Book: The Never Realized Republic - Political Economy and Republican Virtue by Peter O'Lalor

categories: Book, American Colonial History, British Colonial History, Common Law History, Revolutionary Generation, Alexander Hamilton, Federal Convention, Constiutional Convention, Founding Fathers, Adam Smith, , American History

Peter O'Lalor

about this book: The sages of the American Revolution had produced the means to insure that liberty would be the foundation of social, political, and economic opportunity. To establish justice, was to return to first principles of the English Commonwealth and its Duty of the Sovereign.

The Revolution sought economic, political, and social justice that was not to be found under England's political economy of Mercantilism. Subsequently, Capitalism; to the Founding Fathers, was to usher in an age to benefit all of humanity. The fall from England's first principle, resulted in a classical example of Aristotelian perversion, and the Polybian promise, of the cycle of virtue and corruption. Founding principles were resorted to when survival necessitated the remedy of political evils. Falling away from those principles was of course, corruption.

To remedy political evils, republics consistently sought the first principles upon which their polity was founded. This is why James Madison made it so clear that the federal Constitution "was less in the addition of NEW POWERS to the Union than in the invigoration of its ORIGINAL POWERS." However, a counter-revolution occurred in the early 1790s as the newly born Federalists, quickly seized control of the economy; and laid to rest the aims of the Revolution, and replaced the age old Sovereign's duty of obligation, with an arbitrary authority, that pursued the expansion and domination of trade backed by an elite military. This is the original print version, (2004) of the (2012) Kindle version (The History of Virtue and Corruption).