Statesmanship for Political Economy in the National Interest
Only the nation, outlasting the life of individuals and private companies now present, is the proper vehicle for conserving the general welfare.
A German Tocqueville? The Unrecognized Importance of Francis Lieber’s Letters to a Gentleman in Germany, or The Stranger in America
Tocqueville commented on the American characteristics of equality, democracy, individualism, restlessness, and enterprise, but he was not the first foreigner to do so.
The Mechanics of Freedom
The Venetian reality was one of conflict tamed and overcome through a combination of cultural pride and political mechanisms that built on without crushing local loyalties.
“The Same Procedure as Every Year”: U.S. Counterterrorism Policy since 9/11
Even though Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump could not be more different, there has been a remarkable continuity in their approaches.
American Statesmanship: Contrasting Views of Leadership
Washington's greatness stemmed from his being grounded in historical experience, his philosophical realism, and his refusal to conflate the things of God and the things of Caesar.
The Rise of the Administrative State and Decline of Constitutional Morality
What is meant by ‘the rule of law,’ and why is it of value?
Constitutional Morality and the Emerging Social Imaginary of the Information Revolution
Foundational commitments, from the place of the human to the expectations of social interaction to the nature of law, all are being transformed in a short period of revolutionary change.
Legal Conservatism and the Progressive Blame Game
It would have been helpful if Frohnen and Carey had addressed why we have a political consensus in favor of the constitutional disorder they identify.
Reflections on Judicial Duty
The Supreme Court has failed to check the reach of the legislative and executive branches, but I respectfully disagree that it has exceeded its judicial power.
A Response to Critics
Our book is less concerned with interpretive theory than with the grounds of constitutionalism.
The Variety of Historical Minds
Decades past the peak of New Humanism’s renown, this fine volume ably demonstrates that the movement still has much of crucial value to teach us.
Liberal Dystopia
Deneen explicitly links the Framers to the Progressives of the early twentieth century, implying that the two projects were the same and that the Progressives would have met with the Framers’ approval.
Why Democracy Needs Aristocracy
Democracies can succeed, but only if they recognize and cultivate a humane leadership class.
The Challenge Confronting Conservatives: Sustaining a Republic of Hustlers
The hustling and corruption which I once celebrated as a sort of shady virtue that helped explain America’s spectacular growth now appear to me as a vice and, at its worst, a sin whose wages are death.
Russell Kirk: A Centennial Symposium – Reflections on Russell Kirk
Kirk's conservatism was rooted in culture and community, in contrast to the individualism of libertarianism and the national greatness model of neoconservatism.
The Chartered Rights of Americans: A Kirkian Case for the Incorporation of First Amendment Rights
Incorporation is a fact of modern jurisprudence; it is now interwoven into Supreme Court case history, having produced nearly a century of judicial precedents. A conservative cannot be limited to lamenting changes.
Extremism, The American Founding, and Russell Kirk’s The Roots of American Order
America’s political culture does indeed have deep roots in premodernity.
The Concept of Statesmanship in John Marshall’s Life of George Washington
Citizens pine for statesmanship to rescue them from (often self-imposed) political difficulties, but frequently struggle with defining the characteristics of such leadership.
Calvin Coolidge: Classical Statesman
According to the modern view, the task of the politician is not to minister—it is to administer. Can another vision be restored?
Unconstitutional Wars from Truman Forward
From President Truman’s initiation of war against North Korea in June 1950, presidents have exceeded constitutional and statutory authority in exercising the war power.
The Unraveling of American Constitutionalism: From Customary Law to Permanent Innovation
Because constitutional rights were synonymous with the restraints on government embodied in customary law, the greatest threat to English liberties were governmental innovations that undermined centuries-old customs.
Saving Natural Rights from Subjectivism
Is it possible that the modern focus on the subject is not a radical break with classical natural Right, but rather the fruition of its latent promise?
Populism Against Progress
Populism, in spite of its possible authoritarian colorations, may be the only force that can meaningfully confront this emergent dystopia.
Power Without Limits: The Allure of Political Idealism and the Crumbling of American Constitutionalism
For the framers of the U.S. Constitution no task seemed more important than to limit and tame power.
