65 Quotes by Jeffrey Rosen

[Tomas] Jefferson is more out of fashion, both because of his views on race, where he's properly questioned, that part of his legacy, but also because the libertarian critique of bigness in business and government, the idea that size is a danger is something that's shared on the right when it comes to government and on the left when it comes to corporations, but not both.

[Louis] Brandeis, like [Tomas] Jefferson, is an equal opportunity critic of bigness. And he, like Jefferson, sees American history as this incredible clash between small producers, farmers, and small business people on the one hand, and wicked oligarchs and financiers and monopolists on the other.

That strain of anti-monopoly crusading egalitarianism really runs throughout American history from [Tomas] Jefferson to Woodrow Wilson, that finds its apotheosis in [Louis] Brandeis, continues through the New Deal, but then it sort of peters out in the '60s because progressives in particular become more interested in extending equality to minorities, and women, and other excluded groups, and little more suspicious of these old white guys, often from the south, who were crusaders against monopolies.

Do you think Bernie Sanders, for example, is citing Theodore Roosevelt as the progenitor of his critique of the banks when actually Roosevelt wanted to keep the banks together and regulate them.

[Louis] Brandeis had a very distinctive vision of political economy that he persuaded Woodrow Wilson to adopt in the 1912 election and that he largely enacted from the bench.

[Louis] Brandeis is often painted as an acolyte of judicial restraint, or the view that judges should uphold laws whether or not they like them.

I came to believe that actually [Louis] Brandeis tended to uphold laws that he liked and strike down those that he didn't, generally strike down centralizing federal agencies in the New Deal, and uphold state economic experimentation.

[Louis Brandeis] at the age of 57 decided to become the head of the American Zionist movement was more influential than anyone else in the 20th century in persuading Woodrow Wilson to recognize a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

He [Louis Brandais] did believe in the states famously as laboratories of democracy, to use that resonant phrase that Tea Party and conservative libertarians have embraced today because he loves state experimentation.