American Leviathan: Empire, Nation, and Revolutionary Frontier. By Patrick Griffin. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007. xii, 368 pp. $30.00, ISBN 978-0-8090-9515-5.)

Abstract

In American Leviathan, Patrick Griffin examines the development of society and political ideology in the trans-Appalachian West between 1763 and 1795. The book provides a comprehensive narrative of the impact of frontier warfare on western settlements from the Seven Years' War to the end of the eighteenth century. Yet this is much more than a simple narrative, for Griffin seeks to explain how “common men and women helped construct new notions of sovereignty, and in the process gained unprecedented political rights” (p. 10). While much of the historical narrative is well known, from works such as Eric Hinderaker's Elusive Empires (1997), Griffin's important contribution to the scholarship of the revolutionary frontier lies in his discussion of the processes that led to the development of a distinct frontier ideology. Griffin identifies both philosophical and ideological changes among frontier settlers. He argues that western settlers increasingly developed a philosophy similar to the ideas of Thomas Hobbes, who had argued over a century earlier that where people were alone in a state of nature, society would be violent and disordered, and only a “leviathan,” a powerful central state, could bring order and stability. Thus, rather than individualism being central to the creation of western identity and political ideology, Griffin argues that ultimately it was the role of the state.