Martin Diamond's Contribution to
American Political Thought:
Editor's Preface
eo Strauss was the greatest classroom teacher in the history of
LT J Western Civilization. I may be mistaken, but I have to report
things as I see them. There were some peripheral aspects to him that
require a comment here. In the era before cigarette smoking was
found to be the crime of the century, Mr. Strauss smoked a lot. As
far as I could tell, he inhaled. He smoked even while lecturing and
he used a cigarette holder somewhat akin to that used by Franklin
Delano Roosevelt, but not to the same effect. Strauss fumbled. Rapt,
as he was, by the effort to make as plain as possible the most difficult
passages of political philosophy, he looked straight ahead at his
students while struggling ineffectively to find the end of the cigarette
holder with a fresh cigarette, to find his face with the cigarette
holder, and to find the end of the cigarette with a match-lit or not
as chance would have it. On occasion, a solicitous student at the large
oak table in the Seminar Room of the Social Science Research
Building of the University of Chicago would reach across and gently
take the cigarette and holder from the hands of Mr. Strauss, fix them,
help Mr. Strauss get the right end of the combination in his mouth,
and then light the cigarette for him.
Another of the characteristics of Strauss was the frequent
punctuation of his sentences with the interrogatory interjection
"Ja?" The interjection was never a mere grace note such as the "like"
of Valleyspeak. It was always a genuine question. He wanted to know
if his students were following the course of the argument.
It is characteristic of epigoni that they imitate the mannerisms of
their mentor. I smoked. I smoked a lot. I smoked while driving,
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while eating, and even while lecturing. I didn't learn to smoke from
Mr. Strauss; I had begun when I was fourteen and was up to three
packages a day by the time I was seventeen. A graduate student in
one of my classes in 1967 who had, as an undergraduate, taken
classes from me before I quit smoking in 1965, gave an imitation of
my foibles as a smoker-lecturer. I was mortified to think that perhaps
I had unconsciously copied the mannerisms of Mr. Strauss. As I
write this, I am reminded of the remark that Senator Simon of
Illinois made in 1987, likening himself to Abraham Lincoln because
they both had big ears. "No," I thought when he said that, "what
mattered about Lincoln was not his ears but what was between
them." Whenever I caught myself imitating the mannerisms of
Strauss, I tried to check the tendency. The only imitations that would
honor Strauss were better teaching and better scholarship. I still
cringe when I attend lectures by other students of his who, though
native speakers of English, nonetheless gratuitously throw a "Ja, ja?"
into the middle of every sentence.
I mention these small things because, while I never encountered Heidegger or Husserl, I am confident that Strauss did not
"play" them. I know certainly that Martin Diamond never played
Strauss. There is something about great teachers that makes them be
themselves. I was never Diamond's student in the formal, classroom
sense, but I did attend a few of his lectures at Chicago and then at
Claremont. Diamond was truly a great teacher. He was perhaps
second only to Mr. Strauss in his skill in the classroom. He could
certainly mimic. He could "do" Danny Kaye or Groucho Marx very
well, but when he imitated them, it was deliberate and for fun. He
did not affect them. He sometimes laughingly called himself the
"poor man's Strauss," but he didn't dishonor Strauss or himself with
mannerisms or locutions filched from the Master. Diamond was all
Diamond.
E. D. Carlson was Diamond's student at Claremont, and his
contribution to this symposium is a reminiscence of Diamond as a
teacher. I cannot let pass, however, the opportunity to offer a remark
or two of my own on Diamond's classroom skill. I watched with
delight one day as a student asked him a really dumb question and
Diamond's Contribution to Political Thought
5
he responded by congratulating the student for asldng such a wise
and penetrating question. He then restated the student's question,
making it, indeed, wise and penetrating. Whereupon he gave a wise
and penetrating answer to the reformulated question. The student
was greatly pleased with himself, his fellow-students learned from
the exchange, and Diamond pressed forward with the purposes of
his lecture. I saw Diamond do this more than once and I marveled
at it. Try as I may, I never was able to master that response. Usually
when a student asked a dumb question, I showed my annoyance and
let him know how dumb the question was. Of course, sometimes the
question was not so dumb as I had thought.