Deliberative No Longer: The Eclipse of the Intended Role of the U.S. Senate
The dysfunction stems, in large part, from the fact that the Senate no longer performs one of the important functions for which the Framers created it.
Economics and Morality: Friedrich von Hayek and the Common Good
It is possible, then, to argue that Hayek’s basic formulas are defective in that they try to disconnect social policies from a moral order that transcends individual self-interest narrowly understood.
Principled Leadership in the Age of Opportunism: An Australian Perspective
Though Bernardi cites authorities as disparate as Sam Francis and Dinesh D’Souza, the author of 'The Conservative Revolution' is neither a paleoconservative nor a neoconservative.
Descartes’s Paradoxical Politics
Politics for Descartes is not a part of philosophy proper.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Romantic Roots of Modern Democracy
Rousseau’s political ideas were at once idealistic, “mystical,” and collectivist.
Religion and the Constitution
This book provides a good example of the distortion of reality, not to mention mind-torturing confusion, that occurs when political documents are viewed through sectarian glasses.
How Desperate Should We Be?
Whatever one might think in theory, in practice acting morally is not something like following a blueprint. Guessing and taking risks are often necessary.
Decision Procedures, Moral Philosophy, and Despair: The Response of Virtue Ethics and the Connoisseur
The problem is that Ryn, like others who have become desperate, must assume that those who do not read the situation in the same pessimistic light are blinded by some intellectual or moral flaw.
Democratizing the Constitution: The Failure of the Seventeenth Amendment
More than twenty years earlier as a Nebraska congressman, "The Great Commoner" had joined the struggle to free the Senate from the control of corrupt state legislatures, and despite three failed campaigns for the presidency, he never wavered in his determination to make the Senate a popularly elected body.
God and the Constitution
Kramnick and Moore accept that anyone who finds anything positive to say about Christian teaching is a Christian. The architect of the “Jefferson Bible” has as much claim to speak for Christianity as anyone else.
Innovative Conservation: An Unideological Interpretation of the Constitution
The Constitution cannot survive unless its conservative-liberal synthesis is respected and celebrated by all parties.
The ‘Wayward Sisters’ and Constitutional Interpretation
The story of the states that tarried in ratifying the Constitution helps us put an appropriate emphasis where the framers intended: on the State Conventions.
Musings on Postmodern Politics
Postmoderns believe that life and politics, both, can be reduced to "problems" and "solutions." They are not only "problem solvers" but "problem finders."
Waiting for the European Community
Sides for or against the new order were taken for millenarian and not simply economic reasons.
Sic Est in Republica: Utopian Ideology and the Misreading of Thomas More
Utopia provides the earliest antidote to utopian ideology, which it subtly ridicules by the ironic deployment of stylistic variation.
‘The Living Embodiment of the Nation’
History, to most of the authors of the Constitution, was more valuable than political theory because it was more real; as Bolingbroke put it, history was philosophy teaching by example.
Leo Strauss, Willmoore Kendall, and the Meaning of Conservatism
What is conservatism? Is it simply an older version of liberalism? Which traditions do conservatives “conserve” in an age of modern change? Is conservatism populist or elitist, democratic or aristocratic?
Religion and American Liberty
Americans fulfilled the promise of their Revolution by establishing the Constitution, its written form intended to enshrine the moral values held by the people based on their religion.
Ludwig von Mises and The Ethical Imperative
In light of the actual relationship between means and ends, one needs to question the very premise of Mises’ reasoning.
Culture and Politics: The American Whig Review, 1845-1852
For Whigs, probably more than Democrats, literature and political rhetoric represented similar, closely related instructional devices for both individual and collective improvement. Whig literature was rarely ever for “idle” entertainment only and was almost always didactic.
History’s Verdict Still in the Making
The most controversial president of the twentieth century has been Richard Nixon, but it is too soon to know what history’s verdict on him will be.
Irving Babbitt on Lincoln and Unionism
Babbitt holds up what he calls “our great unionist tradition” as the crucial “offsetting influence” to all the temptations to which democracies are particularly vulnerable.
