The Federalist Papers (1788) By Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison
This is a work of great philosophical theory about the nature of the American government. It was really a series of essays written under anonymous names and published in various newspapers in an attempt to garner support for the proposed constitution. It is a call for stronger ties that would allow 13 tenuous colonies perched on the eastern edge of a vast continent to become a great nation.
There’s a unity to it—and yet at the same time it shows some of the strains that would later become more visible in the party politics of America. I feel the book makes a case for limited government. There are in its pages varying degrees of scepticism about America’s ability to exist without a stronger government than it has, but there is clearly a dislike of concentrated power too.
Democracy in America (1835, 1840) By Alexis de Tocqueville
De Tocqueville came from a French environment where government centralisation was so powerful that local officials spent their lives writing documents for their overlords in Paris. He was seized by the contrast with America, where people did not wait for the central government, but went ahead on their own, and I think that’s a vital part of what it is to be American.
He also recognised we were a commercial nation. He was repulsed by it, because he came from a mercantilist economy, with an aristocracy that didn’t really need to labour hard. In America it was all about the man who was going to find a way to rise by his bootstraps. That’s what makes America—we take people who are really the rejects of the world, and by giving them a chance to seek and receive reward in compensation for labour and ingenuity and innovation, we become something different.
The Conscience of a Conservative (1960) By Barry Goldwater
I was 10 when this book came out, a few years before the 1964 elections. I remember reading it and just being blown away. But I was a Republican and a conservative before I read it—I was stealing down to the library to read the National Review. I was a complete nerd.
The book doesn’t have the relevance today that it had then, because a lot of it is of a topical nature. In many ways it’s incomplete, but it strikes a defined note of individualism. There are books, one of them is Witness by Whittaker Chambers, that talk about totalitarian and utopian philosophies better than this one does, but for an impressionable kid, this was heady stuff.
I was a little disappointed when I found out Goldwater didn’t actually write it—his speechwriter Brent Bozell did. But it is Goldwater’s voice, and I do feel Bozell listened carefully to what he said and how he said it.
Capitalism and Freedom (1962) By Milton Friedman
This was the first book I read about economics—shortly followed by Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, because he refers to it—with the idea that in order to have political freedom you have to have market freedom. That economic freedom drives people towards political freedom. If you have the form of political freedom, but not the substance of market freedom, eventually it will undermine the form of political freedom.
This is where Friedman lays the predicate for the volunteer army and negative income tax and so forth. I wasn’t in the most political of environments —I was living in a small town in the west—so this was like opening a window on a wider world. I did not live in a political household, so this is not the kind of book that I was able to talk about with my parents. It was almost like samizdat literature—read in quiet, it was exhilarating, but private.
The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) By Adam Smith
I love this book and read it every few years, because I know I don’t fully understand it and will get some new insight. For me, the essential part is Smith’s description of human nature: that there is inherent in us a striving to win the favour of others by doing right things. Smith is caricatured as a high priest of soulless, individualistic enterprise. But he says that enterprise is only soulless if it lacks our natural sympathy towards those with whom we live. Conservatives give more generously to philanthropic activity than liberals of the same income. Conservatism is fundamentally a compassionate philosophy. What’s better than wanting to construct a society in which you have every opportunity to achieve the best that you can, and be what you want to be?
Interview by Jonathan Rauch for the website FiveBooks.com
This is a work of great philosophical theory about the nature of the American government. It was really a series of essays written under anonymous names and published in various newspapers in an attempt to garner support for the proposed constitution. It is a call for stronger ties that would allow 13 tenuous colonies perched on the eastern edge of a vast continent to become a great nation.
There’s a unity to it—and yet at the same time it shows some of the strains that would later become more visible in the party politics of America. I feel the book makes a case for limited government. There are in its pages varying degrees of scepticism about America’s ability to exist without a stronger government than it has, but there is clearly a dislike of concentrated power too.
Democracy in America (1835, 1840) By Alexis de Tocqueville
De Tocqueville came from a French environment where government centralisation was so powerful that local officials spent their lives writing documents for their overlords in Paris. He was seized by the contrast with America, where people did not wait for the central government, but went ahead on their own, and I think that’s a vital part of what it is to be American.
He also recognised we were a commercial nation. He was repulsed by it, because he came from a mercantilist economy, with an aristocracy that didn’t really need to labour hard. In America it was all about the man who was going to find a way to rise by his bootstraps. That’s what makes America—we take people who are really the rejects of the world, and by giving them a chance to seek and receive reward in compensation for labour and ingenuity and innovation, we become something different.
The Conscience of a Conservative (1960) By Barry Goldwater
I was 10 when this book came out, a few years before the 1964 elections. I remember reading it and just being blown away. But I was a Republican and a conservative before I read it—I was stealing down to the library to read the National Review. I was a complete nerd.
The book doesn’t have the relevance today that it had then, because a lot of it is of a topical nature. In many ways it’s incomplete, but it strikes a defined note of individualism. There are books, one of them is Witness by Whittaker Chambers, that talk about totalitarian and utopian philosophies better than this one does, but for an impressionable kid, this was heady stuff.
I was a little disappointed when I found out Goldwater didn’t actually write it—his speechwriter Brent Bozell did. But it is Goldwater’s voice, and I do feel Bozell listened carefully to what he said and how he said it.
Capitalism and Freedom (1962) By Milton Friedman
This was the first book I read about economics—shortly followed by Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, because he refers to it—with the idea that in order to have political freedom you have to have market freedom. That economic freedom drives people towards political freedom. If you have the form of political freedom, but not the substance of market freedom, eventually it will undermine the form of political freedom.
This is where Friedman lays the predicate for the volunteer army and negative income tax and so forth. I wasn’t in the most political of environments —I was living in a small town in the west—so this was like opening a window on a wider world. I did not live in a political household, so this is not the kind of book that I was able to talk about with my parents. It was almost like samizdat literature—read in quiet, it was exhilarating, but private.
The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) By Adam Smith
I love this book and read it every few years, because I know I don’t fully understand it and will get some new insight. For me, the essential part is Smith’s description of human nature: that there is inherent in us a striving to win the favour of others by doing right things. Smith is caricatured as a high priest of soulless, individualistic enterprise. But he says that enterprise is only soulless if it lacks our natural sympathy towards those with whom we live. Conservatives give more generously to philanthropic activity than liberals of the same income. Conservatism is fundamentally a compassionate philosophy. What’s better than wanting to construct a society in which you have every opportunity to achieve the best that you can, and be what you want to be?
Interview by Jonathan Rauch for the website FiveBooks.com
