Charles Kesler: Can We Save the Republic?

Summary

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Podcast Summary: "Charles Kesler: Can We Save the Republic?"

Podcast: Hillsdale College Podcast Network Superfeed
Host: Larry Arnn (President, Hillsdale College)
Guest: Charles Kesler (Senior Fellow, Claremont Institute; Editor, Claremont Review of Books; Professor, Claremont McKenna College)
Release Date: March 3, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode is an in-depth conversation between Larry Arnn and Charles Kesler about the trajectory of the American republic, conservatism, constitutionalism, and the lessons from classical thinkers like Cicero. The discussion weaves personal history, insights into academic mentorship, and serious reflections on the principles and endurance of self-government in America. At its core: What threatens the republic, what can save it, and is there hope?

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Kesler’s Early Life and Intellectual Formation

• Upbringing: Kesler describes growing up in West Virginia in a large, middle-class family. His father passed away when he was 10 ([02:23]-[02:54]).
• Early Intellectual Influences: A teenage Kesler became a devotee of William F. Buckley Jr., subscribing to National Review at age 12, and managing to interview Buckley at age 16 ([04:15]).
  • Quote: “Once I entered Buckley World, I didn’t leave.” – Kessler ([09:02])
• Harvard Experience: Opted for Harvard over Yale, partly due to Buckley’s recommendation letters, but mostly drawn by Boston’s historic significance and Harvard’s academic environment ([07:31]-[09:00]).
• Mentors:
  • Harvey Mansfield: Taught Kesler how to read books "seriously," paying close attention to argument and structure.
    • Quote: “Serious books have an idea or have a plan to them … it’s necessary to pay very close attention to the author’s words and arguments …” – Kessler ([13:30])
  • Ed Banfield: A contrarian academic, influential through his book The Unheavenly City ([11:23])
  • Judith Shklar: Not a conservative but a rigorous, eclectic thinker ([16:11])
  • Kesler underscores the importance of learning from lectures, noting seminar value but emphasizing strong lecturer role models ([17:01]).

2. On Academic Life and Teaching

• Kesler taught at Claremont McKenna, known for being a thoughtful, engaging lecturer ([17:10]).
• Arnn recalls an impactful Kessler lecture on the Federalist Papers:
  • Quote: “It was still, to this day the best lecture about the Federalist I’ve ever heard. … you revealed to me purposes behind the Federalist Papers …” – Arnn ([18:01])

3. On Cicero, Rome, and Political Thought

• Kesler wrote his doctoral thesis on Cicero, teaching himself Latin to do so.
  • Cicero bridges theory and practice—a thinker and a statesman ([20:25]).
  • Cicero’s end—dying as a “martyr to the fading republic”—draws a parallel to American concerns of decline ([21:10]-[22:06]).
• Cicero’s legacy:
  • Rome as a gradual, adaptive republic—unlike the single-founder city-states admired by Plato/Aristotle ([22:10]-[24:30]).
  • Cicero’s Republic imagines “smart, well-read, practical politicians”—an anticipation or template for the American founders ([26:34]).
• Natural Law:
  • Cicero not first to cite “nature and law,” but he made it a public doctrine of justice ([27:11]) and influenced the American founders and anti-slavery movement ([30:10]).
  • Cicero’s On Duties (de officiis) “for a thousand years, was probably the single most influential work of political philosophy in the west” ([27:11]).

4. American Decline and Renewal: Lessons from Cicero

• The Founders, influenced by Cicero and the tradition of “cycle of regimes,” designed a system to resist decline: separation of powers, checks and balances, etc. ([33:08]-[36:19]).
• America’s “original constitution” is robust but has been overlaid by a Progressive “living constitution,” a legacy of Woodrow Wilson:
  • Quote: “This kind of constitution can't be harnessed by an 18th-century straitjacket of checks and balances and separation of powers.” – Kessler ([36:22])
• The erosion of constitutional safeguards challenges whether the American republic can be sustained. However, Kesler sees unique resources in the U.S. model for renewal ([38:32]).

5. Rome and America: Institutional Crisis

• Kesler draws a parallel between Rome’s Senate losing power to strongmen (Caesar, Pompey) and modern America’s shift towards executive and administrative power ([38:37]).
• The “administrative state”: rule by unelected, expert bureaucracies—contrary to the spirit of republican self-government ([49:39]).
  • Definition: “The administrative state is the state run by the administrators, the state run by experts, by spokesmen for groups and interests that never hold, never hold an election, but which the experts...assert themselves on the basis of their knowledge, their expertness.” ([49:39])
• Supreme Court pushback: Recent rulings have rolled back the powers of administrative agencies and reasserted traditional checks and balances ([53:01]-[54:42]).

6. Defining “Republican” and Populism

• Republicanism: “Rule of the people, but of the people sober, not drunk.” ([41:22])
• On populism:
  • Quote: “With populism, properly understood, comes constitutional… guardrails of various kinds.” – Kessler ([42:02])
  • Trump movement called “America First”—not isolationism, but a focus on rule for Americans’ interest ([43:21])

