Along with being both timely and timeless, the critical importance of Mark Levin’s latest, Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America, rests in its unique ability to empower and inform the Conservative, or activist, political junkie, and average citizen with a genuine interest in contemporary American politics.

Timely because it cuts to the heart of the political struggle playing out in 2012, timeless in that it’s a concise yet thorough primer addressing the two core philosophies that drive all American politics, the depth of understanding of both Liberalism and Conservatism and the critical struggle between them it provides represents a wealth of information and insight to empower the Conservative and political activist of today.

From government in general, to the particulars of the American experiment embodied in our Declaration of Independence and Constitution, Levin extensively quotes unique and important thinkers, such as Plato, More, Hobbes and Marx on behalf of the utopianist view; with thinkers like Locke, Montesquieu, de Tocqueville and others representing the individualist, or Conservative view as we know it today.

Interspersed with extensive, insightful commentary by Levin himself, one comes to understand the bedrock, theory and practice of two very different political ideologies and how they apply to contemporary American politics playing out on a day-to-day basis, as well as in every election year.

Broadly at issue is, how will man structure himself, so as to function within a society. The utopianist would hold that said society must be structured from the top down, with rules, roles, regulations and laws all purportedly designed for the common good being issued from on high. The individualist, free-thinking, or conservative view would hold that, at the core of all civil society rests the individual, with his natural rights and inclinations, both good and bad, the ideal society being represented by a governmental authority that manifests the least amount of control possible, so as to empower the freedom, happiness and productivity of the individual.

By tracing the development of these two critical schools of thinking from their earliest beginnings, in theory, practice and thought, following them right up to today, one comes to understand American society as existing within a polarity between the two competing schools, with every political decision, be it a vote, or government mandate, as impacting precisely where within said polarity an American must live out his, or her life every day.

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Today marks Constitution Day. On 17 September 1787, in Philadelphia, the Framers of the American Constitution added their signatures to the document they had produced, and soon thereafter it was dispatched to the Continental Congress for consideration by the states. On this day, it is appropriate that we, their heirs, reconsider their handiwork and ask whether ours is still a constitutional government.

In their deliberations, the Framers confronted one great question, and it was largely on this question that the debate between the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists during the ratification period turned. Can one establish an enduring republic on an extended territory? This is the question that Americans in this crucial period wrestled with.

As I have argued in earlier posts here and here and, in much greater detail, in my recent books Montesquieu and the Logic of Liberty and Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift, the Americans had reason to worry. In the late eighteenth century, it was almost universally agreed that what they were attempting could not succeed. Such was the argument that Montesquieu advanced in the first part of his authoritative book The Spirit of Laws, and he had grounds for advancing such a claim. Athens and Sparta were situated on territories of no great size, and the same could be said for early Rome and for Lucca, Florence, and Venice in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

Of course, late republican Rome was an exception to the rule. Under the late republic, nearly everyone in Italy was a citizen, and that polity ruled the Mediterranean and beyond. But – as both Machiavelli in his Discourses on Livy and Montesquieu in his Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline and Spirit of Laws had pointed out — Rome was also the exception that proved the rule. It was a small republic that, by dint of conquest, came to be situated on an extended territory; and soon after it had expanded, it collapsed. The Framers of the American constitution faced a great challenge, and this they and their opponents among the Anti-Federalists knew all too well.

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We have come a long way in the last twenty months. The President of the United States, his Chief of Staff, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and the Majority Leader in the United States Senate have done for the Republican Party what no Republican could have accomplished. Just as rigor mortis was about to set in, they brought the old corpse back to life. For their efforts on our behalf, we should be forever grateful.

It is easy to lose perspective. It is easy to forget the dire straits in which the Republicans found themselves in and for some time after November, 2008. On the first Tuesday of that month, they were soundly defeated. The Democrats controlled the Presidency and both houses of Congress. In time, when Al Franken was seated and Arlen Specter turned coat, the Democrats would attain El Dorado – a commanding majority in the Senate capable to bringing a filibuster to a screeching halt.

The Republicans initially thought that to get along they would have to go along. Had Nancy Pelosi thrown a little patronage their way when the so-called “stimulus” bill was being put together, had Barack Obama intervened to insist that she include earmarks for compliant Republicans in the House, a great many of them would have voted for the measure. It is to her that we owe their solidarity on the occasion of the vote. She is responsible for the fact that on that occasion they presented themselves to the world as a party of principle. If the Tea-Party Movement, which sprang up in the immediate aftermath of the bill’s passage, was not as resolutely hostile to the Republicans as it was to the Democrats, it was because Pelosi and her minions wanted vengeance, sought it, and got it.

Even when the Tea-Party Movement had emerged, the Republicans were not quick to realize what was in the offing. On 2 May 2009, some six months after the election, Jeb Bush emerged from a meeting with Mitt Romney and House Republican Whip Eric Cantor to announce that it was time for the Republicans to give up “nostalgia about the past” and to leave Ronald Reagan and all that he stood for behind. “You can’t beat something with nothing,” he observed, “and the other side has something. I don’t like it, but they have it, and we have to be respectful and mindful of that.”

Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney, and Eric Cantor may have been slow to grasp what was going on, but it would be a mistake to assume that they are dopes. It was not until early August in that year that I was willing to admit to myself that a political realignment in the Republicans’ favor was a serious possibility; and, as I noted in a piece posted in the aftermath of the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in early September, I was even then almost entirely alone. At that convention, I had attended a panel on Barack Obama’s first year as President at which not one of the distinguished students of American politics on the panel had in their prepared remarks even mentioned the Tea-Party Movement. And when I asked a question about it, I received a perfunctory answer. It was odd, my interlocutor remarked, that such a movement had emerged in the absence of institutional support. It was, I thought, very odd, very odd, indeed.

Now, thanks to Barack Obama, Rahm Emanuel, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid, the Republicans appear to be on the verge of an historic victory.

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In earlier posts – here, here, and here – I drew attention to the pre-eminence of Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu in and for a time after the eighteenth century, and I suggested that at least two of the reasons for his pre-eminence are still pertinent today. There is at least one other such reason, and it, too, deserves careful consideration.

In The Spirit of Laws, Montesquieu pays exceedingly close attention to the political psychology regnant within the various forms of government that he examines. Republics have as their psychological principle, he tells us, virtue or love of the fatherland and its laws; and, when this fails, they collapse. As we have just seen, monarchies have as their principle the love of honor; and, when monarchs make holding public office degrading and demeaning, they subvert their own authority. And by the same token, despotisms have as their principle fear, and they are corrupt through and through. In The Spirit of Laws, all of this is made crystal clear.

But when it comes time for Montesquieu to specify the principle or passion that sets in motion “the republic concealed as a monarchy” that he discovered when he visited England, he is ostentatiously silent. Eventually, however, in oblique fashion, he will tiptoe around the question.

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In earlier posts – here and here – I drew attention to the pre-eminence of Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu in and for a time after the eighteenth century, and I suggested that at least one of the reasons for his pre-eminence is still pertinent today. There are other such reasons, which I addressed at length in Montesquieu and the Logic of Liberty and in Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift, and they, too, deserve consideration. I will discuss one such here.

Montesquieu’s The Spirit of Laws is a large book, and it is difficult to know which elements within it are the most salient. There is, however, one passage in which Montesquieu tells us outright that what he is about to say is fundamental to everything else that he says. “I,” he writes near the end of the first of the work’s six parts, “shall be able to be understood only when the next four chapters have been read.” Then, in those four chapters, he argues that forms of government are closely related to the size of the territory that must be governed. Republics are well-suited to polities small in extent; monarchies, to polities of intermediate size; and despotisms to polities great in size.

The pertinence of this claim to the situation of the American Founding Fathers should be obvious. Especially in modern times, this would appear to mean that republicanism can only be viable in mountainous places such as Switzerland, where the geography virtually rules out the establishment of anything but tiny states. It is, then, in no way surprising that the debate between the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists turned to a considerable extent upon the question whether it is somehow possible to establish a viable republic on an extended territory.

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In an earlier post, I bemoaned the fact that very few well-educated Americans know who Montesquieu was – and I drew attention to the fact that the author of The Spirit of Laws was more often cited by the American Founding Fathers than any other figure, that his magnum opus was quickly translated into virtually every European language, and that he exercised an influence in England and on the European continent during and for a time after the second half of the eighteenth century no less profound than that which he exercised in our own country.

Needless to say, there were reasons for Montesquieu’s pre-eminence. That his thinking deserves attention today may be less obvious, but it is no less true. To begin with, Montesquieu was the first to grasp the conditions within which modern war is waged, and his insights bear on the history of our country and on its situation today.

Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu was born on the 18th of January 1689, at a time in which the Glorious Revolution was underway in England, and he came of age in the course of the War of the Spanish Succession, which lasted from 1701 to 1713. He watched from afar with dismay as England’s duke of Marlborough repeatedly annihilated the legions of Louis XIV, the Sun King of France: first at the battle of Blenheim on 13 August 1704, when Montesquieu was fifteen; then – in the brief span of years stretching from 1706, when Montesquieu was seventeen, to 1709, when he was twenty – at Ramillies, Oudenarde, Lille, and Malplaquet.

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Every once in a while one gets an insight into the sad state of higher education in the United States.

Back in 2008, when my agent was attempting to market the manuscript of what recently appeared in two companion volumes under the titles Montesquieu and the Logic of Liberty: War, Religion, Commerce, Climate, Terrain, Technology, Uneasiness of Mind, the Spirit of Political Vigilance, and the Foundations of the Modern Republic and Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and the Modern Prospect, he ran into an unexpected snag.

None of the editors at the trade presses he approached had ever even heard of Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu.

That came as a shock to me; and when I repeated the story to other students of the eighteenth century, they expressed amazement and dread.

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