Incidentally, Levin’s talk of our Jim Ceaser, and the man’s own funny post below reminds me, since Christmas and Hanukah approach, you need start your strategic books-I-want hint-dropping with friends and family, and a lot of you new to Postmodern Conservative might want to angle for books from our best writers, such as Jim. There are several books by him that really are classic for understanding America’s constitutional republic. I’ll first give you the one that’s been more on my mind recently, Nature and History in American Political Development. In a 90-page essay he gives you one of the quickest explorations of how Straussian thought applies to understanding America. Perhaps I shouldn’t begin this with Strauss, as no previous knowledge of him is needed to understand what the book lays out, and Strauss is only very briefly discussed. Figures like John Adams, Abraham Lincoln, the Progressives, and Richard Rorty, are the ones more prominently discussed. His exploration of how liberal thinkers of the last seventy years have abandoned recourse to what he calls foundational principles is not to be missed. If some conservative parents were to ask for a single book recommendation for their smart son or daughter frustrated by the typical college treatment of America, this might well be the one that comes to mind first. Reading it alongside Michael Zuckert’s The Natural Rights Republic is another thing I would recommend.

Another must-read is Political Science and Liberal Democracy. This is a wider-ranging feast. Classic explanations for why we have to understand America’s regime by way of compound-terms, for how to read the Federalist on morals, for how to read Tocqueville, for how to compare the classic approach to political science exemplified by Aristotle, Montesquieu, and Tocqueville with the empiricist sort the rules the roost today, and for why Robert Dahl’s socialistic understanding of democracy is so preposterous. You’ll see how it all holds together.