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W. B. Allen Subscribe

W.B. Allen, emeritus dean and professor at Michigan State University, is a senior visiting scholar at the University of Colorado’s Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization.

November 27, 2019|Alexander Hamilton, John Laurens, Marquis de Lafayette, Revolutionary: George Washington at War, Robert L. O'Connell, Washington's Rules of Civility

A Reflexive and Reactive George Washington?

by W. B. Allen|

Washington at the Surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown, 1781 (image: Everett Historical / shutterstock.com)
A new bio highlights Washington’s early appeals to “nationality” and to the people’s sovereignty; but it makes him out to be at the mercy of circumstances.

October 2, 2019|1619 Project, Abraham Lincoln, American Founding, Declaration of Independence, New York Times, Slavery

The New York Times Resurrects the Positive Good Slavery Argument

by W. B. Allen|

Advertisement for "American slavery distinguished from the slavery of English theorists, and justified by the law of Nature" by Rev. Samuel Seabury, D.D.
The “1619 Project” can deliver on its promissory only by enslaving free labor.

September 3, 2019|American Character Project, Constitution

No People? No Constitution!

by W. B. Allen|

July 4th Parade in Barnstable County, MA, 2015 (Nadia Leskovskaya / Shutterstock.com).
Preserving good government depends upon a people’s ability to demonstrate the character appropriate to the task—and ours is in question.

September 24, 2018|A Politician Thinking, Jack Rakove, James Madison

Madison: Pragmatist, Idealist . . . and Game Theorist?

by W. B. Allen|

Jack Rakove makes a plausible case for Madisonian game theory even as he maintains respect for the Madison who said “justice is the end of government.”

April 3, 2018|American National Character Project, George Washington

Defining Freedom Up: National Character Revived

by W. B. Allen|

Statue of George Washington, Trafalgar Square, London, UK (Tony Baggett/Shutterstock.com)
George Washington offers many lessons on how to understand the common good and living well together: it begins with character.

January 20, 2017|"America First", Ben Peterson, national sovereignty, political prosperity

Are American Citizens Servants or Masters? Needy Suppliants or Sturdy Yeomen?

by W. B. Allen|

Ben Peterson’s argument for “national sovereignty” as the “political idea of the year” was so challenging and so persuasive that it seems almost cavalier for me to have observed in commenting upon it that it under-explains the fretwork of national sovereignty. My praise of the argument is sincere, and I do think that it should issue in further discussion. I place at the center of that discussion, however, the urgent necessity to clarify what I have in the past called “political prosperity.”

The idea that people embrace national sovereignty for the sake of national sovereignty, in other words as a mere political abstraction, fails to enlist in its support those political dynamics that give currency to national sovereignty in the first place. Of those dynamics, none is more significant than the conditioning of support for national sovereignty upon the aspiration for humane conditions of life. The nation does not exist for its own sake and, more importantly, in a free society the people do not exist for the sake of the nation.

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September 28, 2016|Commerce Clause, Indians, Naomi Schaeffer Riley, NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin, The New Trail of Tears

The Sum of Social and Political Evil

by W. B. Allen|

The New Trail of Tears opens with the question, “What does America owe Indians?” and closes with the response, “To make them equal Americans.”

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June 11, 2015|How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country, Shelby Steele

A House Divided

by W. B. Allen|

black ethnicity arms with hands pulling rope against white Caucasian race person in stop racism and xenophobia concept, immigration and multiracial respect

black ethnicity arms with hands pulling rope against white Caucasian race person in stop racism and xenophobia concept, immigration and multiracial  respect

A nation riven by a contest of authority between implacable foes describes the world of shame about which Shelby Steele writes.

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February 18, 2015|Anti-Federalists, Edward J. Larson, George Washington, John P. Roche

The Lawgiver

by W. B. Allen|

 

George Washington provided explicit direction for biographers and analysts seeking to capture the substance of his public service. In his September 1796 “Farewell Address,” he wrote:

Though in reviewing the incidents of my Administration, I am unconscious of intentional error, I am nevertheless too sensible of my defects not to think it probable that I may have committed many errors. Whatever they may be I fervently beseech the Almighty to avert or mitigate the evils to which they may tend. I shall also carry with me the hope that my Country will never cease to view them with indulgence; and that after forty five years of my life dedicated to its Service, with an upright zeal, the faults of incompetent abilities will be consigned to oblivion, as myself must soon be to the Mansions of rest.

As we can see, Washington identified as the term of his service to the United States, a continuous period dating from 1751 to 1796. Every Washington biographer inherits an obligation to tell the story at least with reference to that “body of work,” if not comprehensively reproducing it. To date, no one has presented that coherent account (including the present author). But Edward J. Larson has taken large strides toward compensating for the lack with The Return of George Washington. The book focuses on what is arguably the most under-appreciated period in that 45 years, the time between Washington’s resignation of his command of the Army of the Revolution and his inauguration as the first President of the United States.

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June 2, 2014|

Our Civil Rights Rest on Fundamental Arguments, Not Racial Ones

by W. B. Allen|

Celebrations of the Civil Rights Act at 50 remind us just how anachronistic the common understanding of civil rights has become. They are treated as the product of a momentary movement in the latter portion of the 20th century or as a work of legislative artistry by President Lyndon Johnson. Today it seemingly suffices to name President Johnson and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to say all that is necessary about civil rights. Ironically, the observations most associated with each of these men undermine their claims to be advocates of civil rights constitutionally understood. In Johnson’s case, the observation was…

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Book Reviews

A Mirror of the 20th-Century Congress

by Joseph Postell

Wright undermined the very basis of his local popularity—the decentralized nature of the House—by supporting reforms that gave power to the party leaders.

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The Graces of Flannery O'Connor

by Henry T. Edmondson III

O'Connor's correspondence is a goldmine of piercing insight and startling reflections on everything from literature to philosophy to raising peacocks.

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Liberty Classics

Rereading Politica in the Post-Liberal Moment

by Glenn A. Moots

Althusius offers a rich constitutionalism that empowers persons to thrive alongside one another in deliberate communities.

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James Fenimore Cooper and the American Experiment

by Melissa Matthes

In The American Democrat, James Fenimore Cooper defended democracy against both mob rule and majority tyranny.

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Podcasts

Stuck With Decadence

A discussion with Ross Douthat

Ross Douthat discusses with Richard Reinsch his new book The Decadent Society.

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Can the Postmodern Natural Law Remedy Our Failing Humanism?

A discussion with Graham McAleer

Graham McAleer discusses how postmodern natural law can help us think more coherently about human beings and our actions.

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Did the Civil Rights Constitution Distort American Politics?

A discussion with Christopher Caldwell

Christopher Caldwell discusses his new book, The Age of Entitlement.

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America, Land of Deformed Institutions

A discussion with Yuval Levin

Yuval Levin pinpoints that American alienation and anger emerges from our weak political, social, and religious institutions.

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Law & Liberty’s focus is on the classical liberal tradition of law and political thought and how it shapes a society of free and responsible persons. This site brings together serious debate, commentary, essays, book reviews, interviews, and educational material in a commitment to the first principles of law in a free society. Law & Liberty considers a range of foundational and contemporary legal issues, legal philosophy, and pedagogy.

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