Saturday’s episode drew from Aristotle, Polybius, and the Founders the idea of the mixed constitution — the one, the few, and the many in balance — and insisted that the democratic element had to be genuinely popular for the whole structure to hold. This contemporary application episode asks whether our own “people’s house” still carries the voice of the people, and argues that it has been narrowed by two mechanisms: the cap of 435 members frozen in 1929, which has stretched

The men who designed the American constitutional order treated antiquity as a laboratory of political experiment — failed experiments, mostly, and one or two qualified successes — from which the principles of constitutional design could be empirically extracted.