THE AMERICAN MINERVAN (MINVRA) holds that the revival of the republican tradition is the antidote to arbitrary power, civic illiteracy, and modern threats of materialism, oligarchy, and cultural fragmentation. It is founded in the spirit of Noah Webster’s American Minerva, “Patroness of Peace, Commerce, and the Liberal Arts” (New York’s first newspaper) “Patroness of Peace, Commerce, and the Liberal Arts,” for a 21st century republican renaissance.
There are four main sections: Regions (Lineage, History and Geography of Republicanism), Statecraft (or Republican Statecraft on the Systemic Problems, Institutions, and Mechanics of Governance), Political Cosmologies (the connection of the Civic1 and Political to the Sacred, Secular, and Esoteric Currents), Current Affairs and Book Reviews. Other related sections deal with cultural commentary and dispel counter-Enlightenment anti-revolutionary conspiracies and the paranoid political style in early American politics. Articles will track the historical transmission of republican ideas across time and space, debate the core problems that every republic must solve to survive, categorize newly published historical, legal, and philosophical literature by intellectual era, and show the intersection of sacred, secular, and esoteric beliefs. The section under Political Cosmology highlights how the history of the struggle to establish a self-governing republic has always wrestled with or leaned upon the spiritual and metaphysical justification for human liberty. It handles the early to late Providentialists, Christian Hebraists (who saw the republic as a divine mirror of God’s law), the Enlightenment Masons (who saw the republic as a reflection of the “Great Architect’s” rational universe), the esotericism of later figures (who saw America as a plan in a cosmic evolutionary clock) and origins of these views. The purpose of this is to demonstrate how republican, free states have historically justified their existence using cosmic, esoteric, or spiritual frameworks alongside rationalism. It will all feature long-form essays on republican theory and practice, analyses of current events through a republican lens, book reviews, open letters, and cultural features.
- In the republican tradition, the civis (citizen) and the civitas (the commonwealth) are the core units of our analysis. ↩︎
The Minervan Republic 