7. Sources of Hope and Renewal

• Kesler expresses reserved optimism:
  • The U.S. still has fundamental constitutional integrity.
  • Recent Supreme Court decisions and broadening of the conservative voter base, especially among minorities, signal positive trends ([44:49]-[45:56], [54:42]-[56:14]).
  • The role of truth, virtue, and educational communities (like Hillsdale) in fostering republican citizenship ([45:43]-[47:00]).
  • Cultural indicators, from YouTube craftsmen to engagement with figures like Charlie Kirk, signal a hunger for virtue and truth among young people ([46:14]-[49:06]).
    • Quote: “Truth has a power and it commands. That's not gone.” – Arnn ([46:43])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Reading and Teaching:
  • “He [Mansfield] really helped me to be a self-consciously close reader.” – Kesler ([15:36])
• On Cicero:
  • “Cicero was a great political philosopher as well as a statesman. One of the few examples of someone who operated at the highest level … in one life.” – Kesler ([20:25])
• On American Constitutional Durability:
  • “The American Constitution is sturdier than the Roman Constitution. We have a lot of resources baked into the cake of American self-government…” – Kesler ([36:19])
• On the Administrative State:
  • “Our democracy … is not that democratic anymore because … it requires rule by the few, not so much the wealthy … but the properly opinionated who've had the proper kind of education or indoctrination to function as our ruling class.” – Kesler ([49:39])
• Reason and the People:
  • “It is the reason alone of the people that must be placed in control of the government. The passions must be controlled by it.” – Arnn quoting Federalist 49 ([44:30])
• On Hope:
  • “I think better of the American people than some of [our friends] do. I don't think we're as far gone as some … think.” – Kesler ([44:56])
  • “Must never do [despair].” – Arnn ([45:48])
  • “Truth has a power and it commands. That’s not gone.” – Arnn ([46:43])

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Important Timestamps

• [02:23]-[04:14]: Kesler's early encounter with William F. Buckley Jr.
• [07:31]-[09:00]: Choosing Harvard over Yale, encountering top conservative scholars
• [13:30]-[15:36]: Lessons from Harvey Mansfield: how to "read a book"
• [20:25]-[22:06]: Cicero, the statesman-philosopher; martyr to the Roman Republic
• [26:34]: Cicero’s Republic as template for the American Founding
• [30:10]: Cicero's 18th-century influence; American founding, anti-slavery
• [33:08]-[36:19]: Parallels between Rome’s and America’s constitutions; designing against decline
• [36:22]: Rise of the Progressive “living constitution”
• [41:22]-[43:24]: Defining republicanism and populism; Trump as "America First"
• [49:39]: The problem of the administrative state and the recent Supreme Court responses
• [46:43]-[49:06]: Cultural indicators of healthy American renewal (YouTube craftsmen, young people’s response to Charlie Kirk)
• [44:49]-[45:56]: Kesler’s guarded optimism for the future

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Conclusion

This episode is a wide-ranging meditation on how the American republic can resist decline, drawing deep lessons from Cicero and the Founding generation. Kesler argues that the original Constitution’s structure remains fundamentally sound, but Americans must rededicate themselves to its principles and resist the technocratic “administrative state.” Despite the challenges, both Kesler and Arnn maintain a guarded optimism: truth, constitutional principles, and the character of the American people still provide grounds for hope.

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Transcript

[Larry Arnn]

Hello. Welcome to the Larry Arn Show. That would be I. This is Hillsdale College. My guest today is one of my oldest friends, Charles Kessler. He's a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute. He's the editor of the Claremont Review of Books. He's a professor at Claremont McKenna College, and he's a heck of a guy.

[Hillsdale College Promo Voice]

Great books, great people, great ideas. Learning about these things is critical to being a well educated human being. And we can help with the Hillsdale Dialogues. Each week, Hillsdale College President Larry Arne joins radio veteran Hugh Hewitt to discuss topics of enduring relevance. And from time to time, they also talk about current events, but always with an eye toward more fundamental truths. And they want you to tune in to a conversation like no other. The Hillsdale Dialogues are posted every Monday on the Hillsdale College Podcast Network at podcast hillsdale.edu. that's podcast hillsdale. Edu, or listen via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever, wherever you find your audio.

[Scott Bertram]

Hey there, it's Scott Bertram, host of the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. On this week's program, we talk with John Bachmann, the host of John Bachmann now on Newsmax. He'll tell us all about Ronald Reagan's successful invasion of Grenada and his new book, Turning How Reagan Liberated Grenada and Won the Cold War. And Nathan Herring returns from Hillsdale's physics department will discuss the life and accomplishments of of great physicist James Clerk Maxwell. All that this week on the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. Find it at Podcast hillsdale. Edu or wherever you get your audio, including YouTube.

[Larry Arnn]

Hello, Charles. Welcome. How are you?

[Charles Kessler]

Larry, old friend. Good to see you. Thank you.

[Larry Arnn]

Charles is an academic and serious one. He's a professor of political philosophy. And we're going to learn where he came from and how he learned what he knows and some things about his life. And then we're going to talk about some of those things he knows and we're going to talk about America and its condition and its future and conservatism in America. How's that?

[Charles Kessler]

Great.

[Larry Arnn]

He knows all about that stuff.

[Charles Kessler]

I can hardly wait. Hardly wait.

[Larry Arnn]

Yeah, yeah. Where do you come from?

[Charles Kessler]

I come from, well, originally from West Virginia, which was a great place to grow up. And we had a large family and surrounded by good middle class American people. And it's a great place to visit, too, but it was a great place to live.

[Larry Arnn]

So your upbringing, and I know your late mother, Mary, she was an awesome woman. Never met your dad. He died when you were young, I think.

[Charles Kessler]

Yes, right when I was 10.

[Larry Arnn]

Interesting guy. And you went off to Harvard. How'd that come to be?

