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An Empire of Reason - Men Are Not Angels
The commonwealth tradition left the founders staring at a wall: if power always corrupts and virtue always decays, how can any free government last? Every previous answer had depended on someone — a prince, a people, a ruling class — being good, and that goodness had always, in the end, failed. So the Americans asked a question almost no one had dared: could you build a republic that did not depend on anyone being good at all?
This episode is the conceptual hinge of the Constitution — the view of human nature beneath the whole machine. It gathers the season’s threads: the Christian doctrine…
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