Toward a more perfect Union

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Sanford Levinson

In An Argument Open to All, renowned legal scholar Sanford Levinson takes a novel approach to what is perhaps America's most famous political tract. Rather than concern himself with the authors as historical figures, or how The Federalist helps us understand the original intent of the framers of the Constitution, Levinson examines each essay for the political wisdom it can offer us today. In eighty-five short essays, each keyed to a different essay in The Federalist, he considers such questions as whether present generations can rethink their constitutional arrangements; how much effort we should exert to preserve America's traditional culture; and whether The Federalist's arguments even suggest the desirability of world government.

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Nat Hentoff

For years now, Nat Hentoff has been the best-known lay guardian of the magnificent spirit and letter of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. His principled advocacy of free expression for all seems to be needed more than ever today, at a time of appalling assaults on expression not only by traditional opponents on the political right - those offended by what they consider obscene or radical or otherwise taboo - but also from the left - radical feminists calling for the suppression of pornography, members of minorities banning language they consider psychologically damaging, and various other proponents of so-called political correctness. These more recently minted censors are now to be found within such former bastions of free speech as the universities and even the American Civil Liberties Union. This urgently important book is not a mere collection of legal cases; neither is it a history of free expression or a polemic from either left or right. It is rather a wide-ranging report on - and analysis of - the many kinds of conflicts throughout our country between the illusion that this is a land of unfettered free speech and the reality when that illusion is acted upon. It is a book of many stories - of the continuing efforts to deprive students of Mark Twain's masterpiece, Huckleberry Finn, and of attempts to deprive other students of the right not to read books that offend them; of the well-intentioned rulings that result in speech codes and loyalty oaths; of the wide-spread lack of understanding, over the years, of such basic concepts as the marketplace of ideas and of the overriding value of untrammeled speech. Free Speech for Me - But Not for Thee is a book about fear, duplicity, some courage, a lot of hypocrisy, and a good deal of irony. It is a book of dramatic confrontations, of people acting, for better or for worse, on one of the most important of our domestic battlefields. And above all, it presents hopeful, practical suggestions for ways toward saving perhaps the most fragile of our cherished freedoms.

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Eric Nelson

The founding fathers were rebels against the British Parliament, Eric Nelson argues, not the Crown. As a result of their labors, the 1787 Constitution assigned its new president far more power than any British monarch had wielded for 100 years. On one side of the Atlantic were kings without monarchy; on the other, monarchy without kings.

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Alan Brinkley

How did liberalism, the great political tradition that from the New Deal to the 1960s seemed to dominate American politics, fall from favor so far and so fast? In this history of liberalism since the 1930s, a distinguished historian offers an eloquent account of post-war liberalism, where it came from, where it has gone, and why. The book supplies a crucial chapter in the history of twentieth-century American politics as well as valuable and clear perspective on the state of our nation's politics today.