The first 13 of the AEI Walter Berns Constitution Day Lectures are now collected in one volume. Given by distinguished scholars, judges, and political figures—and edited by AEI Senior Fellow Gary J. Schmitt—the lectures cover a host of topics providing a deeper understanding of the US constitutional order and its underlying principles. The volume also reissues a 2011 panel discussion by Christopher DeMuth, Leon R. Kass, and Jeremy A. Rabkin honoring longtime AEI colleague Walter Berns’s still relevant and important scholarship on the Constitution and the American republic.

As the US approaches its 250th anniversary, American discontent bubbles beneath the impending celebrations. Less confident in their own institutions and increasingly dissatisfied with their country’s international commitments, Americans are venting their frustration both at home and abroad. Yet this disaffection rumbles at the same time the US has achieved unparalleled wealth and unmatched global power. Why the disconnect?

In this landmark volume, Nicholas Eberstadt answers that pressing question. Drawing on decades of extraordinary scholarship, he lays out the nation’s “human arithmetic” in demographic, social, and economic terms.

He demonstrates that 21st-century America, for all its marvels and blessings, is nonetheless beset by a “New Misery”: the practical and moral dilemmas of wealth in the absence of well-being. New social afflictions hide in plain sight—among them the astonishing flight of millions of men from the workforce and the surge in criminality, with over 20 million former felons living in our midst. 

In America’s Human Arithmetic, Eberstadt offers a compelling and frightening diagnosis of modern social dysfunction. He shows that the United States’ best years may yet be to come—but not if Americans are unwilling to face the challenges their human arithmetic lays bare.

In this edited volume, Mackenzie Eaglen brings together top foreign and defense policy voices in Washington to address the ever-growing resource-strategic mismatch evident in US defense policy. This project is designed to provide the administration with immediate and realistic solutions to bolster America’s military and restore its flagging strategic and conventional deterrents.

The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of American independence, yet the nation’s founding is controversial now in ways it has not been in decades. The American Enterprise Institute offers a major intellectual and educational project to reintroduce Americans to the unique value of their national inheritance.

In the fifth volume of this series, legal scholars and political scientists discuss how the American Revolution both perpetuated slavery and created the conditions for its abolition. While hundreds of thousands of African Americans remained enslaved at the end of the Revolutionary War, the Declaration of Independence’s assertion of human equality galvanized slavery’s opponents and laid the groundwork for increasingly egalitarian definitions of American citizenship.

Considering how the Declaration shaped antislavery thinkers and politicians such as Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln and informed the 14th Amendment demonstrates how the American Revolution enabled a “new birth of freedom” in the 19th century.

Poverty. Illiteracy. Crime. Unemployment. Riots.

Big cities so often appear to have terrible problems, and Americans have a long history of convincing themselves that urban areas are in crises and that the federal government must do something to improve matters.

Edward C. Banfield argues the conventional wisdom is incorrect. In The Unheavenly City Revisited, he presents rigorous analyses showing that “by any conceivable measure of material welfare the present generation of urban Americans is, on the whole, better off than any other large group of people has ever been anywhere.” He furthermore argues that there is little evidence that the billions of dollars of government spending is improving matters. Indeed, well-intended government actions have proved harmful in some instances.

The Unheavenly City Revisited cautions policymakers that their biases may affect their perceptions of America’s metropolitan areas. Improving the lives of people in cities through government action is an exceedingly complex enterprise. Government officials and citizens alike must be realists about what government action can achieve.

The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of American independence, yet the founding is controversial now in ways it has not been in decades. 

The American Enterprise Institute offers a major intellectual and educational project to reintroduce Americans to the unique value of their national inheritance. In the fourth volume of this series, legal scholars and political scientists examine the many ways in which the founding generation understood the “unalienable rights” immortalized by the Declaration of Independence.

Although the Declaration described the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as a “self-evident” truth, this characterization belied the Revolutionary era’s complex discourse on the origins of political rights and their role in sustaining a political community.

Delving into these debates reveals how the American Revolution encoded a productive tension between individual rights and communal responsibilities at the nation’s founding.