[Charles Kessler]

Well, I'd never been to Harvard before when I put it on my list. But it seemed like a good place. It had a good reputation. And I didn't apply to as many schools, you know, as many students do now. I had a short. I had a list of, I don't know, maybe five or ten schools that I did apply to. But I was boosted in my application chances, I'm sure, by a letter of recommendation from, of all people, Bill Buckley, whom I met when I was 16 years old in West Virginia. Strangely, he was visiting to give a college lecture at a college that is now defunct, the West Virginia Institute of Technology, which is now part of West Virginia University. I mean, it still exists, but not as a separate college. And this was 1973. I was a senior in high school, the editor of the high school newspaper, one of the editors of the high school newspaper. And I wrote him, Buckley, asking for an interview. I had become a Buckley aficionado already from seeing him on television, on Firing line.

[Larry Arnn]

At age 16.

[Charles Kessler]

At age 16. And I think I subscribed to National Review maybe when I was 12, something like that. You know, you've heard the expression loaded for bear. Well, I was loaded for Buckley. You know, I had read his books that I could get my hands on. I had read the magazine. I'd seen him on television. And he was very impressive from afar especially. But as I found out, close up, too. So I sent him a letter of introduction and asking for an interview. When he came to West Virginia, I did not hear back. It was Sunday afternoon. The lecture was supposed to occur the next day, Monday morning. So I figured I had missed my chance. But with typical Buckley flair, that after Sunday afternoon, a little van pulled up outside my house in a small town in West Virginia, and a Western Union man, brown and yellow uniform. Those were the colors nobody else was using, I guess. Got out and came up to the front door and gave me something which I have never received again, a telegram. And the telegram, you know, in very short sentences, said, meet me after the lecture. We'll do the interview in the car on the way to the airport. Because Buckley was leaving West Virginia as quickly as he could. I guess not. An unreasonable attitude, perhaps. And so it happened, and it was a splendid interview. It went very well. We got to the airport and his plane was late, so we had an hour to kill, which was great from my point of view, spending another hour with Bill Buckley, who was quite a famous man in those days and still Is, in a way. We went to the bar and I was, as I mentioned, 16 and so I couldn't drink anything except maybe a Coke, but he had a couple of gin and tonics probably, as I recall. And at the end of the extra hour we had together, he asked me a really striking and amazing question. He said, I would like to write you. Well, where are you going to college? And I said, I have a list. And he said, well, I would like to write you a letter of recommendation to Yale, which was his alma material, a question I was not expecting and was not really prepared to assimilate. But I did the best I could and I thanked him and he did write a letter for me to Yale, which in the course of my, you know, bumptious youth, I somehow negotiated into a letter to Harvard and Yale from Buckley. And I don't really recall the gory details of how I got him to write two letters of recommendation, but somehow I did and both were successful. I got into both and I visited them and decided, somewhat to my embarrassment, not to go to Yale, but to go to Harvard.

[Larry Arnn]

Do you remember why?

[Charles Kessler]

Well, yes, because I visited them both and Boston, you know, even though Harvard is not really in Boston, it's in Cambridge, but it's just across the, the river and easily reached, you know, by subways. I loved Boston. I loved the whole sort of American revolutionary, historical, you know, connections of Boston. And New Haven was a city that had undergone urban renewal. So it was a terrible place. It was, you know, Yale is a small island surrounded by very distressed neighborhoods and not at all attractive to me as a 16 or 17 year old maybe by that time. So it was an easy choice. I mean, I didn't know who was teaching, of course, at Harvard or who was teaching at Yale. I just knew what it was like to see them and to spend. I spent a night at each place in a dorm room with other, with you know, actual students, Yale, Harvard students, and I, I. But I learned it was a great stroke of genius to choose Harvard over Yale because Harvard had a handful of really first rate conservative academics teaching there, none of whom I probably heard of or maybe only heard of in those days. But I'm talking about men like James Q. Wilson and Harvey Mansfield and Ed Banfield, Sam Huntington and others.

[Larry Arnn]

So you were a conservative by then?

[Charles Kessler]

I was already a conservative by then. Yes, I was. Once I entered Buckley World, I didn't leave.

[Larry Arnn]

But you were on your way there when you were 12. And I'd just like to comment that was an incredibly nerdy thing for a

[Charles Kessler]

12 year old to do, certainly, yes. Nerdy or presumptuous or something. There are many adjectives, maybe one could apply to myself in those days. But it was educationally a great decision because Yale wasn't the school. It was, I would say, when Bill was there himself, way back in 19, class of 1950, when Wilmore Kendall was there, his mentor, and a few other professors who were maybe not conservative, but certainly world class that he studied with. But it was somewhat diminished, I would say, from what it was when he was there. Whereas Harvard was much better in 1970. Let's see, when did I go 1974. Than it had been, you know, in 1950.

[Larry Arnn]

How'd you find them? I mean, Harvey is a political philosophy guy, as are you. Yeah, you might say why that what that is. But how did you find those guys?

[Charles Kessler]

Well, it was partly luck, dumb luck. You know, I. The first course I took in government was the Intro American Government, which James Q. Wilson presided over. Actually, there were. It was like a circus there. There were four lecturers, four professors who took turns teaching different parts of American politics. Doris Kearns Goodwin, assistant professor, was one of my four professors back then in that course. She was not very good, I didn't think. But Wilson was great and I enjoyed him. I enjoyed that course. And it led me to take another course in government, which was Harvey's modern political philosophy course the next semester. So my second semester at Harvard is when I found him. And that led, you know, one thing led to another and I discovered Ed Banfield, who was really great and who was James Q. Wilson's teacher only after all that. And I was quite close to Ed and he was a great guy and, you know, a wonderful contrarian. And his whole, his whole academic career was refuting people and refuting popular but erroneous opinions of one kind or another.

