Guttman, Allen. "Political Ideals and the Military Ethic." American Scholar 34:2 (Spring 1965): 221-237.

“From the 1770s to the 1960s, from the Committee of Correspondence to S.N.C.C., American political rhetoric has remained remarkably constant. Liberty and equality. Although each generation of reformers discovers in anger that rhetoric is not the only form of reality and that political ideals are at best imperfectly institutionalized, the liberal tradition (of which Locke is fons if not origo) has dominated American political thought and, to a much lesser degree, political behavior. … Liberalism, like an only child, has its inadequacies. Among them is its inability to understand the uses of power in general and of military power in particular. More particularly still, liberalism has failed to comprehend the military ethic.”

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