The political climate of pre-revolutionary America was based on the worldview of anti-Walpole politicians in Britain. Simultaneously, although formal colonial executive power was in fact stronger than in the British system, the absence of monarchical-aristocratic features (patronage or ‘influence’) reduced the government’s power. Thus the government paradoxically was notionally stronger but actually weaker; royalists meanwhile worried of the democratic (populist) elements threatening the crown and ‘mixed’ constitution. Therefore the situation was latently revolutionary. Overlong sentences but clearly organized and persuasive.
United States
On corruption at the core of American government
America’s unresolved tension between Hamiltonian pursuit of political development and Madisonian balance of interests is corruption: ‘maldistribution of federal resources to vested interests’. Hamilton, seeking to address the young country’s evident political needs, sought to tap economic resources by appealing to elite self-interest. Madison wrote (in Federalist 10?) that ‘a power independent of the society may as well espouse the unjust views of the major, as the rightful interests of the minor party, and may possibly be turned against both parties’. Madison thought of government as a referee among domestic citizenry, Hamilton as a coach facing rival nations.
America is Hamiltonian, in part because Madison and Jefferson never development an alternate dynamic. The trouble is politics remains Madisonian: national powers are inherently weak, and parochial interests must be mollified. To compound, economic ends have been supplemented by sociopolitical goals (e.g., environmentalism, egalitarianism) which add another layer of faction.
14. Shlaes, Coolidge (28 Jul 2015)
A biography of the 30th American president, a famously taciturn New Englander. Mainly complete in its narrative – there are strands here are there which are left loose, such as an apparent estrangement from wife Grace during the latter years of his presidency or controversy regarding the removal of the president of his alma mater, Amherst — the book sufficiently describes why Coolidge acted as he did but lacks details as to how. As such, it’s difficult to decide what are his primary leadership qualities. Also filled with extraneous anecdotes, this is an average work.
21. Bloom, Closing of the American Mind (24 Nov 2015)
Fulminates against the American university’s abandonment of liberal arts education in favor of the postmodern left’s historicism and nihilism. The opening section blasts the contemporary student, circa 1985, and is forgettable. The meat of the book more usefully traces the passage from Weber and Nietzsche to Heidegger and thence, severely corrupted, to the postwar American faculty. The author contrasts classical understandings of the self, truth, and suchlike concepts with the studiously value-free conceptions of the moderns and postmoderns. The final section demonstrates how the Enlightenment university, established to safeguard academic freedom, has been transformed into a radically totalitarian institution. Erudite and interesting, if occasionally shrill.
5. Sandoz (ed.), Roots of Liberty (26 March 2022)
A series of essays exploring shifting interpretation of England’s ‘ancient constitution’ and Magna Carta, sweeping from Fortescue to Augustan England and colonial America, addressing the charter as emblematic of Saxon culture, original intent, rule of law and government by consent, and the source of executive power. Effectively premised on JGA Pocock’s
- Ancient Constitution and Feudal Laws
, the contributors agree one’s views on such topics as the rights of subjects (e.g., trial by jury of peers) and limits of authority are relevant not only to jurisprudence but also the political conditions of liberty. Pocock had observed (among other things) that it was judicial process, rather than black-letter law, which was immemorial. Sandoz writes Fortescue and the common law grounded Coke’s opposition to the monarch. Holt observes Magna Charta was both a grant of liberties and a legislative act. Brooks writes, somewhat against the grain, that 16th-century lawyers were little concerned with constitutional theory and more interested in humanist (neoclassical) law. Christianson, sketching the skirmishing between early Stuarts (i.e., James I’s absolutism) and the Parliamentary opposition (Selden’s mixed monarchy, Hedley’s constitutional monarchy grounded in common law) which came to blows in the Five Knights case and provision of supply, essentially pitted rival views of the ancient constitution rather than absolutism vs constitutional government. Reid: 17th- and 18th-century lawyers thought the ancient constitution gave Parliament and common-law courts standing against arbitrary monarchy (which resonated with American revolutionaries). The common laws which had survived were the best evidence of English liberty. (Later, Burke held prescription the most solid of the titles to property, custom being the proof point of time time.) The merit of ancient constitution was security against government caprice – in an unwritten charter, no element was more essential to thwarting slavery to government. Reid adds: in this era, forensic historical work deployed the ancient constitution for proof of authority, establishment of consent, and bulwark against new government claims; in the latter century, the British chose government by consent (i.e., king in parliament) whereas the Americans settled on rule by law (following Coke, not a sovereign granting rights but a people delimiting executive power). The Saxon constitution represented liberty; the Norman charter arbitrary power; the Americans converted the dynamic to the notion of original intent. He asks why English lawyers, alone in Europe, sought to formalize understanding of rule of law – a matter now relevant to American originalists (vs progressivism) and Brexiteers (vs European Unionism).
