The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of American independence, yet the founding is controversial now in ways it has not been in decades. In honor of this significant anniversary, the American Enterprise Institute offers a major intellectual and educational project to reintroduce Americans to the unique value of their national inheritance.
In the second volume of this series, leading historians, political scientists, and economists analyze the role that the market economy played in the creation of the United States. Alongside the American Declaration of Independence, 1776 marked the publication of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. This work shaped the political and economic thought of many leaders in the American Revolution, including those who would go on to join rival political parties, such as Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. At the same time, the founders evinced concerns over what economic inequality might mean for political freedom in the fledgling republic.
Understanding how the founding generation viewed the promises and perils of capitalism in securing the future of the United States can shed light on modern debates over capitalism's role in American society.
Yuval Levin is the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, 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.
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.
John Yoo is a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute; the Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley; and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Richard A. Epstein is the inaugural Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law at the New York University School of Law, where he serves as a director of the Classical Liberal Institute, which he help found in 2013. He has served as the Peter and Kirstin Bedford Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution since 2000.
Deirdre McCloskey is a distinguished scholar and Isaiah Berlin Chair in Liberal Thought at the Cato Institute and distinguished professor emerita of economics and of history and professor emerita of English and of communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago.