May * Real Clear Markets March 30, 2024 We’re in an era of growing hyper-polarization among America’s citizenry, and in the midst of what’s likely to be one of the nastiest political seasons in American history, if not the nastiest. [...] Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form.” Not long thereafter, back home in Virginia, Madison said this on June 20, 1788, in a speech urging ratification of the proposed Constitution: “I go on this great republican principle: that the people will have virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and intelligence. [...] To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without virtue in the people is a chimerical idea.” Madison’s conception of virtue as undergirding republican principle is rooted in the jurisprudential and constitutional notion of the Roman res publica or “public concerns” articulated by Cicero, and by subsequent thinkers like Machiavelli, James Harrington, and Algernon Sidn. [...] Sellers, Regents Professor of the University System of Maryland, declares that “republican legal theory remains America's central contribution to modern legal discourse, through the United States Constitution's practical demonstration that popular sovereignty may seek liberty and justice in pursuit of the common good, through the rule of law, checks and balances, a deliberative senate, and a stabl. [...] The views expressed in this Perspectives do not necessarily reflect the views of others on the staff of the Free State Foundation or those affiliated with it.
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