Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence defends an inherent and individual right to the pursuit of happiness. For Jefferson, this right dramatically limited Christianity's role in politics. In any case, when drafting the Declaration, Jefferson thought Christianity largely irrelevant, if not inimical, to America's well-being. However, shortly before becoming president, several events transformed Jefferson's private thoughts about Christianity and its public utility. Careful attention to both the text and context of Jefferson's First Inaugural (a significant Jeffersonian document, but one that has never been examined in great detail by political theorists and intellectual historians) reveals that Jefferson came to embrace the teachings of a rationalized version of the New Testament in a way that lightly amends the liberal paradigm of his Declaration. Without significantly altering his commitment to a rights-based government of limited proportions, Jefferson's First Inaugural bespeaks the new political importance he placed on widely cultivating a largely demystified sense of Christian charity.

This article seeks to refute the prevailing scholarly view that Hamilton, like the Founders generally, lacked a deep concern about slavery. The first part examines Hamilton's political principles and shows that they were not Hobbesian but consistent with the views of more traditional natural law theorists. Accordingly, Hamilton understood that the natural rights of man imposed a corresponding duty to end slavery. The second part examines Hamilton's endorsement of a compensated emancipation, his opinions of the Constitution, his conduct of American foreign policy, his involvement in the state abolition societies, and his economic policies to demonstrate that ending slavery was in fact one of his abiding concerns.

Constitutional theory has recently turned to the importance of extrajudicial constitutional interpretation. Yet much of the scholarly debate remains rooted in “legal” views of the Constitution, which continue to give primacy to the Court. This article seeks to go further by articulating a Madisonian view of the Constitution, which resituates questions of interpretation within a larger institutional framework. This Madisonian view suggests that the Constitution calls forth continual debate about constitutional meaning. The “settlement” of constitutional issues is not an essential feature of our constitutional system and, thus, constitutional politics with overlapping views, discontinuities, and essentially unsettled meanings are inherent features of the Madisonian Constitution. Recovering the Madisonian vision is an essential step in restoring both the political branches and the Court to the proper place in the constitutional scheme and, in doing so, overcoming the deeply ingrained myth of judicial supremacy.

This essay examines various intellectual challenges posed by John Rawls's conception of an overlapping consensus, both in terms of his own approach and also that of Charles Taylor. Two questions are entertained: (1) whether various criticisms of Rawls's view are indeed justified and (2) if they are, whether Taylor puts them to rest. Though the latter question is answered somewhat in the negative, Taylor's version of overlapping consensus is interestingly different from that of Rawls in that Taylor introduces an important distinction between a tradition on the one hand and what Rawls terms a “comprehensive doctrine” on the other. The advantage of this distinction, among other things, is that it clarifies what is at stake in moving to any sort of overlapping consensus.

In recent years, a number of political thinkers in philosophy, political theory and law have defended political theories which are deeply indebted to classical republicanism. Like classical republicans, these thinkers have claimed that a flourishing polity depends upon citizens' exercise of the civic virtues. Unlike classical republicans, some of these thinkers have defended what might be called “political republicanisms”—republicanisms which are also indebted to the methodological restraint of Rawls's political liberalism. The article argues that political republicanism suffers from a viability problem. Its list of civic virtues is too short. More worrisome, the public justifications that would be available to a political republican regime are not sufficient to motivate the development of the civic virtues. Therefore, if we are to be republicans, we should be “perfectionist republicans” instead.