We encourage a deep understanding of the ideals that inspired America’s founding generation as well as a study of how leaders have adapted these ideals to new challenges and introduced new principles that Americans embrace. We foster debate about how these ideals have guided the United States, where the nation has fallen short of these ideals, and how they should inform our future.
What ideas most deeply shape and animate the center’s work? While not an exhaustive list, we are especially committed to studying and advancing knowledge of the following:
Ordered Liberty
American life balances individual freedom and the need for social order. An ordered liberty ensures that freedom operates within a framework of laws and institutions that protect the rights of all and maintains peace and fairness.
Democratic Self-Governance
The United States is founded on the idea that the power of government originates with the governed — as President Abraham Lincoln put it, "government of the people, by the people, for the people." The American system of government gives its citizens the authority to direct their government through voting, participation and representation.
Rule of Law
Aristotle recognized the deep need for well-ordered polity to be a “rule of law and not of men.” The generality, stability, and impersonal nature of law provides a check against the vicissitudes and frequent humiliations of purely personal forms of authority.
Justice
The classical conception of justice is to render to each what is due. But what is due? That is a question whose answers require investigation into the social contexts from which our most pressing obligations emerge: family, polity, religion.
Unalienable Rights
Our founders rightly recognized that justice requires acknowledgement and respect for those rights that pertain to us simply in virtue of our shared human nature. While often honored more in the breach than the observance, our highest ideals found profound expression in Lincoln:
“If you have been inclined to believe that all men are not created equal in those inalienable rights enumerated by our chart of liberty, let me entreat you to come back.”