Like dye cast into water, liberal assumptions colour everything American, from ideas about human nature to fears about big government. Not the dreaded "L" word of the 1988 presidential campaign, liberalism in its historical context emerged from the modern faith in free inquiry, natural rights, economic liberty, and democratic government. Expressed in the nation-building acts of revolution and constitution-writing, liberalism both structured and limited Americans' sense of reality for two centuries. The nation's scholars were unable to break away from liberalism's pervasive hold on the American mind until the last generation - when they recovered the lost world of classical republicanism. Ornate, aristocratic, prescriptive and concerned with the common good, this form of republicanism held sway among the founding fathers before the triumph of liberal thought, with its simple egalitarian, rational, and individualistic emphasis. The two concepts, as Joyce Appleby shows, posed choices for 18th century thinkers much as they have divided 20th century scholars.
Entering one of the liveliest debates in the scholarly world about our ideological roots, Appleby follows the labyrinthine controversies that these two perspectives have generated in their day and in ours. In doing so, she addresses the tensions that remain to be resolved in the democratic societies of the late twentieth century - the complex relations between individual and community, personal liberty and the common good, aspiration and practical wisdom.
Sprache
Verlagsort
Zielgruppe
Für höhere Schule und Studium
Für Beruf und Forschung
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Maße
Höhe: 235 mm
Breite: 157 mm
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ISBN-13
978-0-674-53012-6 (9780674530126)
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Schweitzer Klassifikation
Introduction - liberalism and republicanism in the historical imagination; political and economic liberalism in 17th-century England; Locke, liberalism and the natural law of money; modernization theory and Anglo-American social theories; ideology and the history of political thought; liberalism and the American Revolution; the social origins of American revolutionary ideology; John Adams and the new republican synthesis; the American heritage - the heirs and the disinherited; the American model for the French revolutionaries; the "Agrarian Myth" in the early republic; republicanism and ideology; what is still American in Jefferson's political philosophy?; republicanism in old and new contexts.
