I actually learned something.

I was reading the sixth Morgenthau Lecture given by one Dr. Jacques Barzun today.
The speech, entitled "Is Democratic Theory for Export?", is quite good. Compelling, insightful, etc., etc.

What I actually liked about the speech is that I could be pretentious about having understood it.

What are these missionaries to preach? Where do we find
the parallel to the writings of Marx and Lenin, and what do those
writings tell?
Different persons would give different answers, which is a weakness
to begin with. Some would point to the Declaration of Independence
and the federal Constitution; others to Rousseau, Edmund Burke,
Thomas Paine. Then there is Tocqueville’s Democracy in America in
two volumes and a wonderful little book by Walter Bagehot on the
English Constitution, not to mention The Federalist papers and many
eloquent pages from John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham
Lincoln. Taken loosely together, those writings would be regarded by many as making up the theory of democracy.

Instead of caring about the point of the article, I found myself checking off which texts I knew.
To make a long story short - most of them.
Moral of said story - a liberal arts/social science degree is good for something. Feeling smart enough to read (though not necessarily understand or care about) texts by other social scientists/liberal artists.

Now if we could only figure out what democratic theory is so that we could export it.