JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN

Jean Bethke Elshtain is the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago’s Divinity School. Professor Elshtain is prodigiously accomplished as a political philosopher, with a body of work on religion, politics, and international relations that includes an outstanding number of books, essays, and endowed lectureships. Widely recognized as one of America’s most influential public intellectuals, Professor Elshtain’s thought has extended beyond the academy. Public servant as well as public intellectual, Professor Elshtain has given generously of talent and time, serving on President Bush’s Commission on Bioethics, on the Board for the National Endowment for Democracy, and as the holder of the Maguire Chair in Ethics at the Library of Congress. A witty and trenchant critic, she has contributed to journals of civic life and opinion on both the right and the left. In all her work, she consistently brings a morally serious and fearlessly independent perspective to bear on some of the most serious and and contentious issues in contemporary public life. 

Award Comments

It is indeed an honor to be recognized on this occasion. I accept with the caveat that all credit where the Institute and its extraordinary accomplishments are concerned comes to rest in the capacious lap of David Blankenhorn.

Some twenty years ago now, I encountered an impossibly young Blankenhorn at a conference being held in a hotel or motel in the general vicinity of Rockford, Illinois. David and I were among the voices of moderation and the party of common sense on that occasion, or so I like to remember it. We believed that the American family was in big trouble and that a troubled family scene made for an increasingly fragile American civil society overall. But we did not share the gloomy view of many of our fellow conferees that American society had fallen into a pit of darkness from which it was unlikely ever to emerge.

The evening prior to the conference’s closing session, David asked if he could have a moment or two with me—perhaps over coffee before the concluding event and before we each headed home the next day. “Sure,” I said, never for a moment discerning that I was being primed to make a life-long commitment.

The next morning David told he was in the process of setting up an Institute—an independent effort—to focus on the family and related issues. Would I be interested in being kept in the loop? “Sure,” I said, and the rest, as they say, is history: so many memories, so many meetings, so many conferences, so many Councils, so many rich reports to the nation.

The Institute’s track record over the years—for a small outfit operating on a shoe-string budget—is nothing short of remarkable. Astonishing, really. David’s indefatigable energy, his sense of the key issues, and his keen desire that we 'happy few', veterans here gathered, should have a voice in the public square—this made all the difference. I am delighted to have been a fellow laborer in the vineyard through it all.

We are older now, hopefully wiser, and well aware that time waits for no man—or woman—so, as we look ahead, we are also aware of the need to bring in younger folks and to ‘institutionalize’ the Institute in myriad ways. Yet it is also vital to keep alive the freshness, the energy, indeed the audacity, of the founding generation, especially David. No easy task. But we are well on our way.

Where do we go from here? The Institute does certain things extremely well: we have the track record to prove it and we should continue in the by now well paved pathways of success. The heart and soul of the Institute remains the ‘family question’ broadly construed, a question that radiates out in so many directions, all of which have to do, finally, with what kind of home, at once personal and civic, we live in.

Is it a decent, well-ordered place where human beings can flourish? Or are children—too many children—undermined by family disintegration or by not being born into an intact family in the first place? To the extent that we lose our way because so many American children have lost theirs, to that extent we are a less generous, less ennobling, less stable civic home for human development and formation.

Because we cherish our civic domicile, we must look as well at external sources of strife and conflict—hence, our focus on international civil society under the rubric of a Muslim/West dialogue, our Malta Forum. We have made a good start and forged enduring connections as the means toward deepened mutual understanding.

The work of the Institute for two decades has reminded us, time and time again, of the ways we can come to know a good in common that we cannot know alone and, further, that when our private lives fall apart, our public life suffers. This lesson is easily forgotten and we are all the poor when that happens.

It is the Institute’s task to keep reminding us of the fundamental first things: we are the proverbial canary in the coal mine chirping out warnings less disaster strike. Long may that canary called the Institute for American Values chirp away!