[Larry Arnn]

I remember a lecture that Manfield gave in Claremont when I was there. And there's this one sentence he said, two sentences that epitomized him from. In the book the Unheavenly City, which is about urban renewal and how we've destroyed it in America. Urban in America by government policy. He quotes Lowell Weicker, senator from Connecticut. He says, we have built with government funds the slums of America, but at least we did something. That's the first sentence. And then Banfield looked up and said. Precisely. That was the whole thing. So Harvey Mansfield, he's a great academic, still alive?

[Charles Kessler]

Yes. No. Harvey, who was young then, didn't retire until he turned 91. And how he managed to hang on that long is a tale not only of health and a good constitution in his case, but also the neglect of the Harvard dean who didn't realize how old Harvey was really. And so he kept, he was never under any pressure to retire, so he just kept going. Thank goodness. And he had many generations of students. When my, my own graduate students presented me with a fest shrift, an event which was celebrated here at Hillsdale two years ago, 2024, we had a wonderful kind of Kessler fest and my students came and we were all reunited and had a great time. Larry was there, of course. Thank you for your sponsorship of that happy event. But when I told Harvey that my students were giving me a festrip, he said modestly to me, oh, that's wonderful. My students have given me three festrips over the course of my career and say, well, that's hard to beat, you know.

[Larry Arnn]

Yeah, hard to beat. Well, you could do it. What'd you learn from him, tell about that?

[Charles Kessler]

Well, Harvey was probably the greatest lecturer I ever had. He's incredibly consistent and serious minded and he, he writes witty and sometimes challenging difficult lectures, but they are really if compelling and you have to work to understand them. Keep up with him because he has a very fast mind, but you want to, and you, and you do keep up with him and follow him. But what he taught me, of course, a lot of things, but most importantly how to read a book, because it's, you know, one can, it's easy to read a book poorly or without the concentration and the penetration you really need. But when you learn, as I did from him, that, you know, serious books have an idea or have a plan to them and it, it's necessary to pay very close attention to the author's words and his arguments in order to discern what is really the purpose of the book and what it's trying to say to the most astute reader. Once the scales fall from your eyes and you can see how a really intelligent writer writes for really intelligent readers as well as for ordinary readers, you can begin to, you know, you see and learn so much more from books. And that's what he taught me. He's by demonstration, essentially showing me how it was done. As he read and taught Machiavelli and Aristotle and Tocqueville and the Federalist Papers and many other of the classics of political philosophy. He really helped me to be a self consciously close reader.

[Larry Arnn]

And you studied with him in both undergraduate and graduate school?

[Charles Kessler]

Did. Yes, I stayed at Harvard a long time getting all my degrees There a triple Harvard, as some people say, and was very happy to do so. I mean, I could have gone elsewhere, and I thought about, of course, applying elsewhere for PhD studies and things, but in the end I decided there was really no place better at that point than at. At Harvard with Harvey Mansfield and also Judith Sklar, whom I studied a lot with, too.

[Larry Arnn]

Yeah, you always praised her.

[Charles Kessler]

Yes, who was very bright and not. Not at all the same politics as Harvey, who was a conservative of, you know, of distinguished to die, but who was eclectic in her methods and in her politics, but who also had very high standards and from whom one could learn quite a bit. And a good. She was a good lecturer, too.

[Larry Arnn]

And it was lectures, right?

[Charles Kessler]

Yes. I think I learned a lot more at Harvard from lectures than I did from seminars. Seminars were often taught by graduate students who could be very good. Of course, I studied with Bill Kristol, among other famous graduate students at Harvard then, and he was a very good teacher. And a few others who went on to make sterling reputations for themselves.

[Larry Arnn]

So my daughter and my elder of two sons in law studied with you. They say that you are a fabulous lecturer.

[Charles Kessler]

I'm not nearly as good, I think, as Harvey at his best, but I try. And we, of course, we had smaller classes than Harvard did, typically, so they probably saw me in seminars where I lectured. But there was a lot of discussion going on, too, which is a slightly different beast.

[Larry Arnn]

I'll tell our audience that. I met CHARLES probably in 1980, coming back from England, a married man, and I don't know if I've ever heard him give. I actually have. I remember once to the Publius program at the Claremont Institute, you gave a lecture about the Federalist Papers. And it was a real lecture. And that is to say, you talked for an hour

[Charles Kessler]

without Cersei's.

[Larry Arnn]

Yeah. It was still, to this day the best lecture about the Federalist I've ever heard. And it opened a world to me, and I had studied it with serious political philosophy people in graduate school. But that what you said before, you saw that if you read a book, right, it's a serious book, you can find out what it's about. What you revealed to me was purposes behind the Federalist Papers that were evident in the way that they were constructed and composed in addition to the particular things they said.

[Charles Kessler]

Right.

[Larry Arnn]

And that was. I still think that way about that today.

[Charles Kessler]

No, it's a methodological dilemma for modern man, that when you're reading the books of highly intelligent people, you often are introduced to those books by Scholars, secondary books and tertiary books, scholars who are not nearly as intelligent as the people they're writing about. And so you, you see these wonderful books by, you know, heroically gifted authors through a kind of dirty lens, you know, and things which ought to be bright and distinctions that ought to shine out at you are muddied. And so they're, they become much less interesting and people are fooled into a kind of consensus at a level that is much lower than the actual authors level of understanding and sharpness.

[Larry Arnn]

I went, I had a young man many years ago now. He was a philosophy major at Hillsdale College. And I swear the boy thought he knew everything about everything. And he was always given to the, you know, if you'd make a point to him, he would reply with. And I remember he said once. Well, Plotinus would say. And I said, what did he say? And he said, what do you mean? I said, well, you just said he would say. Did he say something that makes you think that's what he would say? And he said, are you expecting me to know the whole of Plotinus? And I said, well, if you're going to come in the President's office and talk about him, you probably should.

