Top Highlights

• Michael Zuckert’s new book, A Nation So Conceived: Abraham Lincoln and the Paradox of Democratic Sovereignty,
• Zuckert gives a penetrating analysis of Lincoln’s lifetime of public grappling with the paradox of democratic sovereignty.
• natural equality implies that the people can only be ruled by their consent. Democratic government has as its foundation the “equality, the basic dignity, of all people.”
• the paradox Lincoln articulates during the war: “Is there, in all republics, this inherent, and fatal weakness? Must a government, of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?”
• Lincoln’s tragic view of democratic politics

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