It doesn’t take much imagination to guess what Thomas Jefferson would think of the U.S. government today, when its supposed “implied” powers are virtually infinite and nobody bothers measuring them against the powers expressly granted. When the federal government claims a new power nowadays, nobody even asks just which clause of the Constitution “implies” it. [...]
According to John C. Calhoun, Thomas Jefferson served as the “Republican Patriarch,” the political thinker who had incorporated the republican understanding of liberty into a theory of federal relationships most conducive to the life of the community and political order. John Caldwell Calhoun inherited the social and political tradition of his South Atlantic world, confirmed [...]
Drinking my morning Mocha from my new Thomas Jefferson coffee mug: “I cannot live without books.” If you also cannot live without books, visit The Imaginative Conservative Bookstore to find books on the American Founding and Conservatism. We hope you will join us in The Imaginative Conservative community. The Imaginative Conservative is an on-line journal for those who seek the True, the Good [...]
On every question of construction carry ourselves back to the time when the constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed. -Thomas Jefferson to William Johnson [...]
I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution. I would be willing to depend on that alone for the reduction of the administration of our government to the genuine principles of its Constitution; I mean an additional article, taking from the federal government the power of borrowing. — Jefferson to John [...]
Monticello Library Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital. Pick up literary ‘capital’ for [...]
”We are ruined, Sir, if we do not over rule the principles that ‘the more we owe, the more prosperous we shall be,’ ‘that a public debt furnishes the means of enterprise,” that if ours should be once paid off, we should incur another by any means however extravagant.”– to James Monroe, 1791 For more [...]
"A strong body makes the mind strong. As to the species of exercise, I advise the gun. While this gives a moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprise, and independence to the mind. Games played with the ball, and others of that nature, are too violent for the body, and stamp no character [...]
As a movement of thought, the resurgent conservatism of twentieth century America cannot achieve maturity without a properly worked out historical self-image—a documented and convincing picture of what traditions, tendencies, and movements it is heir to. In its earliest stages the conservative resurgence has conceived of itself largely as an extension of the European Burkean [...]
Kirk wrote the following piece while an undergraduate at Michigan State College. His second published academic article, he considered it his first foray into political analysis. As with much of what Kirk wrote, though, it is really a literary analysis of several figures during the New Deal who claimed the mantle of Jeffersonianism. Kirk argued [...]
As some renditions of American history would have it, the conservative pedigree in the United States begins with, or at the very least includes, Alexander Hamilton and his followers. In fact, the typical lineages are given thus: Federalist-Whig-Republican on the one hand and Jeffersonian-Jacksonian-Populist-New Deal on the other. This breakdown of the American political tradition [...]
This was the object of the Declaration of Independence. Not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which have never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, [...]
Thomas Jefferson had the most capacious mind and, until his later years, the most optimistic temperament of any of the Founders. Thomas Jefferson’s birthday went virtually unnoticed earlier this year (note: this essay was written in 1993—editor), the 250th anniversary of his birth. Nothing is more indicative of how badly we Americans have squandered our moral [...]
“I place economy among the first and most important virtues and public debt as the greatest dangers to be feared … We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our choice between economy and liberty or profusion and servitude … The same prudence which in private life would forbid [...]