Let’s start with The Federalist Papers. This in its day was a very political piece of work and it’s not a small government book – it was trying to persuade people to have a bigger government. Why did you choose it? 

It is a work of great philosophical theory about the nature of the American government, the nature of the American experience. At the same time it was really a series of essays written under anonymous names and published in various American newspapers in an attempt to garner support for the proposed constitution. I like it because there’s a unity to it, in that it is in favour of that proposed constitution and explains that document in light of the American experience and the American philosophy – and yet at the same time it shows some of the strains that would later become more visible in the party politics of America. They’re muted in the book, but they’re there nonetheless. I think this is the greatest explanation, in one place, of the American constitution, of the essential underpinnings and structures that make American democracy possible. 

It’s not so much about small government, as about balanced government, balancing faction against faction. When you’re actually serving in government in the White House, is that relevant? What do you learn from that? 

It’s about the essential framework and structure of our government that makes it possible. I am not certain it’s an advocate for big government. It is an advocate for more than the anarchy of the articles of confederation. But it is for, I think, a view of a limited government. There is, throughout its pages, varying degrees of scepticism about America’s ability to exist without a stronger government than it has, but there is clearly a dislike of concentrated power that runs throughout its pages. I think it’s a mistake to read it, and especially to read Hamilton, as an advocate for an all-encompassing, all-stifling, all-directing central state. It is merely, instead, a call for stronger ties, that would allow these 13 tenuous colonies perched on the eastern edge of a vast continent to become a great nation. 

Big enough, but not too big, in effect. 

Slightly larger, but not overwhelming…

What today can a practitioner learn from The Federalist Papers? 

What is necessary to maintain the American democracy. This is how to view the constitution in its proper perspective, as a document of limited government, and enormous personal freedom – as an attempt to understand human nature and draw on both its strengths and its weaknesses to achieve a community and nation. 

A user’s manual, in a sense…

Absolutely. That’s a good way to put it. 

Your second book is a real classic: De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, written in 1831, Andrew Jackson’s America. Why Tocqueville? Obviously it’s a great book, but how does it resonate for you? 

There are many, many important things. You can’t take it, exactly, as a description of either Jacksonian America alone or as the American experience today. But it does show up things that are vital to America as we know it, and which are important to nurture and to support. For me it’s the recognition that the American habit of association, our tendency to gather together in groups to solve immediate needs without waiting for direction from government, is vital to the American experience. De Tocqueville came from an environment where the centralisation of government was so powerful that local officials spent their entire lives writing documents to be shared with their overlords in Paris. Tocqueville was seized by the sharp contrast with America where people did not wait for the central government, but went ahead on their own, and I think that’s a vital part of what it is to be both an American and a vital part of what is America. The other thing that gets me about it, is that he recognised we were a commercial nation. He was at once repulsed by it, because he came from a mercantilist economy, with an aristocracy that didn’t really need to labour hard, and here in America it was the go-ahead man who was going to find a way to rise by his bootstraps. I think that’s what makes America – we take people who are really the wretched refuse, the rejects of the rest of the world, and by giving them opportunity, and by giving them a chance to seek reward and receive reward, in compensation of hard labour and ingenuity and innovation, we became something different.

He puts a lot of emphasis on Americans’ volunteerism, on our sometimes prickly nationalism and patriotism and national pride, on our civic-mindedness, our egalitarian culture. Is that still America today? 

I think it’s a large amount of what America is, and I worry about maintaining it. That’s why these mediating structures are so important, and why the vitality of state and local governments is so important and why the sphere of private activity and private action is so vital to protect and nurture and strengthen. 

Tocqueville has mixed feelings about America; he worries about the tyranny of the majority. How does that figure in your view of this book and this country? 

Well, going back to the book that I first recommended, The Federalist Papers, there is a concern there about the tyranny of the majority. How do you build structures that restrain the tyranny of the majority and make it difficult to make radical changes in the structure of American society? It’s interesting, because Tocqueville’s fear of the tyranny of the majority is in a way slightly anti-democratic, but it’s also anti-revolutionary, because his memories of what had happened to his family in Revolutionary France are too fresh and real for him to have complete trust in allowing the majority to have unbridled control. 

Temperamentally, he’s not a true American-style small-d democrat. 

I’d never consider him an American small-d democrat.