FACULTY/STAFF BOOKS

By Lawrence W. Reed and Burton W. Folsom, Jr. - Paperback, 340 pages. A collection of essays that surveys the economic history of the United States and the modern world. Along the way, they dismiss commonly-held fallacies and present the stories of the individuals who changed history and expanded liberty for everyone.

MACHIAVELLI AND POLITICAL THEORY UNDER THE ENGLISH REPUBLIC - By Paul A. Rahe. Paperback, 422 pages. This book examines four thinkers; John Milton, Marchamont Nedham, James Harrington and Thomas Hobbes, situates them with regard to the novel species of republicanism first championed in the early 1500s by Niccolo Machiavelli, and examines the dept that he and they owed the Epicurean tradition in philosophy and the political science crafted by Arab philosophers.

THE LIFE OF CHARLES CARROLL - by Bradley J. Birzer. Hardcover, 286 pages. Birzer masterfully captures Carroll as being a man of supreme intellect, imagination, integrity, and accomplishment, while at the same time, reassesses the most controversial aspects of him: his aristocratic position and his cirtiques of democracy.

Edited with an introduction by Bradley J. Birzer and John Willson - Hardcover, 508 pages. Author James Fenimore Cooper argues that the real American should be one rooted in virtue, honor, and honesty, transcend time and historical era. Cooper's thoughts on republicanism remain as relevant today as they were in the 1820s and 1830s.

Edited by Ronald J. Pestritto - Paperback, 283 pages. Unlike many other books about the American founding, this work emphasizes social compact theory's coherence and intelligibility, and convincingly argues that the political ideas of the American Founders cannot be properly understood without a comprehension of social compact theory and the exalted place it held in the construction of the American system of government.

By Ronald J. Pestritto - Paperback, 327 pages. This book contains some of the most important essays and speeches from the leading figures of national progressivisim. Students and scholars will find this reader to be an invaluable resource on the charateristics of progressive thought and the role of progressives in the development of the Amerian political tradition.

THE TWILIGHT OF CONSTITUTIONALISM AND THE TRIUMPH OF PROGRESSIVISM - By Paul D. Moreno. Paperback, 349 pages. This book tells the story of constitutional government in America during the period of the "social question." After the Civil War and Reconstruction, and before the "second Reconstruction" and cultural revolution of the 1960s, Americans dealt with the challenges of the urban and industrial revolutions.

WHAT AMERICA LEARNED FROM SEPTEMBER 11 AND THE WAR ON TERRORISM - By Victor Davis Hanson. Paperback, 218 pages. This book, which opens with an article asserting that the United States, like it or not, was now at war and had the moral right to respond with force, will stimulate readers across the political spectrum to think more deeply about the attacks, the war, and their lessons for all of us.

KEY INSIGHTS OF INSPIRING LEADERS - by Robert Blackstock. Paperback, 120 pages. Blackstock summarizes the book in these words. "For the past twenty years I have taught a course at Hillsdale College on leadership. The course, Readings in Leadership, Power, and Responsibility, uses great works of literature and history to view and analyze leadership: Leadership big and small, good and evil, effective and poor. Students brought much to the experience including their intelligent, inquiring minds, humor, determination, kindness, and good will. In one sense, we have been a community of learners in which my wife, Jackie, and I have been privileged to labor for decades. Students had their roles and we had ours. Student and teacher: those were the boundaries within which we and they did our jobs. In another, richer, sense though, we have been friends with a shared, high, good, and noble purpose; friends of the sort that Aristotle describes in The Ethics as he plots the course for human happiness. Surely, these students have been a rich source of my happiness.In the pages of this little book we find some of the greatest leaders the world has seen and some of the worst. We'll examine the qualities that made them great and that made them fail. We'll examine the intellectual leadership of Plato and Aristotle, the unflinching but troubled leadership of Alexander the Great, the uplifting leadership of Christ, and the worrisome yet instructive teachings of Machiavelli. We'll see visionary rhetoric, monstrous hearts, blinding pride, unbridled passion, and inspiring discipline, courage, and service.For over forty years I have enjoyed the company of Hillsdale College students, faculty, and staff. Day in and day out, year after year, they have enriched the fabric of my life. The laughter, the tears, the trials and triumphs, all have been a joy. This book is a small token of my thanks to them for their friendship."

NATURAL RIGHT, AND THE ART OF VIRTUE - By Kevin Slack. Hardcover. 305 pages. Benjamin Franklin's writings on politics are voluminous, and his own politics are well known, yet scholars debate, whether he had a political philosophy and, if so, what it was. This book is a study of Franklin's political and philosophical writings, tracing the development of his political thought and elucidating the political philosophy he came to embrace and put into practice. Kevin Slack argues that Franklin, despite his reputation as a wit and clever politician, examined the nature of politics, virtue, and morality more deeply than any scholar has given him credit for. Franklin, as Slack demonstrates, rejected metaphysics during a period of youthful skepticism, adopting radical skepticism, but later abandoned that view for a third alternative, Shaftesbury's common-sense philosophy. Engaging in a rigorous critique of religious and political authorities, Franklin rejected all authoritative claims but that of reason, which he used to investigate the nature of justice, or natural right. Slack shows here that Franklin was a thinker in the tradition of Socrates, and thus a political philosopher in the truest and highest sense.