History of American Political Thought

Description

Revised and updated, this long-awaited second edition provides a comprehensive introduction to what the most thoughtful Americans have said about the American experience from the colonial period to the present. The book examines the political thought of the most important American statesmen, activists, and writers across era and ideologies, helping another generation of students, scholars, and citizens to understand more fully the meaning of America. This new second edition of the book includes chapters on several additional historical figures, including Walt Whitman, Lyndon Baines Johnson, and Ronald Reagan, as well as a new chapter on Barack Obama, who was not prominent in public life when the first edition was published. Significant revisions and additions have also been made to many of the original chapters, most notably on Antonin Scalia, which now updates his full legacy, increasing the breadth and depth of the collection. Contents Preface and Acknowledgments to the Second Edition Preface and Acknowledgments to the First Edition Introduction. Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America 1. John Winthrop, John Cotton, and Nathaniel Niles: The Basic Principles of Puritan Political Thought 2. Thomas Hutchinson and James Otis on Sovereignty, Obedience, and Rebellion 3. Thomas Paine: The American Radical 4. Benjamin Franklin: A Model American and an American Model 5. Liberty, Constitutionalism, and Moderation: George Washington’s Harmonizing of Traditions 6. John Adams and the Republic of Laws 7. Legitimate Government, Religion, and Education: The Political Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson 8. The Political Science of James Madison 9. Alexander Hamilton on the Grand Strategy of Free Government 10. America’s Modernity: James Wilson on Natural Law and Natural Rights 11. Anti-Federalist Political Thought: Brutus and The Federal Farmer 12. The New Constitutionalism of Publius 13. Union, Constitutionalism, and the Judicial Defense of Rights: John Marshall 14. John Quincy Adams on Principle and Practice 15. Union and Liberty: The Political Thought of Daniel Webster 16. Henry Clay and the Statesmanship of Compromise 17. For Constitution and Country? John C. Calhoun, American Politics, and the Union 18. The Art of the Judge: Justice Joseph Story and the Founders’ Constitution 19. James Fenimore Cooper: Nature and Nature’s God 20. Religion, Nature, and Disobedience in the Thought of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau 21. “Proclaim Liberty throughout the Land”: Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and the Abolition of Slavery 22. Abraham Lincoln: The Moderation of a Democratic Statesman 23. Walt Whitman and Politics by Other Means 24. Feminism as an American Project: The Political Thought of Elizabeth Cady Stanton 25. Mark Twain on the American Character 26. Pricking the Bubble of Utopian Sentiment: The Political Thought of William Graham Sumner 27. Booker T. Washington and the “Severe American Crucible” 28. Co-workers in the Kingdom of Culture: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Vision of Race Synthesis 29.Henry Adams and Our Ancient Faith 30. Jane Addams as Civic Theorist: Struggling to Reconcile Competing Claims 31. Herbert Croly’s Progressive “Liberalism” 32. Theodore Roosevelt and the Stewardship of the American Presidency 33. Woodrow Wilson, the Organic State, and American Republicanism 34. The Making of the Modern Supreme Court: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and Louis D. Brandeis 35. John Dewey’s Alternative Liberalism 36. Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Second Bill of Rights 37. Ayn Rand: Radical for Capitalism 38. Walker Percy’s American Thomism 39. Russell Kirk’s Anglo-American Conservatism 40. The Two Revolutions of Martin Luther King, Jr. 41. Malcolm X: From Apolitical Acolyte to Political Preacher 42. Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem: The Popular Transformation of American Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century 43. “The Secret Heart of America”: Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Bold Synthesis of American Thought 44. John Rawls’s “Democratic” Theory of Justice 45. Henry Kissinger: The Challenge of Statesmanship in Liberal Democracy 46. Irving Kristol and the Reinvigoration of Bourgeois Republicanism 47. The Jurisprudence of William Joseph Brennan, Jr., and Thurgood Marshall 48. Ronald Reagan: Statesman and Original Political Thinker 49. The Textualist Jurisprudence of Antonin Scalia 50. “Yes, We Can”: The Progressive Political Thought of Barack Obama Index About the Contributors