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The Constitution in 2020: the Caesars or the Tudors?

By Adrian Vermeule

A trope of tyrannophobic political discourse compares the American presidency with the government of the Caesars. T.B. Macaulay addressed a comparison between the Caesars and the Tudor monarchs (Henry VII, his son, and his grandchildren) in terms both withering and illuminating:
It has been said … that the Tudors were as absolute as the Caesars. Never was a parallel so unfortunate. The Caesars ruled despotically, by means of a great standing army, under the decent

The Perverse Effects of Transparency?

Adrian Vermeule looks at the effects of transparency in Congress.

The Moral Force of Majority Rule

Adrian Vermeule, author of Mechanisms of Democracy and co-author with Eric Posner of Terror in the Balance: Security, Liberty, and the Courts, is a Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.

The technocratic politics of the American right

By Jason Blakely

Conservatives today often present themselves as populists running against a left said to be out of touch with the common people and enamored of technocratic rule by experts. This is, in fact, a longstanding critique found not only in grassroots ideological discourse but also in the work of conservative philosophers like Michael Oakeshott, who suggested that the left was […]