[Charles Kessler]

Well, it's an occupational hazard of professors.

[Larry Arnn]

Yeah. Cicero. You wrote your doctoral thesis on Cicero.

[Charles Kessler]

Yes, and I taught myself Latin in order to do so, but I found Latin relatively easy to learn and you know, you don't have to speak it and so, you know, it goes faster to learn a language like that. And it's a beautiful, of course, language. And Cicero wrote, you know, classic, complicated Latin, Roman Latin. And you, I mean, I certainly couldn't have done it without learning Latin. And Cicero was a great political philosopher as well as a statesman. One of the few examples of someone who operated at the highest level, or almost the highest level of political philosophy and statesmanship in one life. Your hero. Churchill said, you know, you have to nail your life to the cross, either of thought or action. But Cicero sort of did both and was able to pull it off, which is very hard. Of course. Ultimately he lost his life as the Roman Republic came to an end. And he, he died as a kind of political martyr to the fading republic. It died willingly in the sense that he couldn't escape Mark Antony's assassins who caught up to him. But in a gesture he'd seen many times in the arena and admired, he, he didn't struggle against the assassins. He offered his neck to them because there was, there was no escape and no possibility of overpowering them. So he accepted his Fate as a martyr.

[Larry Arnn]

And what does he contribute to the story of political thought?

[Charles Kessler]

Well, first of all, he helps us to make sense of a great question mark in the history of political thought, which is Rome. You know, Rome was in many ways lay athwart all of the, the most distinguished examples of ancient city states. It was not a small republic. It was not founded all at once by one founder like Lycurgus in Sparta or others in Athens and so forth, Theseus and others. But it was founded little by little over time, over hundreds of years, and constantly reacting in a way to the developments in political life in its own neighborhood. But it went on to conquer the world and to conquer all of these virtuous city states like Sparta, Athens, Carthage and others that Aristotle memorialized and honored in his political science and you might say Plato in his as well. How did, how did Rome manage to do that? And it's a question that Cicero was interested, very interested in and spent a lot of time thinking about and writing about. And how could his practically his other big question was how can, if it can be saved from the disintegrating tendencies that had begun to overcome it in its last century, Rome lasted, the Roman Republic lasted almost 500 years, but the last hundred were not good there. I mean, there was a kind of low grade and then high grade civil war going on for the last hundred years in Rome. And the downfall of such a large, various and warlike republic certainly could have been forecast out of Plato and Aristotle's account of the drawbacks of a large complicated republic like that. And Cicero was aware of all of that. But he was very interested in adapting or using, you might say, Platonic and Aristotelian political science to reform Rome or to stop the downfall and the decay of Rome. He failed as a practical matter, but he left an indelible record of what the Roman Republic had been at its height and might have been again if it had been over able to overcome the tendencies that were gradually overpowering it. And so we, in his Republic, he wrote a republic, a dialogue, sort of an imitation of Plato's Republic. But the difference is none of the characters in Plato's Republic is a politician. Exactly. Who's a statesman. All of the characters in Cicero's republic are based on actual Roman statesmen, some very great and grand Roman statesman of about 100 years before Cicero's own life and his times. And so what you have in the Republic in a way is a kind of anticipation of something like the American founders, a generation or a group of really Smart, well read, well thought, but practical politicians who had had experience running a country and indeed, creating a country. And so what Cicero imagined in the Republic was a kind of anticipation of what, in reality, America was lucky enough to have in the late 18th century. I mean, to have in one room John Adams and Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin and others of that ilk, of that quality, who had devoted themselves not only to learning, but to political. Learning political philosophy, and to something that they were able to use in practice to win elections and to write laws and to shape a people. Rome was not actually much like that.

[Larry Arnn]

It.

[Charles Kessler]

It was largely a fictional account that Cicero gives us of Rome in, you know, 129 BC or so. But America was like that. I mean, it shows you that there was a kind of natural possibility there which even though Rome was not able to realize itself, Cicero was able to imagine a country that could. And he didn't imagine America, but he imagined a sort of template for the founding fathers, which itself is very interesting, I think.

[Larry Arnn]

Yeah. Is Cicero the first philosopher to conjoin the words nature and law?

[Charles Kessler]

No, I don't think so. I mean, he's not the first, but he's the first to conjoin them thematically and to take it seriously, to develop it as a public doctrine of justice, the notion that you could reduce the complexities of the moral life and the political life into a legal form and talk about them as a set of rules, a set of laws. And it helps. Once you have the notion of a divine one, divine God who is a legislator, the natural law falls into a kind of scheme which underlines it and affirms it and directs it in a way that wasn't possible for Cicero writing before Christ, before Christianity had assembled itself. But Cicero saw the need for a kind of public doctrine of right and wrong which would guide statesmen and would inform citizens in an intimate and powerful way. And he developed this idea in the Republic and in another dialogue called the Laws, and above all, in what was once his most famous work, which is a book on duties de officiis in Latin, which, you know, for a thousand years, was probably the single most influential work of political philosophy in the west, because most of Plato's dialogues were lost in the Latin west for. For a thousand years or more, and had to be rediscovered, you know, in the. In the 11th and 12th centuries. And people hadn't seen the politics in the west, they'd only read excerpts from it that others had preserved. And they. But when they got access to the Greek or to the Arabic translations of the Greek which were then translated into Latin. There was a kind of the so called 12th century Renaissance in, long before the famous Renaissance. But maybe just as important, the rediscovery of classical texts and especially texts of Aristotle and some of Plato for the first time in the West. And so all of that became, all of that sort of explains why Cicero receded, you might say, in the consciousness of the west after you had Plato and Aristotle's entire works. You know, it was a big, that was a big moment. But he enjoyed a vogue later on too. In the 18th century was probably the most Ciceronian century in intellectual terms in a long time.

