Award-winning scholar Ken Kersch’s engaging introduction situates the key debates in their historical, political and cultural context. He introduces the touchstone frameworks and ideas that are both deeply ingrained and yet have been actively re-made in a country that has spent 250 years of shifting circumstances battling over their real-world implications. Covering thinkers ranging from Jefferson to Rawls, Du Bois to Audre Lorde, he examines the ambiguities of the purportedly ‘consensus’ American principles of liberty, equality, and democracy as well as addressing questions ranging from ‘What are the foundations of a legitimate political order?’ and ‘What is the appropriate role of government?’ to ‘What are the appropriate terms of full civic membership ?’ - and beyond.
Politically balanced and inclusive, American Political Thought introduces the contested terrain concerning these core political questions as they were raised over the course of the USA’s often dramatic history.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments1 Themes and Frameworks in American Political Thought
The Traditional Framing: Lockean Liberalism, Civic Republicanism, and the Liberal-Republican Debate
Complications and Refinements: Other Liberalisms, Other Republicanisms, and Other Thought Traditions
Theories Positing the Inadequacy of the Traditional Frameworks and Proposing Alternatives
Stories About America
Conclusion
Questions
Notes
2 Settlement, the Road to Revolution, the Founding, and the Early Republic
The Theological Dimensions of Colonial American Thought
Race and Indigeneity during the Settlement and the Road to Revolution
The American Revolution and the Founding
Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian Visions
Conclusion
Questions
Notes
3 Antebellum Political Thought
Jacksonian Democracy
The Whig Vision and “the American System”
Majority Rule and Minority Rights
The Sovereign Individual
Anti-Materialism and Nature
The Call of Moral and Social Reform
An “Empire of Liberty”?
Labor: Work and Slavery
Conclusion
Questions
Notes
4 Secession/Civil War/Reconstruction
Race, Slavery, and Natural Rights
Slavery and Union
A New Birth of Freedom? Equality and Union after Slavery
Conclusion
Questions
Notes
5 Industrial Capitalism, Reformism, and the New American State
Restraining Government: The Philosophy of Laissez-Faire
Conservative Critics of Industrial Capitalism and Liberal Modernity
Reformist and Revolutionary Critics of Industrial Capitalism: Ideas
Ideas in Action
From Pragmatism to Progressivism
Pragmatism in Politics and Government
The New Pluralism: Ethnicity, Nationality, and Race
Sex and Gender
Conclusion
Questions
Notes
6 The New Deal Liberal Order: Collapse, Culmination, or “Great Exception”?
The New Deal
The Fate of the Individual in a Mass Polity
Who Governs? The Liberal Consensus
Outliers in Franklin Roosevelt’s America: The “Radical Right,” Marxian Left, and Marginalized African-Americans
Rumbling Undercurrents
Conclusion
Questions
Notes
7 Radical Stirrings, Civil Rights, the Contentious 1960s, and the Rise of Modern Conservatism
Mass Conformity: The Diagnosis and the Rebels
Postwar Conservatism’s Political Rise
Conservative Political Thought
Civil Rights Resistance
Black Nationalism
The New Left
The Full Flowering: The Late 1960s Counterculture
Conclusion
Questions
Notes
8 The Identity and Post-Materialist Left, the New Right, and Third Way Liberalism
Sex and Gender
The Intervention of Feminist Women of Color
“Gay Liberation” and the Politics of LGBTQ + Identity
Racial and Ethnic Identity and Pride: the Chicano and American Indian Movements, and Beyond
Ecology and Environment
The New Right
Third Way (Neo)Liberalism
Conclusion
Questions
Notes
Conclusion
Boundaries, Categories, and Intersectionality
The Persisting Problem of the Color Line
Contemporary Conservatism
Contemporary Liberalism
Capitalism, Socialism, and Neoliberalism
The Resurgent American Left
Conclusion: The Futures of American Political Thought
Questions
Notes
Index
