Ideational Evolution: Wilson, Gladstone & Disraeli

When the title character in Benjamin Disraeli’s 1832 novel Contarini Fleming: A Psychological Autobiography returns home from college, his father (based in part on the author’s father, Isaac D’Israeli) listens with pleasure and amusement as Contarini shows off the results of his reading at school. The boy is newly witty and articulate, tossing off pithy observations on philosophy, history and other disciplines. “But when he found that I believed in innate ideas, he thought that my self-delusion began to grow serious,” Contarini narrates. The 27-year-old Disraeli was referencing a philosophical point of view held by Descartes and Plato, that humans are born with certain ideas innately, such as the nature of God, or moral viewpoints. This philosophical position was opposed by some of the great 18 th Century Enlightenment masters, including Locke and Voltaire, as its sort of Romantic mysticism was at odds with their empiricism.  Scholars have often pointed out that  Contarini Fl...

A work of fiction by a future United States president is a rare occurrence, so it’s strange that no one appears to have written anything about an unfinished, six-page short story entitled “Margaret” that Woodrow Wilson wrote in longhand in a notebook, probably sometime in the 1880s. It is now preserved at the Library of Congress. The story was even left out of editor Arthur S. Link’s unprecedentedly exhaustive 69-volume Papers of Woodrow Wilson . The most extensive mention I’ve found is in a brief footnote in Henry Bragdon’s biography of Wilson, which merely notes the story’s existence and quotes a few lines from it. Even Edwin A. Weinstein, who printed an extensive analysis of Wilson’s only completed short story, “The World and John Hart,” in his psychological study of Wilson, ignored “Margaret” altogether. Biographer John Mulder, surveying his early writing, does mention “Margaret” and reminds us that Wilson also once outlined a novel that he never wrote, but then wraps up by noting ...