[Larry Arnn]

The century of the American founding, the

[Charles Kessler]

century of the American founding, the century of, you know, the beginning of the anti slavery or abolitionist movements in, in England and in America and across the West. And Cicero suffered a decline in reputation dramatically in the 19th century, mostly because the leading classical historians in the world started coming from Germany, not from France or England, which had a kind of fondness for Cicero. But the Germans thought the Germans really identified more with Caesar Kaiser, as they would call it, and, and less with, and more with empire and less with republican self government of the kind that Cicero had fought for.

[Larry Arnn]

Churchill writes once, those brave, loyal, disciplined German people at your throat or at your feet.

[Charles Kessler]

Yes, right, looking for a Caesar.

[Scott Bertram]

Hey there, it's Scott Bertram, host of the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. On this week's program, we talk with John Bachman, the host of John Bachman now on Newsmax. He'll tell us all about Ronald Reagan's successful invasion of Grenada and his new book Turning How Reagan Liberated Grenada and Won the Cold War. And Nathan Herring returns from Hillsdale's physics department will discuss the life and accomplishments of great physicist James Clerk Maxwell. All that this week on the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. Find it at Podcast Hillsdale or wherever you get your audio, including YouTube.

[Hillsdale College Promo Voice]

Great books, great people, great ideas. Learning about these things is critical to being a well educated human being. And we can help with the Hillsdale Dialogues. Each week, Hillsdale College President Larry Arne joins radio veteran Hugh Hewitt to discuss topics of enduring relevance. And from time to time, they also talk about current events, but always with an eye toward more fundamental truths. And they want you to tune in to a conversation like no other. The Hillsdale Dialogues are posted every Monday on the Hillsdale College Podcast Network at podcast hillsdale.edu. that's podcast hillsdale.edu or listen via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you find your audio.

[Larry Arnn]

Your dissertation contains some powerful parallels Between Cicero and the Declaration of Independence, and now you've just named another one, two more. One is everywhere in America there's talk of decline. But Cicero forecast a bunch of statesmen getting together to figure out what to do about that. Expand on that a bit. What does Cicero teach us today about the state of America and what do we do?

[Charles Kessler]

Well, Cicero's generic point was that now we have something which politically was unavailable until his time. We have political science, we have political philosophy, and we have a body of reflections on the typical problems of different kinds of governments and about the possible solutions to those problem. So we learn about, for example, what the ancients called, you know, the cycle of regimes, that no government lasts forever, that governments suffer from inherent tendencies to decline which are not inevitable, but which are patterns. And once you understand the pattern, you can, as a political thinker, begin to devise ways to slow it down, to reverse it. You can't probably eliminate it completely, but you can refresh society. You can rehabilitate the good, the strengths and the energy of a good form of government. And so Cicero was interested in that, and the Renaissance was very interested in that, generally speaking, you know, reversing the cycle of decline. And in America we have a constitution that was written by people who were to some extent connoisseurs of political decline. They had read Cicero, they had read Livy, they had read Tacitus, they were aware of the problems that Britain seemed to be suffering. Imperial overreach, imperial arrogance, imperial corruption. And they having all of those, all of ancient political wisdom and a lot of modern political wisdom to draw upon. The founders of the American Constitution deliberately wrote a constitution with many safeguards against decline at the popular level and especially also at the government level. So you have separation of powers, you have checks and balances, you have bicameralism, judicial independence, and so forth. So the American Constitution is sturdier than the Roman Constitution. And I think we need to realize that we have a lot of resources baked into the cake of American self government that are, have been of assistance to us in holding onto it and will be, I think, in the future of assistance to us in holding onto it. But you know, you have to continually return to the wells that your fathers have dug and dig them deeper and draw from them. And that's our problem today is not so much in the original Constitution or its tendencies, but in the Constitution that has overtaken it in American, impractical in real American politics in the last century or so.

[Larry Arnn]

So describe that. What, what is it that's overtaken so

[Charles Kessler]

this is, this is my hobby horse, of course. I've written a book about this, written a lot about this crisis of the two constitutions, as I call it. So we have the first constitution, which is the Founders, what I call the Founders Constitution, which means the one from 1787, 88, as amended and as informed by all of the moral and political principles contained, let's say, in the Declaration of Independence, restated in the Gettysburg Address and in other famous documents and in moments of American history. That's the original Constitution. But since then we have had a kind of overlay of a second progressive constitution, which the progressives call the living constitution. This is a phrase that comes from Woodrow Wilson only living constitutions, he said, must be Darwinian in, in theory and in practice. And that means they must be constantly open to adaptation to, you know, changing to reflect new problems, unanticipated problems, and sometimes totally unknown problems in the past. And this kind of constitution can't be harnessed by an 18th century straitjacket of checks and balances and separation of powers. This has got to be a constitution free and open to change and to growing, where growing doesn't mean improving, it means changing in as the forces of politics play upon it, you know. And our problem, I think stems from forgetfulness of that first political science that informed the original Constitution and a. An incredulous belief in the Darwinian constitution Wilson bequeathed to us and many other progressive, you know, thinkers and statesmen.

[Larry Arnn]

The changes are big, right? I mean, we don't make our laws the same way anymore.

