The rise of the administrative state is the most significant political development in American politics over the past century. While our Constitution separates powers into three branches, and requires that the laws are made by elected representatives in the Congress, today most policies are made by unelected officials in agencies where legislative, executive, and judicial powers are combined. This threatens constitutionalism and the rule of law. This book examines the history of administra...

Freedom and the Rule of Law takes a critical look at the historical beginnings of law in the United States, and how that history has influenced current trends regarding law and freedom. Anthony Peacock has compiled articles that examine the relationship between freedom and the rule of law in America. Although this is a theme that has been a perennial one since America's founding, it is also one of particular importance today, and this book explains how history makes this apparent....

The recent economic crisis in the United States has highlighted a crisis of understanding. In this volume, Bradley C. S. Watson and Joseph Postell bring together some of America's most eminent thinkers on political economy-an increasingly overlooked field wherein political ideas and economic theories mutually inform each other. Only through a restoration of political economy can we reconnect economics to the human good. Economics as a discipline deals with the production and distribution o...

This book presents the most significant speeches and writings of American constitutional conservatives during the period 1900-1930. Figures such as William Howard Taft, Calvin Coolidge, Elihu Root, Warren Harding, and David Jayne Hill present the alternative arguments that challenged the leading Progressive views of the period. Issues such as natural rights, civil rights, economic regulation, federalism, executive power, political parties, and foreign policy are addressed in these primary ...

During the Progressive Era (1880-1920), leading thinkers and politicians transformed American politics. Historians and political scientists have given a great deal of attention to the progressives who effected this transformation. Yet relatively little is known about the conservatives who opposed these progressive innovations, despite the fact that they played a major role in the debates and outcomes of this period of American history. These early conservatives represent a now-forgotten so...

Questions at the very heart of the American experiment—about what the nation is and who its people are—have lately assumed a new, even violent urgency. As the most fundamental aspects of American citizenship and constitutionalism come under ever more powerful pressure, and as the nation’s politics increasingly give way to divisive, partisan extremes, this book responds to the critical political challenge of our time: the need to return to some conception of shared principles as a basis for...