America’s Founding Feud (And Why it Still Matters)
November/December 2025Jeffrey Rosen has made his mark as a journalist, best-selling author, and constitutional law scholar. But he says his most liberating role is the one that bars him from having political opinions. “It’s freeing,” says Rosen, who has served since 2013 as president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, located on Independence Mall in Philadelphia. “I’ve lost interest in my own opinions—and I had a lot of them when I was a journalist!”
The center was chartered by Congress in 1988 to promote awareness and understanding of the U.S. Constitution. But its educational mission came with a strict caveat—it must do its work on a “nonpartisan basis.”
Today, under Rosen’s leadership, the center is a hub for civil conversations about often-divisive constitutional questions, where scholars and advocates with vastly different points of view set aside red-blue hostility and simply share ideas.
This American tradition of choosing civil debate over alternatives such as political violence is a theme that Rosen explores in his most recent book, The Pursuit of Liberty: How Hamilton vs. Jefferson Ignited the Lasting Battle Over Power in America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2025).
Rosen’s love of the Constitution and American history was kindled at law school in classes taught by celebrated Yale professor Akhil Amar. But rather than going on to practice law, Rosen decided he wanted to write about it instead. During the following two decades, as legal affairs editor of The New Republic and staff writer for the New Yorker, Rosen became one of America’s most widely read legal commentators.
Today, along with his responsibilities at the National Constitution Center, Rosen is professor of law at the George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor of The Atlantic.
Liberty editor Bettina Krause recently talked with Rosen about his new book and about how the lessons of history can help us navigate today’s political controversies.
Bettina Krause: We’re living in what feels like an unusually polarized time, and I found it—somewhat perversely—comforting to read your book, with its accounts of other moments in American history, going all the way back to Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, when the nation was bitterly divided. So what was the disagreement between these two men and why is it important for us today?
Jeff Rosen: I’m so glad you found the book comforting, and I did, too—learning more deeply about our history, recognizing how profound those early disagreements were, and seeing that despite those disagreements, the leaders of the competing parties, Hamilton and Jefferson, ultimately respected each other and were committed to civil dialogue. It does give us hope in these challenging times.
The core disagreement between Hamilton and Jefferson was about the scope of federal power. Hamilton wanted to construe federal power broadly in favor of the federal government. Jefferson wanted to construe it strictly on behalf of the states. This led to different interpretations of the Constitution; Hamilton favored what he called “liberal” construction, and Jefferson, “strict” construction. And it also led to disagreements about the biggest policy issues at the time of the framing: how powerful the president should be, whether or not Congress could charter a national bank, and whether or not the president could suppress free speech. It’s so striking that those same disagreements between Hamilton and Jefferson over the scope of national power versus states’ rights, and liberal versus strict construction of the Constitution, have persisted throughout American history.
Krause: You show in your book that Jefferson and Hamilton, although they had profound disagreements, both feared the rise of an American “Caesar.” How far did that play into their respective approaches?
Rosen: I begin the book with a dinner party that defined America, attended by both Hamilton and Jefferson. Hamilton says to Jefferson, “Who are those three guys on the wall?” Jefferson says, “They’re my three heroes, the greatest men in history: John Locke, Francis Bacon, and Isaac Newton.” Hamilton pauses, and then blurts out, “The greatest man that ever lived was Julius Caesar.” Jefferson scribbles in his diary that evening, “This proves that Hamilton is for a monarchy bottomed on corruption.” And Jefferson goes on to found the Democratic Republican Party in opposition to the supposed Caesaristic ambitions of the Hamiltonian party.
It’s such a striking scene because Hamilton was almost certainly joking. As you say, he feared Caesar as much as Jefferson did. He’s afraid of a Caesar who will flatter the mob from below and persuade the people to surrender their liberty in exchange for cheap luxuries.
Jefferson feared a Caesar from above who will subvert elections and establish himself as a dictator for life. And he fears a crypto-aristocracy that will conspire with the president to rule by fiat from above.
Krause: Just listening to you now, I’m wondering about the Supreme Court’s current focus on originalism as a doctrine of constitutional interpretation—trying to excavate the original public meaning or the original intent of the Founders. Is that even a feasible project, given that right from the beginning there were competing constitutional visions?
Rosen: This is just the question that I was able to ask Justice Amy Coney Barrett last night at the National Constitution Center, because her new book is both a defense of originalism and a description of why she is an originalist. And strikingly, she acknowledged, as she does in her book, that there have been fundamental disagreements about the meaning of the text since the beginning. She notes the Hamilton-Jefferson debate over the national bank as an example of the disagreement between liberal and strict construction of the Constitution. She also acknowledges that early originalists, like her former boss, Justice Scalia, had defended originalism as a means of constraining judicial discretion and deferring to democratic outcomes. And she acknowledges that it hasn’t done that; that originalists can be quite aggressive in striking down laws, and that because you can make historical arguments on both sides of any case, originalism doesn’t necessarily constrain judges all that much. But she says she’s an originalist because she thinks that the text is law and her job as a judge is to interpret the text. I thought that was a very candid defense of originalism.
