REPUBLICS ANCIENT AND MODERN: The third volume was good. Not quite as nifty as the first one (on ancient Greece). Haven’t read the second one yet. (Thhhppppttt to order! Rah to chaos!) Rahe is definitely pushing a thesis–several, in fact. For example, he argues fairly explicitly that Alexander Hamilton’s desire for a more centralized government–more national, less federal–would indirectly have strengthened economic ties in the US to the point that the Civil War might well not have happened. Many libertarians point to the Civil War as a moment of major state (as in The State, not as in states’ rights) expansion–war is the health of the state and all that; many also shy away from Hamilton because he seems like a precursor of today’s bloated federal government; Rahe’s argument is intriguing because Rahe also believes the current federal government (especially the judiciary) has way too much power. Thus he’s saying, If you’d just chilled out and given Hamilton his way, yes, you would have had a stronger federal government in the short term, but potentially a much smaller one in the long term, plus no civil war. (He doesn’t try any alternate-history stuff about whether slavery would have expanded, collapsed, persisted, or what. The people who do those What If? books should get him to write one about this.)

Anyway, that’s one thread of argument in the book. A more implicit claim is my old favorite, Ideas Have Consequences. (No, I’ve never read the book.) Rahe writes unabashedly intellectual history, the sort of thing that gets caricatured as “great man history.”

Perhaps the feature that most struck me as I finished the book was the extremely short time-span. Rahe highlights this by opening and closing his book with Winston Churchill, suggesting that liberal democracy is imperiled in our own time due to apathy and judicial oligarchy–Churchill faced a hard enemy whereas we face a soft one, and yet one can lose a republic by internal collapse as well as by military defeat. Rahe points out that “some fifty years after the ratification of the American Constitution, the twenty-eight-year-old state legislator [Abraham Lincoln] delivered a lecture to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois. He had evidently been reading The Federalist; he had apparently paused to reflect on the death pf James Madison less than two years before; and he quite naturally took as his subject on that occasion ‘the perpetuation of our political institutions.’ …He doubted whether the task of perpetuating America’s political institutions would soon require resistance against an aggressor: the United States was too far distant from its potential rivals and much too strong. ‘If destruction be our lot,’ he concluded, ‘we must ourselves be its author and finisher.’

“Lincoln raised this possibility because he perceived ‘something of ill-omen’ amongst his countrymen: ‘the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country.’ …

“Lincoln’s rhetoric in 1838, like Churchill’s almost exactly a century thereafter [with which Rahe opened the book], must have seemed to his listeners greatly exaggerated.”

There’s something startling about those raw numbers: 1787 to 1838 is almost 50 years, 1838 to 1938 is 100, the Constitution’s bicentennial was in 1987–and two hundred is, in the greater scheme of things, a very short time. By linking the Founders, Lincoln, and Churchill in time, Rahe was able to make me feel the fragility of a system that we’re conditioned to think of as solid and time-tested. By first making readers realize that the American republic is very young, he prepares us to consider that perhaps it is not so time-tested after all, perhaps it is still an experiment and thus not yet a success; and that, I think, prepares readers to question whether we have lived up to Benjamin Franklin’s famous challenge that the authors of the Constitution had given us “a republic, if you can keep it!” I commend this compress-time-through-biography approach (Churchill was 8 when Mary Todd Lincoln died, to give you a sense of how short a century can be) to history teachers if you think it will help.

Rahe is a fluid and convincing writer. Even his index is fun.