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by Nathan Coleman
The crisis with Britain had forced Americans to articulate a constitutional vision where the colonies were sovereign political units for all their internal affairs, with the crown exercising sovereign power over external issues. By declaring independence, the crown’s sovereign authority had reverted to the colonies, who, as “Free and Independent States,” had the “full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do.” Although secession from the British Empire meant the states were thirteen distinct sovereigns, most Americans realized their independence would be short lived if they did not corporate. That realization required Americans to solve the constitutional dilemma of how to create a union that would balance their need for corporation while preserving the state sovereignty they claimed had always existed...
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by Bradley J. Birzer
Prior to the defeat of Athens by a joint Spartan-Persian force, the polis served as the center of a citizen’s life. As Socrates and Aristotle each argued, the polis remained the supreme institution, not just higher than the family, but that very thing which enabled the family to exist. Thus, when the polis fell, a crisis of purpose and justice came into being. After all, how could one know his proper place or receive his proper due (justice) if one did not know the ultimate end of human life or the institution to which one must give his loyalty? The desire to belong to something greater than one’s self, however, is simply human, transcending time, place, and space. It’s as natural as our need to breathe. In this sense, Aristotle put it correctly when he noted that man is meant to live in community. To be outside of community (if such a thing is even possible) is to be, as the Philosopher explained, either a beast or a god...
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by Mark David Hall
Anyone interested in an accurate account of the American founding cannot afford to ignore the important influence the Christian faith had on many civic leaders. Consider just a few examples. If the Founders agreed on anything, it was that humans were sinful. To paraphrase Madison, “men are not angels.” Accordingly, they took great care to build a constitutional order that included limited government, the separation of powers, and checks and balances. They understood as well that all humans were created in the image of God. As such, we are capable of rational self-government. This conviction also contributed to putting one of the gravest evils in early America, chattel slavery, on the road to extinction.Finally, and many other examples could be given, their understanding of “liberty” was profoundly influenced by Christian morality...
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by Michael J. Connolly
The danger of majoritarian tyranny hangs over republics. The dilemma of constituting a virtuous republic while also restricting interests, sects, and factions’ use of unchecked political power possessed eighteenth century American constitutionalists. States’ Rights as a means to curb the concentration of power claimed few champions more eloquent than the New Englander Orestes Brownson. Brownson’s affection for his home region helped him align politically with the South Carolinian John C. Calhoun and write voluminously on states’ need to check Federal authority. His love for New England history and culture, what Brownson designated the region’s “unwritten constitution,” energized his pen. Orestes Brownson rejected social contract theory and suggested that written constitutions reflecting the unique identity of historically-developed human communities—shielding their traditions, habits, and way of life—best-protected liberty...
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by Arthur J. Versluis
We have tried the Hamiltonian experiment of centralized government, usury, and gigantism long enough. Surely it is time, somewhere, for the Jeffersonian vision to begin to reappear, showing us anew the course that we must take. Thomas Jefferson recognized what was to happen: “Our country is too large to have all its affairs directed by a single government. Public servants at such a distance, and from under the eye of their constituents, must, from the circumstance of distance, be unable to administer and overlook all the details necessary for the good government of the citizens; and the same circumstance, by rendering detection impossible to their constituents, will invite public agents to corruption, plunder and waste.” The cure for this fatal disease of the polity is the noble tradition of American autonomy, for as Jefferson put it, “The wit of man cannot devise a more solid basis for a free, durable and well administered republic.” It is high time that we begin to heed his wise and enduring advice...
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by Gleaves Whitney
To define the term, ‘liberal conservative,’ I start with the observation that modern man lives with tensions, paradoxes, and contradictions—oppositions that arise from our civilization’s conflicting sources of intellectual and moral authority. In our shorthand way, we call those conflicting sources Christendom, the Enlightenment, and Romanticism. They have a complex and overlapping relationship to one another, something like that of a child to a parent. They are continually clashing, continually generating conflicting ideas and discourse in our public affairs. As a result, the liberal conservative must be discerning. For he believes in freedom as well as in order. He believes in individualism as well as in community. He believes in the equality of all men as well as in hierarchy, natural aristocracy, and excellence. He believes in private enterprise, competition, and the market mechanism as well as in those human, moral, and cultural values that cannot be defined by the competition of interests in the marketplace... [MORE]
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