[Charles Kessler]

No, we hardly. I mean, you could say we have this in common with Rome. Rome suffered from an institutional crisis in the last century, which was that the Senate could no longer hold its bear its weight and it and its constitutional responsibilities because it was being overshadowed by the generals who ran the armies and who extended Roman power to the provinces. Caesar being the most famous one. But before Caesar was Ptolemy. Not Ptolemy, sorry, there was a ton. That's Egypt. No, but was Pompey. Yes, Pompey Magnus, Pompey the Great. And before Pompey there had been Sola and before Solomarius. So there are a series of generals who would not abide essentially by the Roman Constitution, the unwritten constitution of Rome, which centered power, you know, conservative power, you might say, in the Senate. And so the Senate, as the Senate weakened, the restraints inside the Roman Constitution faded away. And you. The process of degeneration accelerated. America has many more safeguards in its original constitution that we still rely upon and we need to rely upon even more, perhaps going forward, but which have been undermined and discredited to some extent by the new political science that came out of the Progressive era and the Progressive movement. And that's, you know, it's. Our task is remembrance and rededication, I would say, to the truths of the older American political tradition and a skepticism, at least a healthy skepticism, towards the premises and the solutions offered by modern American politics, going all the way back to the New Deal and the Great Society and the New Covenant. The slogan of President Clinton or the New Foundations, which was the slogan of Obama's administration, it didn't stick. You know, neither the slogan nor the, nor the administration. But we have a great task in America if we're to retain Republican government. And it's a responsibility which every citizen bears, even though, you know, only a few are in a position to act on it and to even to understand it, because it does take a certain education.

[Larry Arnn]

Now, right, define Republican.

[Charles Kessler]

Yes, right. Small R. Republican, which means, you know, rule of the people, but of the people sober, not drunk. And therefore the people conscious of their limitations and of their. The rules of right and wrong that ought to guide the society, including individual rights, of course, and protections of natural rights and civil rights that America has embodied for so long and so. Well, not perfectly, of course, but still.

[Larry Arnn]

Are you a populist?

[Charles Kessler]

I'm not. Well, of course, everything depends on what you mean. Populism is one of those slippery words. Yes, I would say I'm, I'm open to rule by the people, if that's what populism means. But again, I say the people sober, not the people drunk. And so you, with populism, properly understood, comes constitutional, you know, what do we call them. Call them now guardrails of various kinds. Trump, though, doesn't. President Trump, I don't think, has ever used the word populist or populism, at least I don't recall him ever using that term. He calls himself a nationalist sometimes and a common sense conservative, but he, I don't think he's ever taken a stand on populism per se. And he. The name of his movement, which you will recognize is not the Trump. He doesn't call it the Trump movement. He calls it America first, by which he doesn't mean Charles Lindbergh. America First. Isolationism, by the way, but really something more commonsensical than that. You rule in America. You rule for this. Your job is to help the American people, you know, maintain their liberty and their virtue.

[Larry Arnn]

He wants to do something again, you

[Charles Kessler]

mean President Trump, make America great again.

[Larry Arnn]

And the way you just described our situation, it's rather like the situation Lincoln faced, isn't it? Needed restoration.

[Charles Kessler]

Yes, that's right. You know, the problem with self government is you have to govern yourself. And so you. You know, there, in America, there is no hereditary aristocracy, there is no monarchy. There's no other political class really, than the people. And so we have to restrain ourselves. There's no one else who's going to do it. And we have to not just restrain ourselves, but exert ourselves also properly in politics. And there's no one else who can do that for us either. So we have to be both assertive and restrained, depending on the problem and the circumstances. And that's a tall order. You know, it's why Republican government is the hardest kind of all to maintain, because you don't have other classes that you can call in when you need them and then dismiss when you're through with them. You know, it's just us.

[Larry Arnn]

I have three favorite passages in the Federalist Papers. I probably learned part of this from you. One of them is, it is the reason alone of the people that must be placed in control of the government. The passions must be controlled by it. So not. Not drunk, sober.

[Charles Kessler]

That's Federalist 49.

[Larry Arnn]

Yeah.

[Charles Kessler]

For those of you following at home, you know.

[Larry Arnn]

Yeah, there we go. It's a tall order, isn't it? But you sound somewhat optimistic about all that.

[Charles Kessler]

I think I. Compared to many of our friends, yes. Because I think. I think better of the American people than some of them do. I don't think we're as far gone as some of our friends and. And many of our enemies think. And also because I think the constitutional structure, even though it has eroded somewhat over the past hundred years, still has a fundamental integrity to it, which I hope will be viable and will be, you know, a tremendous help to steering the ship. Have stayed back onto course in coming years, but there are no guarantees.

[Larry Arnn]

I studied Winston Churchill a lot, and that makes a person.

[Charles Kessler]

Yes, you have.

[Larry Arnn]

Yeah. Makes a person reject despair.

[Charles Kessler]

Yes, no, that's right.

[Larry Arnn]

Must never do that. And so I look around for hopeful things. I find a lot of them around here, like the kids around here, faculty around here. Yes, very good. But I'm going to mention two lately. One of them is because I took up woodworking of late. You know, I'm no good at it, but it's a lot of fun. A fellow introduced me to a guy on the Internet. I can't remember the name of the man, but the YouTube channel is called the Essential Craftsman.

[Charles Kessler]

Oh.

[Larry Arnn]

And the point is you should just like go look up the YouTube of that guy. He's a, he's a blacksmith and a carpenter. Very old fashioned. But also he is a moral philosopher, and I use those terms. He's really amazing. And go look up the YouTube where he teaches you how to make a broadsword for your granddaughter. And that guy's got millions of people following him.

[Charles Kessler]

Wow.

[Larry Arnn]

And I went, wow. The second is the reaction of young people to Charlie Kirk, who became a student here, learned a lot, very assiduous in his studies. And the point is, truth has a power and it commands. That's not gone.

