Last Best Hope of Earth

Tag: Political Theory

  • The Evil of Popular Despotism

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    James Madison. By: H.B. Grigsby.

    James Madison had extensive beliefs about the structure of American government and the sustainability of the system.

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  • The Erosion of Separation of Powers

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    Thomas Jefferson. By: Mather Brown. 1786.

    In the 1780s, there began to be a distinct erosion of the doctrine of separation of powers.

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  • Guarding Against an Evil

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    Benjamin Franklin. By: Joseph Siffred Duplessis.

    Americans’ political beliefs were rapidly changing as the American Revolution progressed into the early years of the Republic. In fact, those beliefs were “constantly in flux, continually adapting and adjusting to ever-shifting political and social circumstances.” Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic: 1776-1787, 438.

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  • A Check on Dangerous Usurpations

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    Samuel Chase. By: John Beale Bordley.

    While an upper house of state legislatures was desirable to some, as explained in The Birth of the Senate, it also had its detractors. Those detractors argued that it was a mere redundancy, wholly irrelevant to the founding of a stable government. In taking that position, the detractors ignored many of the benefits of having a second house in the legislature.

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  • A Moral Reformation

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    Patrick Henry. By: George Bagby Matthews.

    As eluded to in Virtue as a Principle and Foundation, vices had come to plague American society shortly after the American Revolution. Patrick Henry said, in 1780, that he “feared that our Body politic was dangerously sick,” as from top to bottom, society appeared to be embracing vice. Patrick Henry to Jefferson, Feb. 15, 1780, Boyd, ed., Jefferson Papers, III, 293.

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  • Carrying Liberty to Excess

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    David Ramsay. By: Rembrandt Peale.

    While there were perceptions that America was suffering from a malaise in the 1780s, the political theory at the time had an explanation: licentiousness.

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  • A Radical Political Experiment

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    Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. By: Nathaniel Currier and James Merritt Ives.

    Pennsylvania was the home of the “most radical ideas about politics and constitutional authority voiced in the Revolution.” Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic: 1776-1787, 226. This resulted in a “comprehensive examination of assumptions about government that elsewhere were generally taken for granted” and it resulted in one of the greatest experiments in politics up to that time. Id.

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  • The Balance of Mixed Government

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    Alexander Hamilton, as Secretary of the Treasury. By: John Trumbull.

    Conservatives and liberals during the Revolutionary years realized that democracy must have power distributed throughout various sources, known as a mixed government, so as to survive.

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  • The Emergence of American Principles and Tempers

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    Thomas Paine. By: Laurent Dabos.

    As the American Revolution approached “most Americans had become convinced that they were ‘aptly circumstanced to form the best republicks, upon the best terms that ever came to the lot of any people before us.’” Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic: 1776-1787, 98 quoting Phila. Pa. Packet, Feb. 12, 1776; Purdie’s Wmsbg. Va. Gazette, May 17, 1776.

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  • Autopsies of the Dead Republics

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    Edmund Pendleton. By: William Pendleton.

    Ancient Rome and Ancient Greece were intertwined with the American Revolution and the establishment of the American republic.

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