This collection of essays assembles the wit and wisdom of Robert Goldwin, who has worked in the White House as a clarifier of ideas for the President. The essays are organized in five parts, covering the U.S. Constitution, human rights, political philosophy, international diplomacy, and liberal education. Goldwin establishes that the framers of the Constitution were devoted to the traditions of individual liberty and democracy, and he examines Locke's views on property and the state of nature. Other topics include: rights versus duties; human rights as the moral foundation of American foreign policy; the Law of the Sea; liberal arts students and their alienation from families, community, and tradition; and the future of liberal education. ISBN 0-8447-3693-7: $16.95.

American politics grows embittered because it is increasingly torn between two rival constitutions, two opposed cultures, two contrary ways of life. American conservatives rally around the founders’ Constitution, as amended and as grounded in the natural and divine rights and duties of the Declaration of Independence. American liberals herald their “living Constitution,” a term that implies that the original is dead or superseded, and that the fundamental political imperative is constant change or transformation (as President Obama called it) toward a more and more perfect social democracy ruled by a Woke elite. Crisis of the Two Constitutions details how we got to and what is at stake in our increasingly divided America. It takes controversial stands on matters political and scholarly, describing the political genius of America’s founders and their efforts to shape future generations through a constitutional culture that included immigration, citizenship, and educational policies. Then it turns to the attempted progressive refounding of America, tracing its accelerating radicalism from the New Deal to the 1960s’ New Left to today’s unhappy campus nihilists. Finally, the volume appraises American conservatives’ efforts, so far unavailing despite many famous victories, to revive the founders’ Constitution and moral common sense. From Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump, what have conservatives learned and where should they go from here? Along the way, Charles R. Kesler argues with critics on the left and right, and refutes fashionable doctrines including relativism, multiculturalism, critical race theory, and radical traditionalism, providing in effect a one-volume guide to the increasingly influential Claremont school of conservative thought by one of its most engaged, and engaging, thinkers.

The first edition of Alan Gibson's Understanding the Founding is widely regarded as an invaluable guide to the last century's key debates surrounding America's founding. This new edition retains all of the strengths of the original while adding a substantial new section addressing a major but previously unaddressed issue and also significantly revising Gibson's invaluable conclusion and bibliography. In the original edition, which was built upon his previous work in Interpreting the Founding, Gibson addressed four key questions: Were the Framers motivated by their economic interests? How democratic was the Framers' Constitution? Should we interpret the Founding using philosophical or strictly historical approaches? What traditions of political thought were most important to the Framers? He focused especially on the preconceptions that scholars brought to these questions, explored the deepest sources of scholars' disagreements over them, and suggested new and thoughtful lines of interpretation and inquiry. His incisive analysis brought clarity to the complex and sprawling debates and shed new light on the institutional and intellectual foundations of the American political system. Gibson has now added a path-breaking new chapter entitled "How Could They Have Done That? Founding Scholarship and the Question of Moral Responsibility," which reprises and critiques on of the most important and vexing contemporary debates on the American founding. The new chapter focuses on how the men who fought a revolution in the name of liberty and declared to the world that "all men are created equal" could have supported the institution of slavery and even owned slaves themselves, accepted the legal and social subordination of women, and been responsible for Indian removal and genocide against Native Americans. Efforts to criticize or defend the Founders on these issues now constitute a daunting body of scholarship addressing what David Brion Davis has called the "dilemmas of slaveholding revolutionaries." Gibson's astute and fair-minded analysis of this scholarship offers keen insights into how we might move toward more mature and responsible evaluations of the Founders.

One of the finest historians of her generation, Jan Ellen Lewis (1949-2018) transformed our understanding of the early U.S. Republic. Her groundbreaking essays defined the emerging fields of gender and emotions history and reframed traditional understandings of the founding fathers and the U.S. Constitution. As significant as her work was within each of these subfields, her most remarkable insights came from the connections she drew among them. Gender and race, slavery and freedom, feelings and politics ran together in the hearts, minds, and lives of the men and women she studied. Lewis's brilliant research revealed these long-buried connections and illuminated their importance for America's past and present. Family, Slavery, and Love in the Early American Republic collects thirteen of Lewis's most important essays. Distinguished scholars shed light on the historical and historiographical contexts in which Lewis and her peers researched, wrote, and argued. But the real star of this volume is Lewis herself: confident, unconventional, erudite, and deeply imaginative.

The writing of the Constitution at the Constitutional Convention that met in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 was, along with the subsequent ratification of the document in state conventions, a major watershed in U.S. history. An understanding of the plans that were offered, the conflicts that were represented, and the arguments that were made are critical to an understanding of many features of the document that was ratified in 1789 as well as in understanding the Bill of Rights that was adopted in 1791. In The Writing and Ratification of the U.S. Constitution: Practical Virtue in Action, John R. Vile focuses on records of debates at the Convention, and provides a unique window into the contestation surrounding this keystone American political moment.

This book examines the controversy surrounding the conventional wisdom that the Court is the guardian of the Constitution and the ultimate defender of our liberties.

These essays argue that to have good character one needs to have at least developed a sense of empathy and self control.