A Commercial Republic: America’s Enduring Debate over Democratic Capitalism, reads like a very fine revised and extended write-up of a two-semester upper-level college lecture course of the same name.  O’Connor glosses the standard secondary literature and lines up most of the usual primary source suspects from Hamilton and Jefferson to Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman. With the glaring omission of the Civil War period, the book’s 250 pages are comprehensive, and I confess I found myself learning a good bit.  I was pleasantly reminded of even more I should never have forgotten. We are told that we should not criticize Read more