The Second World War ended with our country fundamentally transformed. After the First World War, the United States had sought what Warren Harding called “a return to normalcy.” After 1945, there could be no such return: the new normal would now mean the United States as a fully committed global power, responsible not only for the security of its erstwhile…

The social nature of human beings is the bedrock of our existence. We’re built by and for our relationships with other human beings. As Adam Smith tells us in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, human sociability develops through a subtle, continuous exchange of words and gestures between human beings that includes everything from raising an eyebrow to buying a car.

Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan (“MbZ”) of the United Arab Emirates, the “most powerful Arab ruler” according to the New York Times’ David Kirkpatrick, is also the Arab world’s most sagacious political leader. With the UAE’s current account surplus of $109 billion in 2019 (vs. Saudi Arabia’s $47 billion), he wields enormous economic heft. MbZ…

There are plenty of problems facing higher education these days. And while edited academic volumes tend to be a dime a dozen, Unprofitable Schooling: Examining Causes of, and Fixes For, America’s Broken Ivory Tower, edited by Todd J. Zywicki and Neal P. McCluskey, is a diamond in the rough and even more relevant today than when it was published in…

The world since World War II remains largely what America made of it. Everything it didn’t destroy in war, it modified afterward. With American perseverance and protection, Germany and Japan became democracies. The U.S. helped destroy colonial empires and became involved in protracted post-colonial wars. Above all, the Cold War shaped the world and, after a long struggle, the Soviet…

When in 2005 Doris Kearns Goodwin published Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, a standard was established for the analysis of the dynamics of political administration in the United States. Goodwin carefully analyzed Lincoln’s cabinet to unfold the extent to which the commander-in-chief effectively determined the shape of political administration or merely coordinated competing centers of…

Editor’s note: The following remarks were made on a panel organized by the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University on October 8, 2018. The author was invited to discuss Stephen F. Williams’ book, The Reformer: How One Liberal Fought to Preempt the Russian Revolution. The recent sad news of Williams’ passing at the age…

Who expected it? A world-wide pandemic, recurring food and supply shortages, massive unemployment, widespread violence and lawlessness, deep political disagreement and distrust, feckless leadership, and a general breakdown of our political institutions.  To many Americans, the current state of affairs seems surreal, if not apocalyptic. As we fret about the dangers of George Orwell’s 1984 our country is spinning towards…

Few people, I imagine, would deny that the political temperature, not only in the United States but elsewhere in the world, has risen of late, though few of us would admit to having been in any way responsible for this other, far more dangerous, kind of global warming. It is always the others who are unreasonable, never ourselves. We are…

Adrian Vermeule, constitutional originalism’s foremost opponent on the right, has again criticized the theory and its statutory kissing cousin, textualism. While he argues that positivism cannot provide a justification for originalism or textualism, he concedes that “substantive goods of political morality” might serve to provide textualism and originalism support. But, according to Vermeule, even such goods could justify only…