If we can begin to understand the sense of federalism as an idea rather than a fixed set of immutable relations, and moreover as an idea that is designed to balance and reconcile the competing claims of competing goods, then our debates over the promise of federalism may take on a new vitality and plausibility… Today’s offering in [...]
Even a Constitution that rational individuals can affirm as a firm protection of their liberty can’t endure without the added support of veneration. The instinctive conservative response is to reject the idea of the living constitution for various and conflicting reasons. One such reason is the conservative recognition that even a free country depends on [...]
The path to the adoption of the Constitution wasn’t smooth. A number of arguments and cautions against the Constitution were offered in the months preceding its adoption. Many of these arguments are chronicled in The Anti-Federalist Papers, a collection of disparate writings of Anti-Federalist authors (many of whom used pen names), edited by scholar Ralph [...]
(This essay is the fourth in a four-part series; the first may be found here, the second here, and the third here.) It is clear that Publius’s deliberative process, with its emphasis upon accommodation, harmony, and consensus, is antithetical to the conflict-oriented majoritarianism of the egalitarians. As a corollary proposition, it is essential to note that [...]
Much has been written in the past century about the state of American constitutionalism and the political culture that serves as its animating force. Some scholars have argued that American constitutionalism has evolved so far from its founding principles that political practice today would be unrecognizable by the eighteenth-century Framers. These critics submit that the [...]
In the days when the Constitution lay under active consideration by the state conventions, The Federalist gained only a limited circulation. The speeches, newspaper articles, and pamphlets of several other Federalists played larger roles in securing the constitution’s final ratification. Friends of the Constitution: Writings of the “Other” Federalists, 1787-1788, eds. Colleen A. Sheehan and [...]
Lacking a genuine, common mind concerning the nature of virtue and the requirements for good reputation, auxiliary precautions like our Constitution’s checks and balances no longer will suffice to protect our constitutional order. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. [...]
Scholarship on the political thought and career of James Madison is still dominated by a prevailing “Hamiltonian” interpretation.[1] Set forth by such prominent scholars as Irving Brant, Martin Diamond, and George Carey, the “Hamiltonian” interpretation views the years surrounding the formation of the Constitution as the most productive years of Madison’s career and argues that [...]
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, by Bernard Bailyn The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, by Gordon S. Wood Bernard Bailyn and Gordon S. Wood are already regarded by professional historians as among the best of their respective generations.[1] Bailyn is credited with having significantly shifted our view of the American Revolution’s origins, and Wood [...]
Two hundred twenty-six years ago this May, the Constitutional Convention was scheduled to open in Philadelphia. While it took eleven more days for a quorum of delegates to assemble, it took those delegates less than four months to answer the question that had brought them together: what can be done to make the Articles of [...]
The Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition by Willmoore Kendall and George Carey (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1995). The Conservative Affirmation by Willmoore Kendall (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1963). John Locke and the Doctrine of Majority-Rule by Willmoore Kendall (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1965). Despite Willmoore Kendall’s (1909-1967) [...]
The one teaching of Willmoore Kendall's toward which all his early thought tended and from which radiated all his later thought was this: America's vindication of the capacity of men for self-government rests upon its devotion to the idea of a virtuous people, under God, determining national policy by the deliberations of a supreme legislature [...]
Abraham Lincoln Harry Jaffa says Jack Kemp and I have been conducting an “uncivil war” over Abraham Lincoln’s character. Well, for my part, I deny it. Kemp called me one of the current “assassins of Lincoln’s character,” which I thought was a little rabid, inasmuch as I had given Lincoln praise as well [...]
Americans, as brothers and descendants of Englishmen, were entitled to the rights inherited from the English through the development of Anglo-Saxon common law and through the several political battles. On the eve of the American Revolution, most American thinkers had embraced the idea of all rights (and, therefore, sovereignty) being inherited.[1] Americans, as brothers and [...]