Krause: I wonder what Jefferson or Hamilton would think if they could see the American republic of today—the republic they helped create. What would they recognize as functioning more or less in line with what they envisioned? What would surprise them? What would horrify them?
Rosen: I’m going to have some humility in answering because people throughout history have insisted that Jefferson and Hamilton would’ve seen things the way they did—but who knows exactly what they would’ve thought! But let’s go back to Civics 101. I think it’s fair to say that both Jefferson and Hamilton would have been surprised at the current failure of checks and balances. Both anticipated that Congress would be the most dangerous branch; that it would, to use Madison’s words, “suck all power into its impetuous vortex.” And although they disagreed about how powerful the presidency should be, both saw it as a constrained office—a sort of chief magistrate who would execute the laws passed by Congress. And they saw the judiciary as the least-dangerous branch—as Hamilton put it, having “neither purse nor sword.” Although, again, they disagreed about precisely how powerful the judiciary should be.
But broadly, this sketch was embraced by both of them and by all members of the founding generation. Congress is going to legislate, the president will execute, and the judiciary will interpret the law, but with a very light hand.
Today Congress has stopped exercising its checking power; Congress has refused to check presidents of their own parties and has delegated vast swaths of administrative authority to the executive—starting as far back as the Progressive Era. The presidency has swelled to “imperial degrees,” to use Arthur Schlesinger’s phrase. It is asserting an ability to communicate directly with the people (which also started in the Progressive Era with Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson). And the presidency is increasingly using executive orders to achieve by fiat what it can’t achieve from a polarized Congress. The judiciary has become very aggressive in striking down laws passed by Congress and the states and has, more recently, embraced a very broad view of executive power that arguably goes far beyond what Hamilton himself anticipated. So, for all those reasons, I’m not sure they would’ve been happy about today’s separation of powers.
Krause: I think people have been surprised in recent times that there are not as many explicit guardrails on executive power in the Constitution; that restraints of power seem to rest more on norms or even on the personal characteristics of the officeholder.
Rosen: There’s a reason that the Founders said that the republic can survive only if our leaders have virtue. Their model, of course, is George Washington, the greatest man of his age because he’s the most self-composed and most self-mastered. When there was a rebellion in the Continental Army at Newburgh, he appealed to the troops for “prudence and temperance”—classical virtues. The Founders thought personal self-government was necessary for political self-government. This isn’t some feel-good civics lessons; they really thought that unless our leaders were self-disciplined and self-mastered and put the public interest above their own selfish, partisan, or egoistic interests, they were going to try to turn themselves into Caesar, the way every unconstrained leader has done throughout history.
So you can say we’ve been fortunate in American history. Broadly, our leaders have respected democratic norms, and they’ve not tried to install themselves as dictators for life.
Krause: In your book you write that there’s always been a strain of American illiberalism. And recent events show, on both sides of the political spectrum, the expression of illiberal ideas. What is fueling this current bent toward illiberalism? And what does history teach us about dealing with it?
Rosen: What is fueling it is passion over reason, sectarian self-interest, and a rejection of the liberal idea. It’s a spurning of the truths of the Declaration of Independence, which hold it to be self-evident that all people are created equal, that we’re endowed by our Creator with natural rights, and we create limited governments to secure those rights. And that when government threatens these rights, we have the right to alter and abolish it.
We’ve seen, throughout American history, illiberal strains on the left and the right from the mobs who have risen up violently against the rule of law; from Shays’s Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion to the Southern defenders of slavery, like John Calhoun, who called slavery a “positive good,” and rejected the Declaration as a self-evident lie. We’ve seen it in the Southern resistance to Reconstruction during that “redemptionist period” after the Civil War—where violent mobs subverted the rule of law and lynched African Americans. We’ve seen it in the civil rights era with further resistance to the Constitution and the rule of law. And of course, we’re seeing it today in the epidemic of political violence against leaders on the left and the right by violent extremists who reject the idea that our Constitution requires a rule of reason rather than passion; who reject the idea that truth can emerge only in civil dialogue.
Historically, you do not want to be on the side of those who reject the liberal idea or who call for tearing down the Constitution. In retrospect, they have always been on the wrong side; they have disgraced themselves with their rejection of the liberal idea. The same is true today.
Krause: Next year is a milestone for our country--the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. As you look ahead, are you personally pessimistic or optimistic about the future health of the Great American Experiment?
Rosen: I don’t know what the future will bring in terms of the fate of the Republic. That’s a matter of fortune and fate and providence, and it can turn on small choices that are now unknown. But I’m optimistic about the future of civil dialogue and deep learning about the Constitution, and about the attachment of Americans of different perspectives to the American idea. I’m fortunate enough to travel around the country and to see how deeply Americans in red and blue states embrace the meaning of the Declaration and the Constitution, even though they disagree about how to apply it in particular circumstances. And my experience is that if you have convenings where you’re not allowed to talk about politics—which is a great ground rule, because we’re not going to agree about politics in these polarized times—but instead encourage people to dig deep into American history and the Constitution, you can have civil and meaningful dialogue. You can explore agreement and disagreement, but always united by this love of the Constitution and love of America. So, in that sense, I’m optimistic.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity, but you can hear the full conversation on the Just Liberty podcast, available on YouTube and on major podcast platforms.