Diamond knew how good a teacher he was and he knew to whom
he was indebted and he generously sought to pass some of his skill
to his friends. He once explained to me that, when lecturing, one
must "never speak of an island, but always of an island"-and here
he gestured expansively-"entirely surrounded by water." This
advice I was able to follow. It is based on an appreciation of the most
fundamental principle of good teaching. The teacher must know not
only where he wants to take his student's mind, but also where that
mind is now, and how to get him to the one from the other. And it
is based on an appreciation of the rate at which a mind takes things
in. It was not until this past year that I learned from Walter Berns that
Diamond had himself gotten that advice on lecturing from Norman
Thomas.
Martin Diamond was born in New York City, December 19,
1919. He made his way through a year or so of college. During the
late `thirties he was a Socialist and a stump orator, and I have no
doubt that he was a stirring advocate. Somewhere I have seen a
picture of him, fist raised for emphasis, making a speech. He looked
in that picture like Lenin incarnate. Looking at it I felt intimations
of the political thrill that must have come from listening to the
speech. Diamond's socialism was an altogether understandable
response to the influences of the times. I remember well my older
sisters -born in 1916 and 1919, respectively-coming home from
high school classes in Chicago in the early and mid-1930s with
glowing accounts of the blandishments of the left, including the
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hard, Communist left, to which they had been exposed by teachers
and speakers and fellow-students. When Martin Diamond became
an active Socialist and when he turned away from the left, I don't
know. I do remember his explaining to me that the Stalin purges of
1936 finally made American socialists confront the question whether
they were men or boys. To be a "man" in this context meant to
countenance the mass murder of innocents. Most American socialists decided that they were "boys." They decided that they were
social democrats and, finally, that they were democrats. No doubt
the transition in Diamond was over time and as a consequence of
reflection. Again I say that I don't know when the transition was
complete, but Diamond told me that he had, along with the major
part of American socialists, decided that if to be a socialist meant to
be a Communist and if to be a Communist meant to be an accessory
to murder, then he was not a socialist. My own experience, on a
lesser scale, made Diamond's remarks intelligible. When I was a
part-time student at Los Angeles City College, while in the Navy the
second time, my wife and I were invited to a large dinner party where
we were plied with wine and then drawn into a discussion. Our hosts
insisted that we must "fight for civil rights." I agreed. But, we were
told, when "we" had political power in our hands, we must curtail
rights. "Why?" I asked. To prevent a counter-revolution, I was told.
I just couldn't get it through my thick head. Were not rights good?
"Yes, but" seemed to be the answer. It was clear that we were being
tested for induction into the Party. We failed the test.
Another word about the left in America is in order. Norman
Thomas was a stirring orator and a thoughtful man. As a child, I sat
along with my father and listened to all the presidential campaign
speeches on the radio in 1932 and 1936 and, as an adolescent, in
1940. My father voted for Hoover in 1932, for Landon in 1936, and
for Willkie in 1940, although he was not greatly fond of any of them.
He never spoke of Franldin D. Roosevelt except as "that man in the
White House," but he was by no means close-minded. We both
listened attentively to all the candidates. I recall once-it was in 1936
or 1940-listening to a speech by Norman Thomas to which my
father reacted by saying excitedly, "What a fine man; if only he
Diamond's Contribution to Political Thought
7
weren't a Socialist." My older sisters smiled indulgently when they
heard this remark, but I had not yet achieved the air of superiority
that comes with adolescence, so the remark seemed appropriate to
me. I have since learned from Publius, in Federalist No. 1, that it is
possible for a good man to be wrong in his politics.
