Inductive and Deductive Politics: Science and Society in Antebellum Presbyterian Thought

Abstract

IN 1860 the Princeton Review, the organ of Princeton Presbyterianism, presented an essay bearing the then incisive title: Inductive and Deductive Politics. Neither the author, a prominent Pittsburgh jurist and active Presbyterian layman, nor the argument he so laboriously developed, was in itself of memorable dimension; and the article has since lain interred in an obscure corner of the American past. Yet, if weighed within the original context of ideas and events, this tract for the times is worthy of exhumation. Appearing as the lead item in the most powerful journal of conservative Old School Presbyterianism near the climax of a lengthy period of social and ideological disruption, it was a culminating expression of an important trend in nineteenthcentury ideas and one of the last efforts in conservative American thought prior to the Civil War to confute the abstract idealism of reform. The early and middle decades of the nineteenth century have been commemorated by scholars as a period alive with concepts of dissent and reform. Historians have mined the rich literary remains of freedom's ferment. The diverse patterns of ideas that animated the crusades and experiments of those days have been paraded before the academic public. Yet a contrastingly small portion of scholarly energies has been expended upon the study of conservative strategies in ideas, with the result that important minds of the period remain but sketchily traced, if discerned at all.' The fact is that the age from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln