We need to find a way forward together. By we I mean Americans, all Americans in our splendid and difficult diversity. We need new ideas, including the kinds of ideas that are being put forward on these pages. But we are no longer in the eighteenth century, when a small group of propertied white men can provide the ideas, doctrines, and laws to guide the nation…
Read MoreWalter McDougall is America’s greatest living historian. His The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (1985) earned him the Pulitzer Prize. His Promised Land, Crusader State (1997) summarized American foreign policy from the founding to our own time while explaining twentieth-century statesmen’s radical departures from their predecessors. In Freedom Just around the Corner: A New American History, 1585–1828 (2004) and…
Read MoreJohn Stuart Mill had the worst personal life of any libertarian philosopher, a competitive category for bad personal lives. Marriage in particular has a record of making libertarian philosophers behave discreditably—that is, in a way that brings discredit not just on their character but on their ideas. Bertrand Russell famously divorced the first of his four wives after a bicycle trip: “suddenly, as I was…
Read MoreThe conservative movement is understandably in a state of anxiety. Donald Trump was not their candidate. The key issues of his campaign were not those in which the Right’s leading thinkers had invested their efforts. The major organs of conservative opinion distanced themselves from his candidacy, only allying with him tactically, and in many cases…
Read More“However sudden and momentous be events that have just taken place so swiftly, the author can claim that they have not taken him by surprise.” So wrote Tocqueville in the Author’s Preface to the Twelfth Edition of Democracy in America, on the occasion, in 1848, of the final political repudiation of the effort to restore…
Read More
Sorry, PDF downloads are available to subscribers only.
Subscribe Now
Already a subscriber? Log In
