A Sovereign Colloquy

About the Book

Prominent in the constitutional history of the United States is a strong commitment to pluralism through decentralization; and this political method, this presumption in favor of the local as against the central or national, enabled citizens of the early Republic to fashion and refashion their many institutions of self-government, of liberty, and of justice. A Sovereign Colloquy: Political Reason and the American Founding opens with five interlocking essays, each about a different aspect of the exceptional power of innovation which Americans once wielded in pursuit of their great trinity of public ideals.

The application of American ideas and methods is then illustrated, and the fate of American federalism foreshadowed, through a narration of the major public events and controversies in the long struggle over slavery from Colonial times to the eve of the Civil War.

The book closes with a brief inquiry into the nature and limits of political reason, and an interpretation of the precautionary hypothesis implicit in the American tradition - that the creative but errant faculty of political imagination needs the disciplines imposed by decentralized government.

About the Author

Scott Rutledge is an attorney who lives and works in Texas.