Joseph Cropsey once remarked that Senator Joseph R. McCarthy
had "given anti-communism a bad name." The truth and the worth
of that remark are reflected in the extent to which the academic and
journalistic left, aided by the poetic skills of the motion-picture
industry, have made it appear to generations of students that
opposition to communism is nothing more than hysteria, a kind of
ingrained McCarthyism. Retroactively, this defect of soul is attributed to those whose response to the left in the 1920s has been called
the "big red scare." The truth is, however, that Karl Marx is not just
a bogeyman. The insidious consequences of his work have had
throughout the twentieth century a pervasive and baneful effect on
American scholarship and politics alike.
Martin Diamond's movement away from the left-I shall not say
to the right, for so to say would be to accept the categories embraced
by the left-between 1936 and 1950 enabled him to see the light
regarding the American Founding, a light hitherto hidden under a
bushel fashioned by the revisionism of Charles A. Beard and J. Allen
Smith.
World War II began in Europe in 1939 and the United States
entered the war when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on
December 7th of 1941. Martin Diamond entered the Merchant
Marine in 1943 and served at sea as a radio operator. He returned
to civil life in 1945. He entered graduate school at the University of
Chicago in 1950 with only a year or so of college behind him. One
could do so at Chicago then by taking a strenuous general education
examination devised by the university. The examination took eleven
hours to complete and covered history and economics and art and
architecture and anything else one might be expected to learn in a
good, four-year, liberal arts program. It even included a section
where one was expected to devise an experiment in the natural
sciences and come to acceptable scientific conclusions. Satisfactory
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completion of the test got one admitted to the university's three-year
master's program.'
When Diamond was a student at Chicago, the distinction
between the "College" and the "Divisions"-i.e., the graduate
programs-was pronounced. The College had its own faculty, quite
separate from the faculties of the graduate divisions, and there was
virtually no opportunity for graduate students to get teaching
assistantships. Although many of his contemporaries were exceptional, Diamond's capacities were so evident that he was engaged to
teach undergraduate classes at Chicago even before his doctorate
was completed. It is a special tribute to his energy and capacity that
he was able to hold a full-time teaching appointment at Illinois
Institute of Technology from 1952 to 1955 and at the same time an
appointment as Lecturer at the University of Chicago while also
working on his dissertation. He took his doctoral degree at Chicago
in 1956, having already been appointed in 1955 as Assistant Professor at Claremont. He taught at Claremont Men's College and
Claremont Graduate School from 1955 to 1971. He accepted a
professorship at Northern Illinois University in 1972 and served
there until his appointment to the Thomas and Dorothy Leavey
Chair on the Foundations of American Freedom at Georgetown
University in 1977. He never got to teach at Georgetown because in
July of 1977, moments after testifying against proposals for constitutional amendments to abolish the Electoral College before the
Subcommittee on Constitutional Law of the Senate Committee on
the Judiciary, he died of a heart attack. At the risk of descending to
the poetic, one might say that he died with his boots on.
Diamond was an Earhart Fellow, a Rockefeller Fellow, a Fellow
of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and a
Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson Center. In 1967, the University of
Hartford awarded him the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane
Letters.
If asked to enumerate the basic principles of the American
political order, a good undergraduate student in a college not yet
altogether corrupted by fashion would list liberty, equality, democracy, federalism, and the separation of powers. Much of college
Diamond's Contribution to Political Thought
9
teaching at the very end of the twentieth century is merely irrelevant
twaddle. It does not even rise to the level of being wrong. In
Diamond's day, the prejudices of the moment were not yet downright silly; they were just prejudices. Like all prejudices, however,
they were leaden. Diamond knew that when he began to explore
federalism or the separation of powers the response of his students
would be, "Oh yes, I've had that." His task was to break through the
encrustation of dull errors about those things and open the student's
mind to a genuine and deep understanding of them. The path
through that prejudice to that understanding was cut by Diamond's
scholarship and illuminated by his teaching.
