As Far as Republican Principles Will Admit: Essays by Martin Diamond

Ed. William A. Schambra. Washington, D.C.: AEI Press, 1992.

When Martin Diamond decided the time had come to collect his essays of some twenty years into a single volume, he selected as its title, As Far as Republican Principles Will Admit. That selection was the only piece of guidance he left for those whose task it became to finish the project after his sudden and tragic death in 1977. But, as Diamond would have insisted, it was guidance enough. He composed titles for his essays with the utmost care and deliberation well before he began writing them, because an essay’s title was, for him, its end or purpose—its reason for being written. And just as the end or purpose of a political institution, when fully elaborated, explains every facet of its behavior, so the title of a piece, he insisted, should suggest or imply its entire argument.

The essays in this volume, then, have been selected and arranged to elucidate the author’s carefully and deliberately chosen title. As Diamond foresaw, once we have explored the title’s meaning we do indeed have a glimpse of his full argument about the nature of the American political order.

1. Editor’s Introduction by William A. Schambra

Part One: Foundations: The Democratic Republic

2. Democracy and The Federalist: A Reconsideration of the Founders’ Intent

3. The Federalist: 1787-1788

4. The Separation of Powers and the Mixed Regime

5. Conservatives, Liberals, and the Constitution

Part Two: Decentralist Federalism and Republican Virtue

6. What the Framers Meant by Federalism

7. The Federalist’s View of Federalism

8. The Ends of Federalism

9. The Federalist on Federalism: “Neither a National Nor a Federal Constitution”

10. The Forgotten Doctrine of Enumerated Powers