Tradition, Principle, and the Rule of Law: A Response to Claes Ryn
Ryn asks the right questions but errs in his endorsement of Machiavelli. Machiavelli is not a tradition-minded "realist" but a political ideologue and a moral revolutionary.
The Problem of Lincoln in Babbitt’s Thought
Babbitt claimed to be rescuing Lincoln from the sentimentalists of his day; he claimed that he knew the “real Lincoln.”
A Post-Liberal Thinker
Gray’s essential argument is for a regrounding of human social experience in history and nature. If we want to live in a society that is even minimally civilized, there is simply no room for growth without end and ever-more-expansive rights doctrines.
Political Morality Reconsidered: A Rejoinder
The cries of righteous indignation that I can hear show the force of ingrained habit. How could universality possibly express itself in particularity? This is surely “relativism,” “solipsism,” “historicism,” “nihilism” “situationism”! This reaction points to the need for rethinking not just morality but epistemology.
The Heritage of Lincoln
Like Gamble and Babbitt himself, I think that the Progressives distorted the historical Lincoln. In my view, however, a careful study of the words and deeds of Lincoln reconfirms Lincoln’s moral and intellectual stature.
The Origin of Modern Society
Man is a creature of desires, and since these desires are the products of social and economic motives, good government is situated at the crossroads of individual desires. The focus of politics shifts from moral authority to the social contract.
An Ideal Vital Center?
Never does Green allow an early American leader to escape his carping scrutiny. He insists that George Washington was “an unmitigated snob whose personal integrity was protected by his social status at the top of the heap.”
The Authoritarian Secularism of John Stuart Mill
As Mill proceeds in On Liberty, he seems to take away a good deal of what he “gives” at the beginning.
Republican Virtue and America
Virtue is not goodness, but the means toward goodness. This is evident as soon as we ask, “Courage for what?” Understood apart from moral relations virtue seems little more than vainglory, a form of self-flattery, hence self-interest.
Edmund Burke: The Perennial Political Philosopher
Professor Stanlis’ book is an excellent work of historical and interpretive scholarship, but it may place too much emphasis on Burke’s reliance on the natural law tradition.
Radical Son: The Apprenticeship of John Stuart Mill
Few parents raise their children from infancy to assume a specific occupation or role in life. Fewer still raise them to be radical reformers. This, however, is precisely what James Mill did with his first-born child, John Stuart Mill.
Democratic Chimeras And Unceasing Discord
It may be an entirely modern dream that erotic politics is possible without a unity that excludes others.
The Return of John C. Calhoun
If his work is treated at all, it is considered part of a sectional defense. Calhoun was concerned, however, with the most fundamental of political issues—the nature of society, the character of the human condition, and the structure of government.
Thomas More: Virtuous Statesman
Of the statesman's charge, More in Utopia says: "What you cannot turn to the good, you must at least make as little bad as you can."
Richard Rorty’s Postmodern Case for Liberal Democracy: A Critique
While Rorty makes a sound move in attempting to defend democracy on a non-foundational basis, he goes too far in the Sophists’ direction.
Two Liberalisms: The Contrasting Visions of Hobbes and Locke
Neither Hobbes nor Locke said much about the transmutations of human nature in the past because they were more concerned about how it might be transformed in the future.
Charles Austin Beard: Liberal Foe of American Internationalism
Lionized in his early career by much of the historical establishment, Beard fell out of favor with his fellow liberal and progressive academics because of his opposition to the nation’s foreign policy in the years prior to World War II.
A Flawed Defense of the South
Charles Adams, a libertarian and prominent historian of taxation, seeks to demolish the “Northern interpretation” of the war, which holds that the conflict was a great moral crusade to preserve democracy.
Unrestraint Begets Calamity: The American Whig Review, 1845-1852
The Whig party had presupposed acceptance of the basic character of the country as it was. They sought redemption only through peaceful means and through the established constitutional edifice.
The Spirit of American Constitutionalism: John Dickinson’s Fabius Letters
Though a sine qua non for good government, according to Fabius, a strong confederation alone is insufficient to ensure that government will live up to its “sacred trust.”