The prejudices of the nineteenth century ranged from the
salutary to the intransigent, but they were still prejudices rooted in
interest and habit., The prejudices of the twentieth century have
sprung more from the revisionist history that finds its grounds in the
historicism fashioned in the nineteenth century and culminates in
the present "post-modern" deconstruction. The business of political
philosophy is to rise from opinion toward truth-that is, to confront
prejudice with unremitting inquiry. The business of teaching is to
bring one's better students to the point of confronting prejudice on
their own in a responsible fashion. We say "in a responsible fashion"
because the first lesson philosophy itself must learn is its own
dependence upon political life and, in turn, the dependence of
political life on salutary prejudice.
Diamond had to confront both the old and the new prejudices.
The essays that follow examine his doing so in the instances of
liberty, equality, democracy, and the separation of powers, but a few
words here are in order respecting his examination of federalism. No
doubt there was some movement in his understanding of the
problem between his writing and teaching in the 1950s and his last
word on it in 1976, but he knew early on better than to paint himself
into an intellectual corner from which only recantation might offer
an escape. His earlier treatment emphasizes the fluidity, the nationalism, of the Constitution. The later treatment emphasizes its
constraining, its federal aspects. The later treatment, however, has
no need to contradict the earlier, for the earlier deals with one
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prejudice without embracing another.
The prejudice about federalism that was more common in the
nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth but is by no
means absent from political discussions at the end of the twentieth
recited the expressions "strict construction" and "states' rights." Like
all prejudices-indeed, like all political opinions-there are elements of truth and elements of falsehood in these expressions and
there are praiseworthy and blameworthy sources. To touch here
only the negative, the falsehood is seen instantly by a perusal of the
Constitution. Article I, §8 delineates the powers of Congress; Article
I, §9 lists limitations on Congress; Article I, §10 lists limitations on
the states. Not a word anywhere in the original Constitution of states'
rights. The arguments supporting strict construction and states'
rights developed as rear-guard actions after the Constitution was
ratified. They are transmogrifications of arguments made at the
Convention by the hesitant party there. Again, only to mention the
negative, the blameworthy source of those slogans was the material
interest in the preservation of slavery.
The first thing to note about "federalism" itself is that the word
"federal" never appears in the Constitution. We speak constantly of
"the Federal government," but that expression is a contradiction in
terms. Where there is a federation, there is no government; there are
governments, for a federation is a federation of governments. Where
there is government, contrariwise, there is not a federation. It had
been customary during the first half of the twentieth century in
American secondary schools and colleges to teach that there were
three typical forms of government-unitary, federal, and confederal.
The unitary form was said to be typified by the "English constitution;" the federal was said to be the form that prevailed under the
American Constitution; and the confederal was the one that had
prevailed under the Articles of Confederation. This supposes that
there is some distinction between the terms "federal" and
"confederal." There is no distinction between them. "Federal" is an
adjective that simply means "of or pertaining to a fcedus." The word
fcedus is Latin and means treaty, or pact, or league. Its root is the word
for "faith." Treaties are acts of faith-the faith of one party in the
Diamond's Contribution to Political Thought
11
compliance of the other-because, to use the terminology of Thomas Hobbes, there is "no common power" above the parties "to keep
them all in awe." That is, over the federating parties there is no
government. That is why what under the American Constitution is
understood as the executive power insofar as it deals with foreign
affairs is called by John Locke "the federative power."
That there is no difference at all between "confederal" and
"federal" is proved by the very first sentence of The Federalist, which
speaks of "the unequivocal experience of the inefficacy of the
subsisting Fcederal Government." The system under the Articles was
a federal, that is, a confederal, system. The moving party at the
Convention was, as the hesitant party well knew, a nationalizing
party. The hesitant party fully appreciated the "inefficacy of the
subsisting Fcederal Government" but clung, for good reasoning and
bad, to the hope of preserving a league, or pact, or multilateral treaty.
That is why the moving party stole the word "federalist" from the
hesitant party, putting the latter, the truly federalist party, in the
position of having to be called "Anti-federalists."
