Bøger i American Political Thought serien

From the Revolution to the Age of Jackson, John Marshall played a crucial role in defining the ""province of the judiciary"" and the constitutional limits of legislative action. This book clarifies the coherence of Marshall's jurisprudence, while keeping in sight the man as well as the jurist.

In ""A Preface to American Political Theory"" the author sets out to emancipate American political theorists from empiricism and inappropriate European theories and methodologies. He argues for clarification of the core of American political theory and its attendant methodologies.

Surveys more than 100 theories of community, taken from political, sociological, philosophical and theological thought, and backed by a bibliography of over 300 entries. Fowler proposes the idea of existential community as an alternative to liberalism and the standard communitarian ideal.

This work provides a fresh interpretation of James Madison and a critique of Madisonian politics. Neither civic humanist nor democrat, Madison has been described as a ""distrusting, calculating, and pragmatic Machiavellian Prince"".

A conversation about war and freedom between founder Alexander Hamilton and the Loyalists, Anti-Federalists, Jeffersonians and other Federalists. Instead of pitting Hamilton's virtues against his opponents' vices, it pits his virtue of responsibility against the revolutionary virtue of vigilance.

For Frederick Douglass, the iconic 19th-century slave and abolitionist, the foundations for his arguments in support of racial equality rested on natural rights and natural law. This title examines the philosophic core of Douglass' political thought, offering an understanding of its depth and coherence.

This text explores the shifting reputation of this controversial founding father. It surveys the Hamilton image in the minds of American statesmen, scholars, literary figures and media, explaining why Americans are content to live in a Hamiltonian nation, but reluctant to embrace the man himself.

Since the early days of the republic, Americans have recognized Thomas Jefferson''s distinctive role in helping to shape the American national character. As Founder and statesman, Jefferson thought broadly about the virtues Americans would need to cultivate in order to preserve and perfect their experiment in republican self-government. Now in an age preoccupied with rights and divided over questons of character in public and private life, Jefferson can help us to think more clearly about our most urgent concerns.American Virtues is the first comprehensive analysis of Jefferson''s moral and political philosophy in over twenty years and the first ever to focus exclusively on the full range of moral, civic, and intellectual virtues that together form the American character. It asks what kind of character Americans as a people must cultivate to ensure their freedom and happiness and how we as a free society can nurture moral and intellectual excellence in our citizens and statesmen.Beginning with the Declaration of Independence, Jean Yarbrough explores how Jefferson''s conception of rights helps to form the American character. In subsequent chapters, she examines the moral sense virtues of justice and benevolence; the "agrarian" virtues of industry, moderation, patience, self-reliance, and independence; patriotism and modern republicanism; slavery and agrarian vice; the effect of commerce on character; the virtues connected with private property; the civic virtues of vigilance and spirited participation; the meaning of virtue and happiness for women; the virtues of republican statesmen; the place of the Epicurean virtues of wisdom and friendship in liberal republicanism; and piety and the secularized virtues of charity, toleration, and hope.In broadening the examination of virtue to include not only civic or republican virtue but the whole range of moral and intellectual excellences that perfect the individual character, American Virtues moves beyond the liberal-republican debates and makes a fresh contribution to the Jeffersonian literature.

From his Kentucky farm, Wendell Berry preaches and practices stewardship of the land as he seeks to defend the value and traditions of farm life in an industrial capitalist society. This book explores key aspects of Berry's thought, as well as his overall contribution to environmental theory.

As recently as 2008, when Presidents Bush and Obama acted to bail out the nation's crashing banks and failing auto companies, the perennial objection erupted anew: government has no business in . . . business. Mike O'Connor argues in this book that those who cite history to decry government economic intervention are invoking a tradition that simply does not exist. In a cogent and timely take on this ongoing and increasingly contentious debate, O'Connor uses deftly drawn historical analyses of major political and economic developments to puncture the abiding myth that business once operated apart from government. From its founding to the present day, our commercial republic has always mixed--and battled over the proper balance of--politics and economics. Contesting the claim that the modern-day libertarian conception of U.S. political economy represents the "natural" American economic philosophy, O'Connor demonstrates that this perspective has served historically as only one among many. Beginning with the early national debate over the economic plans proposed by Alexander Hamilton, continuing through the legal construction of the corporation in the Gilded Age and the New Deal commitment to full employment, and concluding with contemporary concerns over lowering taxes, this book demonstrates how the debate over government intervention in the economy has illuminated the possibilities and limits of American democratic capitalism.

Arguments over what democracy actually meant in practice and how it should be implemented raged throughout the early American republic. This exploration of the Pennsylvania experience reveals how democracy arose in America and how it came to accommodate capitalism.