The Problem With Anne Hutchinson
Anne Hutchinson bewitches most college students. When analyzing her trial transcripts, with her clever and sarcastic repartee with Massachusetts Bay Governor John Winthrop and the Puritan ministers,…
Why Yankees Won’t (and Can’t) Leave the South Alone
Southerners rarely while away their leisure hours by contemplating Yankees, for there is no point in thinking of unpleasant things if one is not obliged to do…
Barrett Wendell and New England Orderly Idealism
Long after Barrett Wendell’s death, an elderly George Santayana remembered his former Harvard colleague fondly. “We were on the same side of the barricade.” Both he and…
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 as its animating force. Some scholars have…
The Challenge of American Patriotism in the 21st Century
If there is one distinctly modern pathology which needs more attention from conservatives no less than liberals, that pathology is hypermobility, rootlessness, what the late philosopher Roger…
This is Not Who We Are
That is Not Who We Are! Populism and Peoplehood. Roger M. Smith. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020. In This is Not Who We Are, Smith…
What We Must Demand For Our Democracy to Survive
What We Must Demand For Our Democracy to Survive. What Commitments Should Presidential Candidates Make in the Writings Prior to the 2020 Election. Adam Strum and Stephen…
What Americans Today Can Learn from the Russian Past: Lessons from Turgenev and Dostoevsky for American Hillbillies
National identity has been a preoccupation in the tradition of Russian political thought since Peter the Great (reigned 1682–1725), who led a cultural revolution in Russia that…
John Locke and Contemporary American Resistance Movements
Introduction This piece is written as a response to the use of John Locke’s political thought to justify recent resistance movements in the United States, with some…
John Courtney Murray and the American Civic Psyche
We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition. John Courtney Murray, S.J. London: Sheed & Ward, 2005. Reading John Courtney Murray’s famous work, We…
The Demise of Congressional Deliberation: Willmoore Kendall
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…
“Poison Under Its Wings”: The Constitution and Its Defects
The beginning of the American political order goes much further back than the Philadelphia Convention of 1787. Political scientists and political theorists are understandably fixated on the…
The Rhetoric of Alexander Hamilton
The political rhetoric of the Founders of the American Republic has received scant attention from scholars. The relative neglect is understandable. On the one hand, the very…
The Role of the “Middle Delegates” at the Constitutional Convention
Historians of the Constitutional Convention have agreed that there were divisions among the delegates, but have disagreed as to what those divisions were and what underlays them.…
Original Unintentions: The Franchise and the Constitution
The controversy over originalism-the question whether judges, in interpreting the Constitution, should be guided by the original intentions of the Framers or by some other standard-has generated…