Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris, to discuss a very

important political book by a very important political thinker in American history, and that is

John Taylor of Caroline. The book that we are going to be discussing is called New Views of the Constitution.

And normally, this is the kind of thing that would be an exclusive for Patreon supporters.

I decided in the spirit of Christmas to make this available to everyone.

Of course, the slideshow, though, is only available for patrons.

We've already done a discussion of Edmund Burke and the

anti-federalist papers. This is our third installment in our series on the Anglo-American conservative

tradition. And really the point of this is to chart a path back to go to the roots of who we are as a people, what makes us unique, what are

the true and valuable things that have contributed to the arrangements that we've enjoyed for so

long in this country, what's made America exceptional, those kinds of things. And of course,

behind all of this is an Anglo-Protestant ethos, a Christian understanding of the nature of man, of who God is,

of the order that God has created. And this is something that is mediated through tradition

to us. And we want to preserve those true, good, valuable things for our posterity. And so it is in

that spirit that we are doing this particular series. And this is probably

one of the shorter ones. I didn't even know if I was going to do something on John Taylor of Caroline.

I was thinking of jumping straight from the anti-federalist papers to the middle of the 19th century.

But the more I thought about it, the more I thought, you know, John Taylor is an important political think his views on the Constitution, because he's done a number of works,

we could have talked about, but his views on the Constitution, I think are very important

because they contrast sharply with another important American political thinker, and that is Joseph's

story. And in fact, if you go to law school,

if you take any course in the philosophy of law in American history, you're going to be talking

...