Thus, the chief rhetorical accomplishment of The Federalist is
the very title of the work. That accomplishment is rivaled by that of
one of the papers, Federalist No. 54. Publius had promised at the
outset to defend every part of the proposed Constitution and to do
so by showing its conformity to republican principles. Republican
principles, properly understood, however, rest in the self-evident
truths of the Declaration. (As Diamond showed, however, the
principles of the Declaration do not lead, of necessity, to republican
government.) The chief of these self-evident truths is equality of
men in their rights by nature to life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness. Therefore, slavery is inconsistent with republican government. So, while the word "slavery" is never used in the Constitution (until the Thirteenth Amendment abolishes it) and the form,
frame, and language of the Constitution do not establish or approve
of slavery, political necessity led the moving party to make four
concessions regarding slavery to the hesitant party-for, whatever
the praiseworthy sources of the hesitant party's hesitation, the
blameworthy source was its desire to preserve its material interests
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in slavery, which it perfectly well knew to be inconsistent with the
principles of the Declaration of Independence.
The "three-fifths of all other persons" clause of Article I, §2, one
of the four concessions made to the slave power, is thus indefensible
in republican terms. How then does Publius defend it? He does so
by first admitting the charges against the clause and then by saying:
We subscribe to the doctrine, might one of our southern
brethren observe, that representation relates more immediately to persons, and taxation more immediately to property....
and then he goes on to defend the three-fifths clause not out of his
own mouth, but by quoting what "one of our southern brethren"
might say. By so doing, Publius acknowledges that the clause is
indefensible. His purpose is to get the Constitution ratified. Whatever its faults, when judged on republican principles it is a vast
improvement over the Articles of Confederation.
In a set of writings in the 1960s, Diamond showed what the
Framers meant by "federalism," what the Federalist meant by
"federalism," and how the rhetorical skill of Publius in Federalist
No. 9 met the charge that the moving party intended to substitute a
consolidation of the states in the room of the federation. Publius met
that charge by first accepting what he knew to be a bad translation
by Nugent of Montesquieu's De L'esprit Des Lois, by next deliberately using a selective excerpt from the bad translation of
Montesquieu, and then by utterly confounding the distinction
between "consolidation" and "confederacy."
What Publius showed, therefore, was not that the proposed
Constitution preserved federation or confederacy, but that confederacy in the case of the American Union was idiocy and that its
preservation spelled the doom of America. To the argument that we
must not countenance a fraud perpetrated on the country by
Publius, Diamond showed that, in the Convention and also in The
Federalist, the moving party had much the best of the argument and
the hesitant party, albeit grudgingly, fundamentally accepted the
force of that argument. Thus, what the Constitution establishes is
what I have called, in keeping with what I learned from Diamond,
Diamond's Contribution to Political Thought
13
a national government lightly laced with an occasional federal
principle.
The constitutional argument put forward by the heirs of the
hesitant party is, as we have said, the argument for "strict construction." Again, to speak for the moment only of the negative side of this,
we are reminded that Mr. Chief Justice Marshall, in McCulloch v.
Maryland in 1819, disposed of the "strict construction" position by
showing that it is nowhere called for in the Constitution itself. The
survival well into the twentieth century of the strict construction
position is illustrated by the tendency of its advocates baldly to insert
the word "expressly" into the "necessary and Proper" clause. (Article
I, §8, clause 18.) One is reminded of the remark made by a wag in
the 1950s that Clarence Manion, Dean of the Law School at Notre
Dame, wanted "strict enforcement of the Articles of Confederation. "
Diamond showed that the harmonics of the argument of Publius
were that there was an openness of the grant of powers in Article I,
§8 that, because of the greater merit of the government of the Union
over the governments of the states, would lead ultimately to the
people reposing more trust in it and therefore to its taking on, over
time, a greater share in governance. The intention of the moving
party, exactly as the hesitant party feared, and an intention realized
in the new Constitution, was a system in which the central government would grow larger and more powerful and more effective. To
avoid that by narrowing the construction of the grants of power is to
void the Constitution by acting as though it never happened, as
though we should in fact live by a rule of strict enforcement of the
Articles of Confederation.
