Garry Wills’s new book, Cincinnatus: George Washington and the Enlightenment,[1] seems meant to put an artistic seal on his project of refounding America. Where before he was Inventing America or Explaining America, now he is sculpting America. In Washington, Wills finds an emblem for the nobler America, replete with classical republicanism, that he thinks we have basely abandoned. Wills’s general project has a long pedigree. Merely to point to it is to indicate what makes this book so intriguing on first glance, yet ultimately so unsatisfactory and frustrating.

Emerging in the 1960s from the Catholic conservatism that had originally led him to National Review, Wills was repelled by what he saw as the baseness of Locke’s classical liberalism. In his earlier books he sought to wrest the American founding (and thus, one assumes, the American future) from those for whom the Republic is based on Tocqueville’s “low but solid” principle of self-interest. Though his earlier forays into the history of ideas led Wills to conclusions—most notably his suggestion that Locke’s thought had had little influence on the Declaration of Independence—that proved unsustainable under serious inspection, he was nonetheless working a rich lode in American as well as European thought, one that either condemns liberalism for its vulgarity or offers hopes of a nobler liberalism yet to come. It is a sign of the breadth of this tradition, of its transcendence of the party conflicts of Left and Right, that Wills could remain faithful to