So if you could just start, just give us a thumbnail rendering of that debate that's going on today.

Absolutely.

So, of course, there are lots of books on Douglass, biographies of Douglass.

My book mostly looks at his views of the founding and the founders and the Constitution.

And particularly at this year, we're all talking about the founding because of the right to a 50th anniversary.

We've heard about a thousand times by now.

And so Douglass, you know, we debate about how we should view the founding and the founders given their complicity regarding slavery.

Now, his view is still

Who was he and how did he end up with that job, that critical job?

So he was really among the most colorful of the founders.

Morris was a peg-legged ladies' man with a really wicked sense of humor.

He was without question one of the funniest of the founders.

It's not a super high bar, but he was one of the funniest of the founders, along with Benjamin Franklin.

He was arguably the single most important person at the Philadelphia Convention that created the Constitution.

At the convention, he spoke more often than any other delegate.

What happened there? He obviously wasn't persuasive enough in regards to his opposition to slavery.

And what was driving that concern? I mean, I, I imagine it varied among the founders w- why they didn't think it would survive.

Yes, it did vary.

So my book focuses on four of the biggest names, Washington, Hamilton, Adams, and Jefferson, and each one has a different worry that was associated with them.

So Washington was disillusioned above all because of the rise of parties and partisanship.

Hamilton because he thought that the national government wasn't energetic enough or vigorous enough.

Um, Adams because he thought that the American people just lacked the requisite civic virtue to sustain a republican government.

And Jefferson, above all, because of the sectional divide that, uh, was laid bare by the expansion of slavery.

Historically speaking, how would you describe America's divisions today?

Here is Dennis Rasmussen again.

I think one of the most valuable and interesting aspects of Smith's thought is precisely that he recognized the real potential drawbacks and dangers of commercial society, the ways that commerce can produce great inequalities, the ways that wealthy merchants and manufacturers collude against the public interest, and above all, the way that the desire for wealth often leads people to submit to endless toil and anxiety in the pursuit of just frivolous material goods that will produce only fleeting satisfaction.

And so I think too many of the Chicago School thinkers, even today's self-proclaimed Smithians, read him as a mere apologist for commercial society, whereas I think he was anything but.

It's not that Smith didn't ultimately defend commercial society.

He absolutely did.

He's absolutely convinced that commercial society's faults, though real and important, are not nearly as numerous or as great as those of other forms of society, that the security and liberty and prosperity that commercial societies make possible constitutes a real improvement over the alternatives.

So wouldn't it be nice?

It would absolutely be nice, yes.