First Principles marks a departure for Ricks, a prizewinning journalist, the author of several works on contemporary military and national security affairs and a columnist for The Times Book Review. In this instructive new book, he offers a judicious account of the equivocal inheritance left to modern Americans by their 18th-century forebears ... Ricks concludes that the classically trained founders bequeathed us a mixed legacy. On the plus side, he commends the nation’s eventual extension of political rights to far more people than the landholding white male minority enfranchised in the Revolutionary era ... Ricks urges Americans to fix their government so that it protects citizens from the inevitable lapses of a fallible people and, perhaps, even more fallible leaders.
Fresh from the 2020 presidential election, there probably isn’t a better book to read than Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Thomas E. Ricks’ First Principles. Well informed, gracefully written and brimming with contemporary relevance, regardless of whether your candidate won or lost, it’s a bracing antidote to the presentism that’s one of the worst afflictions of our public life ... Ricks is well attuned to the differences in the role that classical sources played in shaping the thinking of each of his subjects ... a rich lode of material for any engaged citizen seeking hope and some encouragement.
... a rich compendium of the ancient wisdom that Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Madison believed they were gleaning from Aristotle or Tacitus, and the formation of 'classically shaped behavior' in the early republic ... As Ricks’s searching account shows, what feels truly elegiac is to be reminded of a time in American history when political leaders, for all their faults, valued erudition and, yes, a certain brand of virtue as ideal qualities in public life.
... a delightfully written, fast-paced, and intellectually sophisticated group biography of our first four presidents. Ricks chose a fruitful point of entry into the minds that shaped our nation. Instead of looking at the written work of mature political thinkers struggling to piece together a state during and after the American Revolution, Ricks focuses on the intellectual formation of our first four presidents ... focusing again on the public good, rewarding public virtue, and revitalizing Congress. Embracing such changes can, Ricks hopes, allow us to salvage 'the American experiment' that our first four presidents treasured. I fear that these recommendations do not go far enough to address the real challenges our republic faces ... Ricks offers no good solutions for America’s terrifying new politics of intimidation, though I suspect few can fault him for this.
Ricks masterfully documents how examples of city states like Athens and the Roman Republic (before Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon) informed the four aforementioned Founding Fathers and their fellow travelers ... engaging.
Ricks does something quite remarkable: he takes a seemingly academic topic—the Greco-Roman education of the Founding Fathers—and makes it resonate with grand relevance ... The education of the Founders, so often relegated to a sentence or two, is the theme of this book, which makes it unique among the plethora of works on them ... The author comments on current politics in the beginning and end of the work, which, on the one hand, apply to classical principles discussed within, but on the other may date this edition in a few years ... Offering a look at the Founders rarely glimpsed, Ricks successfully argues that America needs to rediscover its classical roots.
... immersive and enlightening ... With incisive selections from primary sources and astute cultural and political analysis, this lucid and entertaining account is a valuable take on American history.
The author reassures readers that the durable Constitutional order can handle a Donald Trump, and he concludes with 10 strategies for putting the nation back on course. All are admirable, although several—e.g., campaign finance reform, congressional reform, mutual tolerance—regularly fail in practice ... Penetrating history with a modest dollop of optimism.
