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The author argues that the Framers of the Constitution & other early national leaders were capable -- in a way that has never since been replicated in American history -- of living mutually in the world of ideas & ideals as well as that of political realities. However, it does us no good simply to wonder at their talent & intellect, he argues. Rather, we should try to understand what allowed them to balance public life & private intellect so that we might try to emulate that balance in our own lives. He suggests that the centrality of writing to their lives -- & the fact that they believed that they needed only to appeal to rational readers and not to the masses -- was part of what allowed them to achieve this balance. This balance also arose from the fact that they saw themselves organically linked to everyone else in their society -- something that politicians no longer feel, and one of the primary reasons why politicians are no longer public intellectuals. D. Knaff

As pundits and politicians remind us at every election cycle or turn of the television dial, the United States sees itself as the world's greatest democracy. But what citizens might also hear, if they knew how to listen, is the grinding of two tectonic plates on which this democracy was established. In the venerable tradition of keen foreign observers of American politics, Anthony King exposes the political paradoxes in our system that we may well be too close to see--founding principles of our great democracy that are distinctly undemocratic. In an extended essay eloquent in its plainspoken good sense, King begins, on the one hand, with the founding fathers who emphasized moderation, deliberation, checks and balances, and the separation of powers--a system in which "the people" were allowed to play only a limited role. On the other hand were radical democrats who insisted that the people, and only the people, should rule. The result was a political system tangled up in conflicts that persist to this day: unelected and unaccountable Supreme Court justices who exercise enormous personal power; severe restrictions on the kind of person the people can elect as president; popular referendums at the state and local level but none at the federal level, not even to ratify amendments to the Constitution. In King's provocative analysis, we see how these puzzles play out in the turmoil of our nation's public life and political culture--and we glimpse, perhaps, a new way to address them

Lucid and concise, Original Intents: Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, and the American Founding fully explains the political, economic, and constitutional ideas of Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison as their thinking developed from the American Revolution through the early 1790s. It shows how their ideas took shape and changed as they engaged with each other and eventually began to have serious debates and arguments. Original Intents shows that there was no single original meaning or intent in the Constitution, and that Hamilton sought to build a Republican United States that was completely incompatible with the Republic that Jefferson and Madison wanted. By the early 1790s, the two Virginians had come to despise Hamilton and detest his vision, and vice versa.Andrew Shankman is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University, Camden.

This book is a study in depth of the work of Franz Boas and twenty of his students at Columbia University in the early years of the twentieth century. Collectively they laid the entire institutional as well as the intellectual foundations of American anthropology as it exists today.

A Few words may be in order at the outset to explain why I have chosen the title "Power and Morals and the Founding Fathers." I believe that we can learn much from an inquiry into the basic thought and character of the first statesmen of the Republic that may help us in meeting the crisis of a divided world today. And such an inquiry can be most effectively pursued by a consideration of their views on power and morals.

Intro -- Contents -- Preface -- 1. An Assortment of Puzzles -- 2. Who- and What- Were "the People"? -- 3. The People in the House of Power -- 4. The Exaltation of the People -- 5. The People Move Upstairs -- 6. Two Tectonic Plates, Two Nostalgias -- 7. An Assortment of Solutions -- 8. Democracy in America -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.

Words About a Word -- The Four-Note-Chord of Liberty -- The American Creed -- The Classical Roots of Virtue -- Greek Eleutheria and Roman Liberatas -- Two Paths to Virtue: Religion and Reason -- Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Moderation -- Virtue or Rights? -- More Need of Masters -- Liberty: The Box With the False Bottom -- Mourning Virtue.

The Monroe doctrine.--The third-term tradition.--The political depravity of the fathers.--The riotous career of the Know-nothings.--The framers and the framing of the Constitution.--Washington's inuaguration.--A century of constitutional interpretation.--A century's struggle for silver.--Is sound finance possible under popular government?--Franklin in France.--How the British left New York.--The struggle for territory.--Four centuries of progress. ; Mode of access: Internet.

Essays reprinted from various periodicals. ; The Monroe doctrine.--The third-term tradition.--The political depravity of the fathers.--The riotous career of the Know-nothings.--The framers and the framing of the Constitution.--Washington's inauguration.--A century of constitutional interpretation.--A century's struggle for silver.--Is sound finance possible under popular government?--Franklin in France.--How the British left New York.--The struggle for territory.--Four centuries of progress. ; Mode of access: Internet.