communities hostile to the development of outstanding personalities and to their influence upon events: and lastly if this be true, will it be for our greater good and glory?
Can modern communities do without great men? Can they dispense with hero-worship? Can they provide a larger wisdom, a nobler sentiment, a more vigorous action, by collective processes, than were ever got from the Titans? Can nations remain healthy, can all nations draw together, in a world whose brightest stars are film stars and whose gods are sitting in the gallery? Can the spirit of man emit the vital spark by machinery?
The American Politics and Government Summit will assess these predictions, grapple with these questions, and pursue new research into the subsequent developments of the last 100 years. America has been the global economic, military, technological, and political leader of the last century, and no one has contributed more to the advances of modernity than the United States.
Panelists and presenters are invited to discuss key developments in history, politics, economics, literature, psychology, sociology, and other related fields, and engage with like-minded scholars, offering new ideas in light of timeless truths.
Registration
The American Politics and Government Summit will take place from October 9-11, 2025 at ISI’s Linda L. Bean Center in Wilmington, DE.
Registration for the Summit is only $150. Reach out to Tom Sarrouf at [email protected] with questions.
Call for Papers
We invite proposals of scholarly papers and panels from across the disciplines as we explore Statesmanship and Leadership in the Age of Mass Society for the third annual American Politics and Government Summit.
Graduate students whose paper proposals are accepted will be offered a $250 stipend to attend and present at the conference.
Individual papers by graduate students and professors will be compiled into thematically relevant panels with a discussant. Full papers will be due to discussants two weeks prior to the conference.
Applicants are also invited to submit full panel submissions with speakers, topics, and discussants (where applicable).
Examples of topics eligible for consideration include:
- · The great man theory of history
- · Deracination and alienation in modern thought
- · Liberalism, progressivism, and postliberalism(s)
- · Religion in a mass age
- · The future of war and total war
- · Leadership styles: transaction, transformational, and servant
- · A new birth of statesmanship
- · Personal agency in major systems
- · Bureaucracy and democracy
- · Education for managed mass democracy
- · “Institutional individuals” and the Caesar option
- · Tocqueville and “democratic despotism”
- · Scientism and epistemology
- · Science and Religion: is there a conflict?
- · Atomized individualism and the quest for community
- · The End of History
- · The Last Man
- · Nietzsche and the “Eternal Return”
- · Heidegger and “waiting for new gods”
- · Economies of scale and creative destruction
- · T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland
- · Technicity and the abolition of man
- · Economic growth and the modern miracle
- · The devil in the machine
- · The Federalist at 250: Does the Constitution have answers for the digital age?
The deadline to apply is April 30, 2025. Reach out to Tom Sarrouf at [email protected] with questions.
