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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 inaugural volume of an eight-book series, renowned historians and political scientists explore what the contested idea of democracy meant to those who participated in the American Revolution. For some, democracy represented a particular way to order government, while others understood democracy to be a transformative principle that would serve as the philosophical bedrock of not just the new republic’s political institutions but its social and cultural ones as well.
Examining the democratic culture that was born out of the American Revolution can help us understand the framework within which we continue to debate the structure and purpose of the system of government that binds us together today.
Yuval Levin is the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, where he also holds the Beth and Ravenel Curry Chair in Public Policy. The founder and editor of National Affairs, he is also a senior editor at the New Atlantis, a contributing editor at National Review, and a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times.
Adam J. White is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on the Supreme Court and the administrative state. Concurrently, he codirects the Antonin Scalia Law School’s C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State.
John Yoo is a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute; the Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley; and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Contents
Introduction
Yuval Levin
1. A New Kind of Democracy
Gordon S. Wood
2. The Spirit of Independence and the Rhythm of Democratic Politics
Bryan Garsten
3. Democracy, Freedom, and the Declaration of Independence
Peter Berkowitz
4. The Adams Declaration: A Guide for Our Times
Danielle Allen
5. Lincoln’s Declaration and the Coherence of Democracy
Greg Weiner
About the Authors
About the Editors