How to balance state and national power was perhaps the single most important and challenging question confronting the early republic. The way the framers took up that question, and the approach they landed on for addressing it, can help us appreciate just how unlikely the emergence of the United States as we now know it really was. Guest Allen Guelzo joins us to discuss the framers’ approach to federalism and how it can still help us maximize liberty and use power responsibly today.

Allen Guelzo is the senior research scholar in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University, as well as director of the Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship at the university’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.  

This podcast discusses themes from Dr. Guelzo’s essay in the Winter 2022 issue of National Affairs, “Federalism and the Founders.”