Let us look, however, to the other side of the coin. Publius does
grant that the government of the Union under the Constitution is
still a government of limited powers and Marshall admits in McCulloch
that the mere fact of the enumeration of powers in Article I, §8
implies the limitation of the powers of the national government to
the things there enumerated and to those things that fairly can be
understood as necessary and proper to the completion of them.
Neither Publius nor Marshall can be said to anticipate and counte-
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nance those national actions after 1937 that Mr. Justice Frankfurter
attributed to what he called the "unfolding of the Commerce
Clause."
Diamond's last word on federalism was an emphasis on this
more limiting aspect of the Constitution. In keeping with what two
of the articles in this symposium praise as Diamond's rising above
partisanship and confronting the errors of both sides in political
debate, Diamond chastised those attending a conference in 1976 for
acting as though every problem that had a national reach was a
problem constitutionally fit for national legislation. In fact he showed
that those attending had never even mentioned the Constitution.
They had raised the question of the appropriateness of national as
opposed to state or local action solely on the grounds of efficiency
and compassion. Diamond, at the risk of appearing callous, insisted
that the true basis for national legislation was the enumeration in
Article I, §8, and that there is no "national jurisdiction over the
problems of handicapped children simply because we are outraged
by their neglect."2
William Winslow Crosskey held in 1953 that the enumeration,
so far from limiting the national government vis-a-vis the states, was
really intended as an emphatic statement of national legislative
powers vis-a-vis the national executive and, in fact, the Constitution
simply established a national government with general legislative
powers. Although this argument has enticing aspects, I believe it is
simply false. To credit it, one would have to brand the whole of The
Federalist as a backsliding apostasy from the true intent of the
Founders.
The proof that the enumeration means something and that it has
to do with the question of federalism can be discerned from a
reading of Federalist No. 17 which tries to allay the fears of the
hesitant party by assuring it that there will be no national appetite to
usurp the proper functions of the states because the national
government will have all the powers the most ambitious politician
could want, namely the powers over war, negotiation, commerce,
and finance. An examination of Article I, §8 shows that all of the
powers therein do, indeed, fall under those four classes of things.
Diamond's Contribution to Political Thought
15
Thus, the business of the national government is war, negotiation,
commerce, and finance and it has no business meddling in gun-free
school zones or school lunches or school curricula or the miseries of
handicapped children. This cannot be dismissed as heartless and
harsh, and therefore an unwarranted interpretation of the Constitution, by the shouting of slogans and the brandishing of approved
sentiments. If we were guided by Diamond, we would rise above
bumper-sticker constitutional construction.
The articles that follow are by Walter F. Berns, John M. Olin
University Professor Emeritus at Georgetown University and Resident Scholar at American Enterprise Institute, who was Diamond's
fellow student at Chicago; Edmund D. Carlson at Virginia Wesleyan
College, who was Diamond's student at Claremont; Morton J.
Frisch, Professor Emeritus at Northern Illinois University and
Diamond's colleague there; Thomas K. Lindsay at the University of
Dallas and David K. Nichols at Montclair State University, who were
Diamond's students at Northern Illinois; John Koritansky at Hiram
College; and Alan Gibson at Saint Ambrose University. The pieces
by Berns, Carlson, Frisch, Lindsay, and Nichols are all generally
laudatory of Diamond, as is this Preface. That by Koritansky is
critical of the piece by Frisch and that by Gibson is generally critical
of Diamond. All of the parts of this symposium except for this preface
and the introduction by Walter Berns were presented in earlier form
at the meetings of the Southwest Political Science Association in
Corpus Christi in March of 1998. Thrice retired, I teach at the
Institute of World Politics. Although I do have some widespread
disagreements with the piece by Alan Gibson, he is a vigorous young
scholar and his arguments will succeed or fail on their own. As
general editor of the symposium it is not my place to take issue with
the contributors to it. However, I will here make one point touching
the piece by John Koritansky.
