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Still, Brownson somehow manages to keep inserting his voice back into the conversation. An eminent succession of American intellectuals has, each in turn, rediscovered Brownson, including Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Perry Miller, and Russell Kirk. Lawler's edition of The American Republic is the first of a projected five-volume series of Brownson's works in political philosophy (one hopes that the others will not be let down by such a haphazard effort at indexing). Meanwhile, Carey is editing a seven-volume series of Brownson's works.

When they have not been motivated simply by a scholar's desire to set the record straight, Brownson's rediscoverers seem to have been energized by an interest in promoting either Roman Catholicism or political conservatism or both. One might be tempted to claim Brownson for orthodox Christianity generally, but then he went through a rather pronounced phase of virulent anti-Protestant polemics. Take it from someone who knows, he averred, godless Transcendentalism is just the logic of Protestantism worked out. Indeed, Brownson is an awkward ally for almost anyone.

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute has presumably decided that reprinting The American Republic will serve the cause of conservative politics. Nevertheless, it is a painfully wrongheaded text at points. "Humanitarianism" is a pejorative term in Brownson's lexicon, and "philanthropy," he confides, is a latter-day Satanic plot. Those agitating for "negro suffrage" are not to be trusted, and to give women the vote would be a downright violation of divine order. It is the destiny of the United States peacefully to annex its neighbors. After all, none of them have anything worthwhile to contribute as sovereign nations: "Canada and the other British Provinces, Mexico and Central America, Columbia and Brazil, and the rest of the South American States, might be absorbed in the United States without being missed by the civilized world."

On the other hand, Brownson sometimes sounds too much like a liberal to please the Bush Administration. He declares that the maxim, "Let government take care of the rich, and the rich will take care of the poor," should be replaced with the far safer one, "Let government take care of the weak, and the strong can take care of themselves." And then there is that long tirade about the "grave evil" sometimes contemplated of making what could only be a "mad attempt" to impose the American system of government on another nation. "No form of government can bear transplanting," Brownson declares; indeed, "thoughtful Americans are opposed to political propagandism, and respect the right of every nation to choose its own form of government."

It would be unfair, however, to mine this book—which Carey refers to as Brownson's magnum opus—only for those pronouncements with frisson for today. The American Republic is, in fact, an ambitious study of America in the light of a panoramic political theory. Brownson seems to have been particularly motivated by some rather big circles that he needed to square. First, he had held from 1828 to 1861 the doctrine that America was a confederation of sovereign states. The Civil War necessitated his finding a convincing alternative theory. Second, Pope Pius IX's Syllabus of Errors (1864) had condemned political liberalism, religious liberty, and the separation of church and state; thus Brownson longed to find a way to explain the American experiment in terms that evaded these censures.

Although neither Carey nor Lawler makes this connection, it seems to me that Brownson's solution was to apply analogously to the state a Catholic view of authoritative sources in the church. Just as the perceived limitations of sola Scriptura are overcome by an appeal to the unwritten traditions of the apostles, so Brownson discovered an "unwritten constitution" behind the penned document. He chides Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and company for failing to discern this reality. They are people of the Protestant temperament, doggedly devoted to words on paper. The written constitution presupposes the unwritten one, just as the Bible presupposes a church that has arbitrated on canonicity.

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