QJAE: How Say and Jefferson Transformed American Political Economy

Who laid the intellectual foundations of American political economy in the early Republic—the Jeffersonians or the Hamiltonians? This article argues that American economic thought developed primarily along Jeffersonian lines, shaped through a transatlantic exchange with the French liberal school. Beginning with an 1803 correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and Jean-Baptiste Say, Jeffersonian thinkers drew on French liberal economic theory to defend free trade.

JLS: The Background, Failure, and Aftermath of Nozick’s Attempt to Justify the State

Perhaps the most fundamental question in political philosophy is whether any state is justified. The most impressive modern attempt to justify the state is in part 1 of Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Nozick argues that a minimal state, and only a minimal state, is compatible with our having natural rights. Here, I clarify the logic of Nozick’s strategy and show that his attempt to justify the state fails at every step. A central issue is that Nozick implicitly adopts a restricted, rather than absolute or even bounded absolute, conception of natural rights.

America’s Deadly Addiction to War

America has a deadly addiction to war. Since 1950, presidents of both political parties have sent American troops into conflicts across the globe, killed countless people, sacrificed the lives and limbs of American servicemen and women, and wasted trillions of dollars. Yet these wars have consistently failed to achieve the objectives proclaimed when the killing began.