The Image of an Executioner: Princes and Decapitations in John of Salisbury’s Policraticus
This "most readable" of medieval authors was fascinated by execution. Why?
Which Liberalism? Which Soul?
It may be possible to make Walsh’s hermeneutic inclusiveness work, but there is no evidence it does, and certainly not on the basis of his lavishing of liberal certificates upon a multitude of dead and living thinkers.
Power Is Coercion: A Response to Claes Ryn
Professor Ryn ascribes too much philosophical and aesthetic baggage to those who simply craved material security and were not equipped to think about the larger questions.
A Broader, Subtler View of Power
How weak are my putatively weakest points? What about the relevance of “beautiful language,” or female beauty? Are they quite so extraneous to a discussion of political power as Gottfried assumes?
Power Play
A weakness of traditional Western political thought has been a tendency to disparage a desire for power. Following Plato, many…
Debt and Sovereignty: The Lost Lessons
The national debt is roughly 100 percent of our gross national product, and the people who lend to the federal government are beginning to worry that they will not get their money back. Yet without continuous borrowing, the nation cannot possibly sustain its accustomed lifestyle. Something has got to give.
More than ‘Parchment Barriers’: The Ethical Center of American Constitutionalism
Much has been written in the past century about the state of American constitutionalism and the political culture that serves…
Lawless America: What Happened to the Rule of Law
Though it has been obvious to discerning observers for a considerable period that the United States is moving at an…
Liberty’s Aristocratic Roots And Modern Democracy
Depending on the meanings of the terms involved, liberty and liberalism can be incompatible with democracy and with each other.
“The Backside of the Universe”: McDougall’s Throes of Democracy
Perhaps its unsparing analysis of the psychology of utopian reformers still strikes a little too close to home for it to make its way onto reading lists at most schools and colleges.
Tradition, Habit, and Social Interaction: A Response to Mark Bevir
I wish to take issue with Bevir’s treatment of tradition precisely because it is so utilitarian. It reduces a social reality to an amorphous material with no meaning or purpose of its own.
On Practices
Practices are concrete social realities, but they are not natural kinds. Thus, we have to allow, as I do but Frohnen does not, that in a sense we construct or individuate particular practices to suit our purposes.
Marshall vs. Jefferson Then and Now: How the Intellectual and Political Struggle Over the Constitution Resonates Today
Clear and irreconcilable differences in the political and constitutional philosophies of Jefferson and Marshall sparked heated debate over such monumental issues as the use of judicial review
over acts of Congress and the development of the doctrine of “implied powers.”
Sources of American Republicanism: Ancient Models in the U.S. Capitol
If America seeks a future inspired by the virtues of its past, then it must derive inspiration not merely from the founders but also from the Hebraic and Roman Republics.
Conservative Pragmatism, Pragmatic Conservatism
A claim that Burke rejects or dismisses transcendent truths and is insincere or reluctant when he makes Natural Law-type arguments really demands considerable engagement with the literature.
From Democracy to Hyperdemocracy
I soon began to wonder how this cheapening of the word "democracy" might be linked to the cheapening of the underlying concept
Seyla Benhabib, Wendell Berry, and the Question of Migrant and Refugee Rights
It is upon small-scale values and practices—not the abstractions of cosmopolitanism or “global thinking”—that the literal survival of the world depends.
A Flawed Book on ‘The Founders’
Those on the philosophical right habitually appeal to “the Founders” without ever having read them.
Imperialism Destroys the Constitutional Republic
What is at issue is the meaning of greatness. Our first president chose a modest path, the greatness of Cicero and Cato.
Political Theology and the Theology of Politics: Carl Schmitt and Medieval Christian Political Thought
The Medieval understanding of theology and politics, rooted in Exodus, exceeds the limiting categories Carl Schmitt provides.
Unorthodox Reflections of An Elder Statesman
Kennan’s gifted use of the English language makes manifest the great advantages of the historical mind: clarity, elegance, and concreteness.
The First Amendment and Progress
Even if the Founders had been lucidly clear about the moral and philosophical foundations of the First Amendment, it is in a sense futile to argue from their authority.