[Charles Kessler]

Yes. And I'll tell you this story. So I was teaching freshman American government last semester when Charlie Kirk was assassinated. And so I had a class of 20 students, more or less, and I asked them very naively, know how many of you before his assassination had ever heard of Charlie Kirk? And I frankly was surprised. Every student, liberal, conservative, regardless of what, you know, sort of political background or passion they had, every student put his hand up. They all knew about Kirk. They all, you know, to some extent followed Kirk's career, his, his presence online especially, and so forth. And so later I asked him, how many of you watched the funeral of Charlie Kirk? And not, not 100% of them this time, but I would say 75% of them said yes. And strangely enough, to me at least that was a lot more in that 75%. A lot more women than men. Yeah, I mean, one hears a lot about young men, you know, and not just white men, but the young men who sort of followed Kirk and are turning to some flavor of conservatism or some of Trumpian, you know, self assertion in our day. But a lot, there are a lot of women who, a lot of young women who were interested in Kirk's career and his life and his death. And so, yes, I mean, I wouldn't have, certainly would never have predicted either of those, those polls, their results. And so I'm, yeah, I'm happy to be surprised and pleasantly surprised by some good trends in America.

[Larry Arnn]

Yeah.

[Charles Kessler]

But I think too, I would, I must say that I've been surprised by how good the Supreme Court has been and how many, you know, limitations on the administrative state, which is something we haven't really talked about, but limitations on the administrative state they are applying in opinions which we haven't seen, you know, since the New Deal, basically.

[Larry Arnn]

So describe, you should describe the administrative state. And we can talk for a minute about these Limitations.

[Charles Kessler]

Yes. Well, the administrative state, this is an ugly term and I don't really like the term. I wish there were a better term, but I, I haven't found one yet. At least the administrative state is what used to be called the rational state, but has suffered a comedown from the 19th century. And the administrative state is the, is the state run by the administrators, the state run by experts, by, you know, spokesmen for groups and for interests that, that never hold, never hold an election, but which the experts, the rulers of these groups, assert themselves on the basis of their knowledge, their expertness. And administrators mean rule by the wise, Basically, those who claim to be wise and who often have PhDs from previously respectable universities, not Hillsdale, and who claim to rule America better than the people themselves could ever rule it. Because the people have prejudices. They're ignorant, they're not focused, they're not up to date, they're not schooled. This is the people that Hegel called the rabble. And in a way, you know, modern day progressives look at the world as divided between those who know and the rabble, and they're in favor of those who know ruling. And you know, that is a, it's a highly artificial and, you know, obviously undemocratic way, unrepublican way to look at politics. But it is increasingly the way I think progressives and professors in the universities look at it, that better to be ruled without the consent of the governed, if the governed are rabble and not capable of, of giving a reasonable consent to law or direction to society. And so, you know, our democracy, to use a term much loved by the left these days, our democracy is not that democratic anymore because it, it requires rule by the few, not so much the wealthy, although it turns out many of them are quite wealthy, but the properly opinionated who've had the proper kind of education or indoctrination to function as our ruling class. This is a development of late American politics, 20th century American politics, anticipated and condemned by Tocqueville in his famous book Democracy in America. Centralized administration is one of the bugbears of that book. One of the bad tendencies of American democracy. It has to be checked. And a healthy spirit of liberty and local self government, Tocqueville advises as an alternative, as an antidote to this kind of centralized administration.

[Larry Arnn]

And I know of two things the court, one thing the court has done lately and another one people think they might be about to do. And if you state what those two things are, you can see how powerful this administrative state Is the first is they have overturned a doctrine that an administrative agency passes a rule and then prosecutes you under that rule within its own headquarters and then adjudicates the dispute you bring. And then if you ever get to the Article 3, the regular courts, they will defer to the judgment of the professional administration. And that means abandon hope all ye who enter here. That's been overturned.

[Charles Kessler]

Yes. And that's the complete antithesis of separated powers as defended in the, in the Federalist. And it's the, it is, as the federal says, the very definition of tyranny that powers, judicial, legislative and executive should be concentrated in the same set of hands and the same people make the law, who enforce the law and who judge the enforcements of the law. But that is sort of the formula for government by experts.

[Larry Arnn]

And that's, and that's, that's a mighty power if you get it. And they had it and they've lost it in the last year. Well, for the time being until they packed the court. The second one is this idea that an administrator gets appointed and the president, the elected head of the executive branch, cannot dismiss that person. And that's up for grabs right now.

[Charles Kessler]

Yes, we'll see how bold the court wants to be. But the court is courageous, has been courageous already, as you say, in rolling back some of the great gains to the administrative state in, in the past, really of the past century, you might say. And so I didn't think they would be that courageous or that clear sighted, but so far, so good. And then the other cheery developments is how broadly the Trump's victory in particular was in 2024. You know, it, he made huge inroads into the, not only the white working class, but all, every bit of the working class, black, Hispanic, other races. And so, you know, beginning to suggest that a real majority could endure, could emerge from the Trump years that would be enduring and steady and that we could sort of count on a conservative majority in the country in the future. That, I have to say, looks a little bit less likely than it did on election night. I think Trump may have lost some ground electorally, but it, it's not clear that that's the case and, or, or that even if it's true that it couldn't be recovered. So I'm, you know, cautiously optimistic still about that.

[Larry Arnn]

Okay. Well, I want to say I've enjoyed this. I want to say that young people out there who wish to live in a free country would do no worse than reading, never better than reading the works of Charles Beter Kessler, thank you

[Charles Kessler]

for being with us. Thank you very much.