How can we make this happen?

 I am going to try to join you all.

So you'll discuss that book at the end of this month?

 ShellGamer: Is it not quite dangerous for the people, as well as the political branches, to resign themselves to the notion that the Constitution means whatever the Court says it means?  It seems then self-government becomes a fiction.  And the Judiciary as final arbiter doesn't square with a notion of checks and balances.  The alternative your raise, each branch as its own arbiter (what Jefferson favored and is sometimes called "departmentalism"), is not the only alternative.  Lincoln's model was that while he would abide by the decision of the Court as it pertained to the parties to a particular case, he would not necessarily allow this same decision to be determinative of future policy.  And it seems to be that the people as well as all of their representatives ought to be in the habit of thinking constitutionally.  Constitutional interpretation ought to be the function of each of the branches engaging one another, sometimes clashing. 

Richard raises the issue of the meaning of Marbury and the role of the Court to illustrate the difficulty of getting back to an original understanding.  But aren’t these two questions linked in another way as well?  That is, if the Court is the ultimate interpreter of the Constitution and the other branches must bow to its views (see Cooper v. Aaron), then this problem of the conflict between the need for consistency versus fidelity to original understanding becomes much more acute.  That is, wouldn’t a more modest understanding of judicial review and the overall place of the Court in our Constitutional system leave more space for mistakes—and more space for the political branches to react against them and for the Court to eventually correct them?  And such an understanding would hopefully force, or at least encourage, the other branches to start thinking constitutionally again.  

I see from your other posts your interests in philosophy and theology--you ought to read Havel's essay called Politics and Conscience--in a collection called Open Letters.

 Just finished a book I would highly recommend: The Philosophers' Quarrel by Robert Zaretsky and John Scott.  It is really unlike any book I have ever read--a unique mix of political philosophy, history, biography.  It is about the friendship and eventual falling-out between Rousseau and Hume.  But it includes compelling and not too heavy analyses of their thought and lives.  Other characters are sketched along the way too (d'Alembert, Voltaire, and Boswell).  The authors evoke 18th century salon society in Paris and the London literary scene.  It is truly a strikingly original combination of themes and angles of analysis.

Now I am on to an Alan Furst novel, Blood of Victory and Vaclav Havel's To the Castle and Back.

 And who would be the "harvester" in this scenario?

 Yes, yes, good post.  And notice too the ephemeral greatness of one is closely related to another of AT's points--that this new sort of democratic despotism keeps people, the citizenry, in a kind of perpetual adolesence.  So the greatness of the one is accomplished through the infantilazation of the many.

 "This is not so of socialism, a political movement that like fascism embodies the religious impulse in secular form, and is thus an ideology destined to rise again and again from the grave."

Very well put!!! Claire, I will now go purchase your book.

Your example also points back to my thought about the dangers of generalization.  Christianity and Islam are both religions for example, but they are quite distinct in their conception of the Divine and the character of man's relation to the Divine.  It seems to me the differences need to be carefully attended to.

Good example!  And I read many of the positive reviews of Alien Powers, but haven't gotten to it yet.  Did you like it?

 Diane,

That is some poem!  Beautiful.  The Klima essay can be found in a collection called The Spirit of Prague and Other Essays--published by Granta Books.

Burke, Shmerk. Hayek, Shmayek.  I got plenty o' Tocqueville:

"This particular form of tyranny, ...we call democratic despotism.  No more hierarchy within society, no more classes, no more fixed ranks; a people composed of almost identical and entirely equal individuals, this jumbled mass recognized as the sole legitimate sovereign, but carefully deprived of all the faculties which might permit it to direct and even to oversee its own government.  Above society, a single official, charged with doing everything in its name, without consulting it.  To control it, a public reason without means of expression; to stop it, revolution, and not laws: in theory, a subordinate agent; in fact, a master."

 I see your Burke, and raise you a Tocqueville.  From The Old Regime and the Revolution:

The philosophes readily acquired a disgust for old things and for tradition, and they were naturally led to want to rebuild contemporary society according to an entirely new plan, that each of them drew from the inspiration of reason alone.  The very situation of these writers prepared them to like general and abstract theories of government and to trust in them blindly.  At the almost infinite distance of practice in which they lived, no experience tempered the ardors of their nature; nothing warned them of the obstacles that existing facts might place before even the most desirable reforms; they didn't have any idea of the dangers which always accompany even the most necessary revolutions.  They did not even have the least suspicion of them; for the complete absence of political freedom had made the world of action not merely badly known to them, but invisible. (from Book III, chapter 1, "How Around the Middle of the 18th Century Intellectuals Became the Country's Leading Politicians, and the Effects Which Resulted from This")

 To put Yuri's point slightly differently, even as specific species of totalitarianisms appear dead (or nearly so), the totalitarian temptation is still very much with us.