Virtue scores
Review
SECTION ONE American history contains a story most textbooks skip: the persistent, often dangerous efforts of ordinary people to push back against concentrated power. Tad Stoermer's A Resistance History of the United States gathers those episodes — from colonial dissent to labor organizing to civil disobedience — and reads them as a continuous thread rather than isolated incidents. The argument is that resistance is not an aberration in the American story but one of its structural features, running alongside and against the official narrative of institutions and legislation. Stoermer writes for readers who suspect that the history they learned was curated, and who want the fuller picture: who resisted, at what cost, and what it produced. The book is suited to students of American history, civic educators, and anyone who works with communities navigating questions of authority and conscience. It does not promise an ideological manifesto; it promises specificity — moments, people, stakes. SECTION TWO - **Created**: The book's deepest anthropological assumption is that persons possess a dignity that no political arrangement can finally extinguish. Every act of resistance it records is, at its root, a refusal to be reduced to a subject of power alone. This maps onto the CCMMP's Created premise that the human person, made in the image of God, carries a worth prior to any social contract. - **Fallen**: The recurring antagonist in Stoermer's history is what the CCMMP identifies as one of the most consistent expressions of the disordered will at a structural level: the coercive appropriation of another person's agency. The book documents how power concentrates, corrupts, and then defends its concentration — a pattern Aquinas treats under the heading of injustice as the privation of what is owed. - **Redeemed**: The Redeemed arc here is civic rather than explicitly spiritual, but it is real. The book shows people recovering voice, agency, and dignity through concerted action — a partial but genuine image of restoration. For the Catholic reader, these episodes can be read as instances of what Aquinas calls vindication: the measured, purposive correction of injustice, distinct from mere revenge. - **Prudence (memory)**: Stoermer is fundamentally doing the work of historical memory — retrieving what was lost or suppressed. Aquinas identifies memory as an integral part of prudence precisely because right action in the present depends on accurate retrieval of the past. A book that restores historical episodes to view is, in this sense, an exercise in one of the cardinal virtue's most neglected functions. - **Justice (civic)**: The episodes Stoermer selects train the reader in political prudence by providing the kind of concrete historical particulars — names, dates, consequences — that abstract accounts of justice cannot supply. Practical wisdom, for Aquinas, is formed by cases, not only by principles. SECTION THREE The most direct conversation partner is Murray Rothbard[^1], whose *Conceived in Liberty* opens with the claim that American history turns on 'the great conflict which is eternally waged between Liberty and Power.' Rothbard[^2] argues, from a libertarian standpoint, that liberty — understood as consensual, voluntary interaction grounded in property rights — is 'a moral good responsible for all human flourishing,' while power, centered in the coercive state, is a moral evil. Stoermer's resistance history proceeds from a structurally similar intuition, though almost certainly from a different political tradition; the two books complement each other precisely because they converge on the Liberty-Power tension from opposite ends of the political spectrum, which itself invites the Catholic reader to ask what a natural-law account of just authority — one that neither collapses into libertarianism nor into statism — would add to both. Karl Popper[^3], in *The Open Society and Its Enemies*, supplies a third angle: his insistence that 'resistance, once democracy has been attained, to any attack against the democratic constitution' is not only permissible but obligatory sharpens the question Stoermer's book leaves implicit — namely, what conditions make resistance just, and what conditions make it merely reactive. ## References 1. Rothbard, Murray (n.d.). *Conceived in Liberty I-IV*. Preface. — 'the great conflict which is eternally waged between Liberty and Power' 2. Rothbard, Murray (n.d.). *Conceived in Liberty V*. Introduction. — 'Liberty, or consensual agreements between individuals regarding their private property rights, is a moral good responsible for all human flourishing' 3. Popper, Karl (n.d.). *The Open Society and Its Enemies*. 'The Rise of Oracular Philosophy.' — 'the resistance, once democracy has been attained, to any attack against the democratic constitution'
✓ Strengths
- ✓The book takes historical memory seriously as a moral act — recovering suppressed or marginalized episodes in American history trains the reader in what Aquinas calls the integral part of prudence he terms 'memory,' the capacity to draw on the past as a guide to just action in the present.
- ✓By centering ordinary people who challenged concentrations of power, the book implicitly affirms the dignity of the human person apart from state recognition — a premise the CCMMP grounds in the imago Dei and in Maritain's distinction between the person and the individual.
- ✓The tension between resistance and power that Stoermer traces across American history maps directly onto the CCMMP's Fallen premise: coercive power is one of the clearest structural expressions of the disordered will, and naming it historically is a first step toward moral clarity.
- ✓The book's orientation toward justice-as-correction — not mere grievance but the measured redress of wrong — aligns with the Thomistic account of vindication (iustitia vindicativa) as a legitimate exercise of the virtue of justice.
- ✓For readers in civic or pastoral leadership, the historical episodes function as case studies in political prudence, supplying the kind of concrete particulars that Aquinas argues are indispensable to the formation of practical wisdom.
⚠ Considerations
- ⚠The book's framing of 'resistance' may not consistently distinguish legitimate opposition to unjust authority from a generalized suspicion of all institutional order; Catholic social teaching holds that lawful authority carries a real moral claim, and readers should engage the text with that distinction in mind.
- ⚠Without an explicit anthropological or transcendent grounding, the book's moral framework risks treating justice as purely procedural or political rather than rooted in the nature of the person — a gap the reader will need to supply.
- ⚠The description offers no indication of how the author weighs the moral ambiguities within resistance movements themselves; a Catholic reader will want to bring that evaluative layer to the text independently.