Thinking about Nationalism and Internationalism

Abstract

Americans who have thought and cared about law, from era of unruly colonial crowds to mid-twentieth-century days of backroom bargaining, have sought to make American nationhood meaningful to themselves, frequently with surprising twists of fate, and no less often with ironic, even tragic results. Such is one of lessons to take away from John Fabian Witt's ambitious and original Patriots and Cosmopolitans: Hidden Histories of American Law. Through four distinctive histories or yoked Witt unfolds a story about important if often obscured relationships between international currents and ideals, law, and structures of nation-state as they have come together in lives of lesser-known individuals from American past (p. 6). Taken together, Witt's essays raise questions of growing interest to historians of United States questions about how Americans have juggled between nationalist and internationalist convictions as well as how scholars might assess causes and consequences of such countervailing sensibilities. Witt begins his quartet of essays with tale of a leading lawyer of revolutionary America, James Wilson. A signer of Declaration of Independence and Constitution, Wilson nevertheless has been overshadowed in history of period by other, more revered Founding Fathers. For Witt, recovering personal and professional travails of Wilson offers a revealing lens into matrix of political and legal theories at work during formative years of American nation-state. Raised and educated in Scotland, a twenty-three-year-old Wilson carried Enlightenment philosophies with him to America notions above all about positive connection between private interest and public virtue. Settling in Pennsylvania, Wilson found those lands an especially fertile ground to put such convictions into practice: the virtuous cycles of Scottish political economy, Witt writes, would be realized at last on American frontier (p. 78).