While Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835) has undeniably contributed to a robust understanding of American culture, his description of American political principles misinterprets the origins of the separation of church and state. Tocqueville focuses on Puritan influence on American political thought, concluding that Puritans’ love of liberty inspired American religious liberty and American […]
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Art and the Politics of Nature
Landscape is destiny. The Genesee River, for example, flows north from Pennsylvania through the Allegheny Plateau, falling about 14 feet for every one of its 160 miles. The cracks and fissures in the earth’s crust—scars of millions of years and recent glaciation—buckle and warp the land we see today, leaving spectacular waterfalls that dot the river’s […]
Do We Still Support Constitutional Government?
Legal scholars spend a lot of time debating the proper way to interpret the Constitution. Political scientists study voting blocks on the Court or trends in judicial appointments. But to think about the future of constitutional government, we should give more attention to the ultimate authority behind the Constitution – “We the People,” as the […]
The Moral Effects of Hamilton’s Economic Revolution
He smote the rock of the national resources, and abundant streams of revenue gushed forth. He touched the dead corpse of the Public Credit, and it sprang upon its feet. So reads the inscription on the pedestal of the statue of Alexander Hamilton, in front of the Treasury Department in Washington, D.C. The quote—originally from […]
Liberal Education and a Free Society
It becomes expedient for promoting the publick happiness that those persons, whom nature hath endowed with genius and virtue, should be rendered by liberal education worthy to receive, and able to guard the sacred deposit of the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens, and that they should be called to that charge without regard […]
