Political Thought

In Defense of the Constitution argues that modern disciples of Progressivism who subtly distort fundamental principles of the Constitution are determined to centralize political control in Washington, D.C., to achieve their goal of an egalitarian national society. It is in their distrust of self-government and representative institutions that Progressivists advocate, albeit indirectly, an elitist regime based on the power of…

Richard M. Weaver, a thinker and writer celebrated for his unsparing diagnoses and realistic remedies for the ills of our age, is known largely through a few of his works that remain in print. This new collection of Weaver’s shorter writings, assembled by Ted J. Smith III, Weaver’s leading biographer, presents many long-out-of-print and never-before-published works that give new range…

John Randolph of Roanoke is unique in American political history. For most of his public career Randolph was a leader of the opposition—to both Jeffersonians and Federalists. Only twenty-six when first elected to Congress in 1799, he readily became the most forceful figure at the Capitol. He was, writes Russell Kirk, “devoted to state rights, the agricultural interest, economy in…

Anthony de Jasay breaks new ground with Justice and Its Surroundings—a collection of trenchant essays that seek to redefine the concept of justice and to highlight the frontier between it and the surrounding issues that encroach upon it and are mistakenly associated with it. This straightforward and terse book analyzes the roles of collective choice, redistribution, and socialism and the…

This volume opens with Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) and also contains his earlier Essay Concerning Toleration (1667), extracts from the Third Letter for Toleration (1692), and a large body of his briefer essays and memoranda on this theme. As editor Mark Goldie writes in the introduction, A Letter Concerning Toleration “was one of the seventeenth century’s most eloquent pleas…

This famed Payne edition of Select Works of Edmund Burke is universally revered by students of English history and political thought. Volume 3 presents Burke’s Four Letters on the Proposals for Peace with the Regicide Directory of France—generally styled Letters on a Regicide Peace (1795–1796). The Letters, Payne believed, deserve to “rank even before [Burke’s] Reflections, and to be called…