Richard Brookhiser has written at least four books about the founders of the United States, including biographies of Washington, Hamilton, and the two Adamses who became presidents. In this book he writes about them as if they were old friends he had invited in for tea — or something stronger — to a kind of collective press conference. It is moreover “our questions” he asks them, as if they and we were contemporaries.

Mr. Brookhiser is an intelligent American asking intelligent questions of intelligent fellow Americans, who just happened to live only 200, not 2,000, years ago. The reader of “What Would the Founders Do?”(Basic Books, 261 pages, $26), like the proverbial fly on the wall, has the privilege of being a silent presence at these delightful conversations. Here are some of the topics covered: “Liberty and Law,” “God and Man,” “Money and Business,” “War and Peace,” “Education and Media,” “Men and Women,” “Race and Identity,” “Politics.”

The difficulty with Mr. Brookhiser’s approach lies in the fact that he shares the political principles of the Founders, but these principles are no longer shared by the men and women who today occupy the places in the life of the nation that the Founders occupied.What makes his book so readable however is that he writes for the unsophisticated citizen who has not been corrupted by the “political correctness” that dominates our universities. For most present-day academics — and Mr. Brookhiser thankfully is not an academic — the curse of historicism, in its many forms, has rendered impossible understanding of the great minds of the past as they were understood themselves. Yet understanding the writings of men and women of the past as they understood themselves is the sine qua non of genuine historical scholarship. Such was the dictum of the unique genius of our time, Leo Strauss, who went so far as to say that Socrates had more in common with any intelligent American, than he had with any stupid Athenian. And likewise, Mr. Brookhiser has more in common with the Founders than with politically correct academics.

Consider the beginning of “Liberty and Law.” “America is about liberty, or it is about nothing,” Mr. Brookhiser writes. “The Founders fought a revolution because Britain was infringing their rights, and they kept working at their form of government until they had made one capable of preserving them. In the Founders’ minds, government existed to secure ‘inalienable rights,’ and the ‘blessing of liberty.'” But the rights (spelled unalienable in the Declaration of Independence) were rights possessed under “the laws of nature and of nature’s God.” Yet according to contemporary academic political discourse, the liberty of the Founders had no intrinsic or non-arbitrary meaning. Carl Becker’s 1922 book,”The Declaration of Independence,” which is still the classic work on its subject, declares without hesitation or qualification, that “to ask whether the natural rights philosophy of the Declaration of Independence is true or false is essentially a meaningless question.” But if the doctrine of the declaration cannot be said to be true, then the American Revolution cannot be said to be just, nor can the Union cause in the Civil War or the Allied Cause in World War II.The meaninglessness of all moral distinctions, apart from passionate but blind commitment, is the very heart of postmodernism, which is happily not visible in Mr. Brookhiser’s work.

Another book that makes a first rate comparison to Mr. Brookhiser’s is “Vindicating the Founders” (1997) by Thomas G. West. West addresses the misconceptions and misunderstandings of the thought of the Founders by today’s professoriat, which Mr. Brookhiser simply bypasses in addressing those whose understandings have not been undermined by their college education. In commending Mr. West’s work I wrote the following, which can also serve as a prologue to Mr. Brookhiser’s:

There are rare times and places, in the long human story, when outbursts of human genius supply human civilizations with the supreme wonders of human greatness. It is the contemplation of these that raises the mass of mankind to levels not unworthy of the divine image in which we were created. Such moments of supreme achievement are to be found in Periclean Athens, in the Florence of the Medicis, and the London of Elizabeth — and Shakespeare.

However, never before — or since — has political genius burst in such a profusion on the human scene, as in the British colonies in America, in the latter part of the eighteenth century. The period of American Founding, from, the revolution to the Framing, Ratification, and Inauguration of the Constitution, saw political thought and action in the service of human freedom, of a wisdom and power unsurpassed even by the glory of Greece or the grandeur of Rome. Every human good we enjoy today is, either directly or indirectly, a legacy of what the Founders wrought, and Lincoln preserved.

Mr. Jaffa is a distinguished fellow of the Claremont Institute and professor emeritus of government at Claremont McKenna College and the Claremont Graduate School.