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- Harry Mount, the London Telegraph
FeaturesFebruary 2011 The wisdom of “The Federalist” On the balance between saftey & strength in the thinking of Publius. The wisdom of the American Founders does not come to us in authoritative phrases such as “Confucius says” or in what we have unfortunately come to call our “values,” but mostly in the form of a Constitution. The Constitution has been best explained to us in The Federalist, a series of papers first written for New York newspapers by three defenders of it—Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison. These papers contain arguments against opponents of the Constitution intended for the immediate debate over its ratification in that state in 1787–8 and also for a wider audience in the future who would read them as a book. They were neither official statements of the meaning of the Constitution nor private interpretations but somewhere in between, and, over the years, they have acquired a semi-official status both from the prominence of their authors and the quality of their explanations. The ... This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchaseSubscribe to TNC (Print and Online editions) Subscribe to TNC (Online only) This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 29 February 2011, on page 9 Copyright © 2013 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/The-wisdom-of--ldquo-The-Federalist-rdquo--6928
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A new kind of liberalism: Tocqueville's “Recollections” On the defense of politics through the disparagement of philosophy. The great famine before China's Cultural Revolution killed millions. Yang Jisheng took it upon himself to make sure the world knew about it. by Charles Hill He was an eighteenth-century Irish statesman, but Edmund Burke still has plenty to say today. Reinhold Niebuhr was a public intellectual and a theologian who still has a deep influence on both the right and the left.
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