Have a green beer...I should have had three if I had one for every post that I lost to a computer crash, on your previous post...which is just as well given what you say about Madison, but really you have to be wrong about lumping Hegel and Marx, they had opposite projects and different insights. I concluded in agreement with your whole post other than a crucial disagreement on the Hegelian project with implications for the crucial difference between Europe and the United States...but since you juxtapose being deep with being manly...I will simply say that being deep is the result of leisure and being manly the result of work. The Europeans were led astray by leisure, the americans by work. While Marx hates the Bourgeouis they really are foundational for Hegel, who is much more interested in keeping power structures, attachment to custom and tradition and showing these to be REASON itself even if the cunning of Reason...now I can't believe how European I am being so I will go drink some Budweiser...it is the prosaic attitude of those occupied in things other than reflection(which is autonomizing)...which is why as deep as Jefferson was he was wrong about which religion would come to dominate...and also why the Mormons are productive. Hegel instructed that thought was on the side of work, but Marx reverted to the ancients with the deviousness to make though on the side of screwing work. In any case Tocqueville was right about american respect for what slight aristocracy existed, so that no master slave relationship developed or boiled over, lacking this tension and being born of Locke and the respect for work/prosiac without history(as tabula rasa as you could get)...we avoided the disolution of the enlightment and only really absorbed a morphed Hegel/Dewey who was conservative in a sense or at least becomes so if you are worried about an overly robust Lockeianism. Madison gave us a state where we only needed the bourgeois, and it didn't take reading Hegel to understand what the master/slave relationship was in the United States...then the Irish came but they were hardly intellectual catholics...they were hard working rowdy breed like rabbits drink like sailors catholics.

My buddies and I look at this site and ante up a dollar for every pithy name or founding father dropped in a post. You hit me up for 16 with this one. And the topic was St. Patrick's day. Can't wait for the Easter holiday for even more half-baked name-dropping references. But then they will be chocolate-egg induced instead of the result of green beer.

I didn't know Arabs celebrated St. Patrick's Day. Can you get green beer in them caves in Afghanistan?

I've never understood the esteem in which Madison is held by many on the right. He was one of the most contemptible of the Founders. I defy anyone to read Federalist 54, where we see Madison, a southern slaveowner - pretending to be a northern non-slave owner - in turn assuming the guise of a southern slave owner (convoluted, isn't it?) - in order to make the case that his slaves should be counted as free men for the purpose of representation in Congress, and not gag.

Even all his laudable sounding concern for the rights of the minority was based on his fear that the non-slaveholding majority would take away his slaves. In a sense he was the architect of the Civil War.

My buddies and I look at this site and ante up a dollar for every pithy name or founding father dropped in a post.

You and your buddies recognize the names of the founding fathers? I'm impressed, ren. And even more so that you blow your pocket money on such a pastime.