Glendon stresses importance of public service as a higher calling

Glendon, a Harvard Law School professor and former U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, focused on the idea of a life in public service as a higher calling in her lecture “Cicero and Burke on Politics as a Vocation.”

The lecture, which over 100 people attended, was the first in an endowed series of annual lectures presented by the Aquinas Institute, the University’s Catholic chaplaincy, and co-sponsored by the James Madison Program and the American Whig-Cliosophic Society.

Glendon said the topic of the lecture was inspired by conversations she had with graduate students who had decided not to pursue careers in public service. The students, she said, had expressed their concern that they would lose their “moral compass” in such a “dirty business.”

The most common fear, she found, was that these students thought they “wouldn’t be able to make a difference.”

Tracing the decisions that shaped the career arcs of Cicero and Edmund Burke in her lecture, Glendon noted that both statesmen struggled with the “huge gray area” between “moral and political compromise.”

Both men viewed politics as a higher calling, she explained, but sometimes stumbled in the political circuit while trying to adhere to their principles.

Glendon explained that in Cicero’s letters, he sometimes berated himself for not living up to his own moral standards, particularly when he executed five conspirators against the Roman Republic without trial. Such execution was against the law but was justified as an emergency action.

The Irish-born Burke, similarly, had to reconcile his heritage with his affiliation with the British Parliament in the mid-1700s, Glendon noted.

Support nonprofit student journalism. Donate to the ‘Prince’. Donate now »

“If you were to judge at the times of their deaths the results of their efforts and the political causes that were important to them ... they were both failures,” Glendon argued. “And yet, if we take a longer view, I think the message is that, just because one does not see the results of one’s vocation in one’s own lifetime, does not mean that those efforts were in vain.”

But, as she noted, neither could foresee the future positive effects of their lives’ works.

“‘Will I make a difference?’ is not exactly the right question to ask ... we shouldn’t worry too much about whether we are going to see the difference,” she explained.

Members of the Aquinas Institute were pleased with the tone and content in this inaugural lecture.

Get the best of the ‘Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

“I thought it was a great success,” Brian Stephan ’11, Aquinas student coordinator said. “Applying the ethos of helping others to political life is something that is important, especially in an age where we see politics as something self-serving.”

“For a couple of years now, we’ve been trying to get Professor Glendon to come to Princeton,” Reverend Thomas Mullaly said. “Her insights in regard to that nexus between philosophy and practice is so very important.”

Glendon’s lecture was based on an upcoming book, “The Forum and the Tower: How Scholars and Politicians Have Imagined the World, from Plato to Eleanor Roosevelt.”