Claude Lorrain, French artist best known for, and one of the greatest masters of, ideal landscape painting, an art form that seeks to present a view of nature more beautiful and
harmonious than nature......
Even if all parties were to agree that American republicanism is not classically liberal, or that classical liberalism really is ontologically indifferent, or that the laws of
nature and of
nature's God are the foundation of constitutional order and that these are the same thing as natural law — even if, in other words, all parties were to agree to some version of a pristine American founding
harmonious in principle with the truth of God and the human being — returning to the first principles of the eighteenth century isn't much more realistic
than a return to the first principles of the thirteenth.