The 85 essays that comprise The Federalist Papers are in great measure concerned with the principle of the separation of powers — that “the legislative, executive and judiciary departments ought to be separate and distinct,” since the “accumulation of all…
Walter Russell Mead, writing in Foreign Affairs, advocates a return to “Hamiltonian statecraft,” based on the geopolitical approach of Alexander Hamilton, our first Treasury Secretary and President George Washington’s most important adviser. Hamiltonian statecraft, according to Mead, “offers a grand…
The independent judiciary established by our Constitution has inspired the world. Even British law, which developed and preserved constitutional liberties, and whose firm sense of political rights inspired the American Founders, has only in the last two decades undertaken to…
The Constitution and the President In the great debate over the Constitution, the powers of the president were a focal point of controversy. Antifederalists passionately objected to the entire federal system, seeing it as antithetical to republican freedom. The inability…
Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle recently wrote that the best argument made in favor of limiting the size of the stimulus during the Great Recession — part of a larger conversation about austerity — was one of ethos. “We weren’t…
Everyone who has seen the play Hamilton knows that the nation’s capital was moved to the present site in the District of Columbia due to a dinner-table bargain in 1790 between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. Hamilton needed Jefferson’s support in…
A statesman in modern democracies is a politician of one sort or another and is accountable in the end to the body politic he serves. He cannot ignore the will of the people. In this, he is the same as…
It seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or…
It’s not easy being a drama critic for the New York Times because you have so much heavy ideological baggage to carry with you every time you go to the theater. You can’t just take in a play and try…