Koritansky gives measured support to the accusation that
Hamilton was a monarchist by saying that what the notion of
monarchism could mean "is that the governing impulse-the agency
in the formation of public policy-would be the executive branch."
The problem with this is that it falls under what Martin Diamond
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dubbed "the fallacy of the first formulation." It is easy to labor under
that fallacy. I remember that after searching in department stores for
twenty years for just the right sweater-a cardigan, not made of
wool, gray or maroon in color, with pockets in front for my cigarettes
and lighter-I finally received as a present from my daughter-in-law
just such a sweater, only to remember suddenly that I had quit
smoking ten years earlier and no longer needed the pockets. To
apply to the Founding the fallacy named by Diamond is easy. The
hesitant party feared a strong executive just as it feared a central
government. They likened a strong executive to monarchy. What
Diamond showed was that the moving party understood, and
Publius-Madison as much as Hamilton-argued, that strong government was the friend, not the bane, of liberty and that a strong
executive was the friend of strong government and a necessary
ingredient of a balanced government, a government secure in a
proper separation of powers. The hesitant party was worrying about
the executive in a monarchy; what was being established was a
republic. As Madison put it in Federalist No. 48, one of that
sequence of five papers defending the proposed Constitution against
the charge that it lacked a proper separation of powers, "The
legislative department is everywhere extending the sphere of its
activity, and drawing all power into its impetuous vortex." In a
republic it is the legislative power that is most to be feared. Only a
strong executive can oppose that power and retain the republican
excellencies of the regime.
Maybe the executive has grown improperly in power in the
United States. Maybe the design of the Constitution does not intend
an executive who takes such a commanding place in the "formation
of public policy" as the president has come to take. But the
presidency still, even at the close of the twentieth century, does not
constitute a monarchy by any stretch of the imagination, and if
Hamilton is successfully to be charged with monarchism, his accusers must recover from the fallacy of first formulation and discover in
him something much more than a call for a strong executive.
Martin Diamond was not only a splendid teacher; he was a solid
scholar and a graceful writer. his work was a model of clarity and
Diamond's Contribution to Political Thought
17
force and was never weakened by sententious obfuscation or by
preciosity. He once gave a younger scholar advice on draftsmanship.
He said, "When you proof your own work and find something that
is just too marvelous to cut out, cut it out." No doubt he was wrong
sometimes, but the wisdom, and the balance, and the prescience of
his scholarship are such that his works merit examination and
reexamination. Diamond loved the Constitution as perhaps no
twentieth century Supreme Court Justice has done. More than at
any time in its history, the Constitution needs friends, for it is in grave
danger from enemies both foreign and domestic. Its greatest enemy
is ignorance.
Richard G. Stevens
Institute of World Politics
NOTES
1. The sketch of Martin Diamond's life offered here is drawn in
part from personal recollection of conversations with him and in part
from various published and unpublished sources such as the biographical sketches in American Political Science Association directories, published from time to time, and the printed record of the
Memorial Service for Diamond conducted at the American Enterprise Institute.
2.These remarks were made during a conference at the Woodrow
Wilson Center. They were published in Publius: The Journal of
Federalism in 1976 and reprinted as "The Forgotten Doctrine of
Enumerated Powers" in As Far as Republican Principles Will
Admit: Essays by Martin Diamond, ed. William A. Schambra,
Washington, 1992, AEI Press. The passage quoted is at p. 185 in
Schambra. Diamond's earlier arguments confronting the narrower
understandings of federalism are best seen in "What the Framers
Meant by Federalism," first appearing in Robert A. Goldwin, ed., A
Nation Of States, Chicago, 1961, Rand McNally and in "The
Federalist's View of Federalism, first appearing in Benson, et al.,
Essays in Federalism, Claremont, 1961, Institute for Studies in
Federalism. These also are reprinted in the Schambra collection of
Diamond's essays