8. Morgan, Birth of the Republic, 1763-89 (27 Apr 2016)
Surveys the Revolutionary War era, demonstrating America’s founding is a product of shared search for principles of civic equality and justice. As with Burkean or Whig historians, Morgan argues for a revolution not made but preserved; this effort covers the details of articulating protest, organizing around the colonies’ common political views, and ultimately framing the American Constitution. The work’s eloquence lies in persuasively tying emergent principles to facts on the ground. A 21st-century analysis would hit harder at the moral failure to dispose of slavery — but then most latter-day treatments pettifog in ways which Morgan surmounts. Interestingly, the author contends the Articles of Confederation were not quite as dire as commonly held, and ties the Bill of Rights to the Constitution’s adoption by the states as a quid pro quo.
9. Paulsen and Paulsen, The Constitution (18 May 2016)
Illustrates vital political concepts and shortcomings in the American constitution, before going on to narrate five distinct periods of jurisprudence: to 1860, postbellum, to World War II, to 1960, and the current activist era. The Constitution does not establish judicial supremacy but the document’s supremacy: it is intended to surmount the clash of opinions. The authors view the document as broadly successful, save for the stunning failure of allowing slavery, because it has tended to move toward justice rather political fashion. But the justices themselves have often stood in the way of progress for long periods of time, and continue to legislate from the bench. The heroes in fact are Lincoln, Frederick Douglas, and others who have fought for the Constitution’s preservation and the revision of its application.
16. Himmelfarb, Roads to Modernity (23 Oct 2016)
British thinkers following in the footsteps of Locke and Hume — Berkeley, Hutcheson, Gibbon, Smith joined by Burke and Wesley — were the Enlightenment’s first and foremost cohort, seeking to elaborate social compassion, benevolence, and sympathy. Where the French philosophes concentrated on the ‘ideology of reason’, born of universally applying the systems of Newton and Descartes to society’s structure and pursuits, and the American Founding Fathers on equitable political liberty, the British sought new precepts for a gentler, more virtuous society. These moral philosophers ‘posited a moral sentiment in man as the basis of the social virtues’. Himmelfarb places a major emphasis on Methodism (as an offshoot of the Anglican Church) and Dissent. Burke’s role was to take the British approach further, ‘by making the “sentiments, manners, and moral opinions” of men the basis of society itself, and, ultimately, of the polity as well’.
1. Beer, To Make a Nation (7 Jan 2017)
The origin of American federalism lays in the English Commonwealth, specifically the work of John Milton and James Harrington. The latter’s
- Oceana
most completely broke from the hierarchic, corporate views embodied in Thomas Aquinas and carried on up through the aristocratic Edmund Burke (the work’s antihero). Colonial- and Revolutionary-era Americans faced the task of justifying an expansive republic governed by popular sovereignty, in contradistinction to the classical small republic (as advocated by Montesquieu) or parliamentary sovereignty. Here James Madison and then James Wilson come to the fore, the former for overturning the prejudice against small states by asserting conflict rationally resolved prevents tyranny of the majority, and the later (the unexpected hero) for explaining how the people would come to love their federal government. Ben Franklin also is to be admired; Alexander Hamilton is slighted. The work is particularly strong in showing how the people are simultaneously to be in control of and benefit from the administration of government; but there is ever the hint of viewing the Constitution as a ‘living’ document, which would seem to unsettle all of its theoretical underpinnings and equipoise.
3. Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay (20 Feb 2017)
Examines the expansion of democratic government since the French Revolutions and evaluates reasons for its decay. Building on
-
Origins of Political Order
, Fukuyama shows how the sequencing of a strong (capable) state machinery, rule of law, and accountability influence the course of progress toward democracy and also national history, contrasting the US, an earlier adopter of manhood suffrage without developed machinery, Italy (machinery suffused with ‘partrimonialism’), and Germany (lack of accountability). Although Britain extended the franchise relatively late, its strong rule of law and accountability gave it a more credible democratic government than clientelistic America, which conquered the problem only with the rise of Progressivism, heralded by Pinchot’s Forest Service(!). After reviewing the influence of geography and economics (e.g., natural resources), the author turns to democratic governance in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Fukuyama remains an advocate of Asia’s strong state model, even though few countries have reached full democracy. Then comes corruption in democracies, and recidivism. The final chapters consider the possibilities of America’s surmounting its rule-bound bureaucracy and ‘repatrimonialism’. Because he contends that ideas are products of events, Fukuyama continues to overlook ancient Greece, even though America’s founding fathers staked much of their thinking on classical political thought. Another thorough work, evidencing the same teleological shortcomings.