we hold these truths, volume i: democracy and the american revolution

The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of American independence, yet the founding is controversial now in ways it has not been in decades. The American Enterprise Institute offers a major intellectual and educational project to reintroduce Americans to the unique value of their national inheritance.

In the inaugural volume of an eight-book series, renowned historians and political scientists explore what the contested idea of democracy meant to those who participated in the American Revolution. For some, democracy represented a particular way to order government, while others understood democracy to be a transformative principle that would serve as the philosophical bedrock of not just the new republic’s political institutions but its social and cultural ones as well.

Examining the democratic culture that was born out of the American Revolution can help us understand the framework within which we continue to debate the structure and purpose of the system of government that binds us together today.

Yuval Levin is the director of Social, Cultural, and
Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he
also holds the Beth and Ravenel Curry Chair in Public Policy. The founder and
editor of National Affairs, he is also a senior editor at The New Atlantis, a
contributing editor at National Review, and a contributing opinion writer at
The New York Times. At AEI, Dr. Levin and scholars in the Social, Cultural, and
Constitutional Studies research division study the foundations of self-government
and the future of law, regulation, and constitutionalism. They also explore the
state of American social, political, and civic life, focusing on the
preconditions necessary for family, community, and country to flourish. Dr.
Levin served as a member of the White House domestic policy staff under
President George W. Bush. He was also executive director of the President’s
Council on Bioethics and a congressional staffer at the member, committee, and
leadership levels. In addition to being interviewed frequently on radio and
television, Dr. Levin has published essays and articles in numerous
publications, including The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The
Atlantic, and Commentary. He is the author of several books on political theory
and public policy, most recently ＂A Time to Build: From Family and Community to
Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the
American Dream＂ (Basic Books, 2020). He holds an MA and PhD from the Committee
on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

Adam J. White is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise
Institute, where he focuses on the Supreme Court and the administrative state.
Concurrently, he codirects the Antonin Scalia Law School’s C. Boyden Gray
Center for the Study of the Administrative State. Mr. White practiced
constitutional and administrative law, particularly in the regulation of energy
and financial markets. He started his legal career as a law clerk for Judge
David B. Sentelle at the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit. Mr. White has
written for the Wall Street Journal,
the New York Times, the Washington Post, National Affairs, Commentary,
Harvard Journal of Law & Public
Policy, and Notre Dame Law Review,
among other publications. He is a regular contributor to the Yale Journal on Regulation’s Notice and
Comment blog, and for many years, he was one of the Weekly Standard’s lead writers on constitutional law and the
Supreme Court. Mr. White has testified often before Congress, including before
the Senate’s Committees on the Judiciary; Commerce, Science, and
Transportation; and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and before the
House’s Judiciary and Financial Services Committees. In 2018, the Senate
Committee on the Judiciary called him to testify in Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme
Court confirmation hearings to advise senators on Kavanaugh’s approach to
administrative law. In 2021, he served on the Presidential Commission on the
Supreme Court of the United States, where he criticized ＂Court packing＂ and
other efforts to restructure the Supreme Court. In 2017, he was appointed to
serve on the Administrative Conference of the United States. He also serves on
the leadership council for the American Bar Association’s Administrative Law
and Regulatory Practice Section, which he will chair in 2023-24. Before joining
AEI, he was a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and
an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Mr. White has a JD from Harvard
Law School and a bachelor of business administration from the College of
Business at the University of Iowa.

John Yoo is a nonresident senior fellow at AEI, Emanuel S.
Heller Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, and a
visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. He has worked in all three branches
of government, notably as an official in the US Department of Justice, where he
worked on national security and terrorism issues after the September 11 attacks.
He also served as general counsel of the US Senate Judiciary Committee under
its chairman, Orrin Hatch of Utah. And he has been a law clerk for Supreme
Court justice Clarence Thomas and US Court of Appeals judge Laurence Silberman. His new book is Defender in Chief: Donald Trump’s Fight for Presidential Power (St.
Martin’s, 2020). He is also the coauthor of Striking
Power: How Cyber, Robots, and Space Weapons Change the Rules for War
(Encounter 2017), Point of Attack:
Preventative War, International Law, and Global Welfare (Oxford University
Press, 2014), Taming Globalization:
International Law, the U.S. Constitution, and the New World Order (Oxford
University Press, 2012), Crisis and
Command: A History of Executive Power from George Washington to George W. Bush
(Kaplan Publishing, 2010), War by Other
Means: An Insider’s Account of the War on Terror (Atlantic Monthly Press,
2006), and The Powers of War and Peace:
The Constitution and Foreign Affairs after 9/11 (University of Chicago
Press, 2005).