American Liberalism Research Articles

The Woman of Tomorrow

Pablo A. Ramirez, “The Woman of Tomorrow: Gertrude Atherton and the Latina Foremother of the Californian New Woman” (pp. 502–534) Throughout the 1890s, Gertrude Atherton employs the figure of the aristocratic Californiana (Mexican Californian woman) to extend classical liberalism’s economic model of individualism to include women. By joining the aristocratic Californiana with American liberalism, Atherton transforms California’s history of capitalist development into a romance in which the creation of new markets generates not only profits, but the New Woman as well. In Atherton’s stories of Alta California, which I call “tales of romantic liberalism,” the history and evolution of California and the New Woman is narrated through the promises (or contracts) that a Californiana character makes and the obligations she accepts or rejects. The Californiana in The Doomswoman (1893) and Before the Gringo Came (1894) becomes the foundation for the New Woman, whose personal development and advancement promises to perfect liberal capitalism through her consensual romantic unions. As the decade drew to a close and the war with Spain became imminent, however, one can see in Atherton’s The Californians (1898) her growing fear that the massification of politics and culture imperiled not only liberal capitalism and democracy, but the evolution of women’s individuality as well. As a result, the evolution of the Californiana character is no longer reliant on a union with a capitalist contractarian partner but on the reaffirmation of her aristocratic individualism. Through her Californiana heroines, Atherton engages the Californio past in order to imagine the evolution of women’s individuality as the United States undergoes a shift from classical liberalism to modern liberalism and from republic to overseas empire.

Conservatives and the Constitution: Imagining Constitutional Restoration in the Heyday of American Liberalism

Conservatives and the Constitution: Imagining Constitutional Restoration in the Heyday of American Liberalism

The Battle over Burke

Like Karl Marx, Edmund Burke has remained a partisan figure, even though the specific partisan context in which he wrote is long gone. To a greater degree than Marx, however, Burke's partisan identity is itself frequently contested. Burke was a hero to the conservative writer Russell Kirk, who devoted his life to undoing the triumphs of twentieth-century American progressivism. But Burke was also a hero to Woodrow Wilson—whose presidency enacted and inspired so many of the progressive reforms that Kirk wanted to overturn—and to a number of the Victorian liberals who did so much to form Wilson's political mind-set.

Image of Russian Revolution in American Radical Discourse: the Russia’s Social Mission vs the US Liberal Mission

Image of Russian Revolution in American Radical Discourse: the Russia’s Social Mission vs the US Liberal Mission

Faith in Beauty and Progress: Temple Beth El

ABSTRACT In the 1920s Harrisburg's acculturated Reform and Conservative Jews found in City Beautiful aesthetics and ideals the architecture and ideology appropriate for expressing publicly their cultural identity as thoroughly modern Americans and Jews. Temple Beth El and Temple Ohev Sholom, both built on Front Street in uptown Harrisburg, stand as the ultimate material outcome and testimony to the synergistic interweaving of early twentieth century American and Jewish progressivism. A book commemorating Temple Beth El's 1928 dedication, produced by J. Horace McFarland's Mount Pleasant Press in 1930, documents in word and image connections between the founding of the congregation, the building of its temple, and the sensibilities and goals of the City Beautiful movement.

“Deplorable Exegesis”: Dick Gregory's Irreverent Scriptural Authority in the 1960s and 1970s

ABSTRACTThis article examines comedian Richard Claxton “Dick” Gregory's comical articulation of religious belief and belonging through his speeches and religious writings during the 1960s and 1970s. It argues that, during his most visible public presence as an activist and comedic entertainer, Gregory bore an irreverent scriptural authority for his readers and comedy audiences who sought a prominent, public affirmation of their suspicion and criticism of religious authorities and conventional religious teachings. This suspicion would allow them to grapple with the oppressive presence of religion in the long history of Western colonialism, in the U.S. context of slavery, and in the violence and segregation of Jim Crow America. Following this religious suspicion, however, Gregory's consistent goal was to implement just social teachings stemming from socially and theologically progressive readings of the Hebrew Bible and of the teachings of Jesus in the Gospels. Gregory's irreverence modeled, and reflected, the maintenance of belief in both the divine and in the justness of remaking an oppressive, violent, unequal world through nonviolent activism in accordance with his understanding of the teachings of the King James scriptures that he read throughout his life. This study of comedy uses one African American male's production of irreverent, authoritative religious rhetoric to display a noteworthy mode of mid-century African American religious liberalism. It is also a case study highlighting the complexity of religious belief and affiliation. Despite acknowledged ambivalences about his commitments to religion, Gregory also modeled ways for audiences to reframe religious commitments to produce social change.

Split screens: A content analysis of American liberals’ and conservatives’ respective television favorites.

Split screens: A content analysis of American liberals’ and conservatives’ respective television favorites.

Ken I. Kersch: Conservatives and the Constitution: Imagining Constitutional Restoration in the Heyday of American Liberalism. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. 408.)

Ken I. Kersch: Conservatives and the Constitution: Imagining Constitutional Restoration in the Heyday of American Liberalism. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. 408.) - Volume 82 Issue 4

Security and polarization in Trump’s America: securitization and the domestic politics of threatening others

ABSTRACT This article explores the relationship between foreign policy and domestic politics under Trump. We employ Gramscian theory to make sense of US foreign policy structures, conceptualizing the Trump administration as engaged in a discursive war of position over narratives of national identity and security. Second, we use securitization theory to conceptualize agency and change within this. We analyse 1200 official, opposition and media texts over 20 months following Trump's election. First, we consider Trump's attempted securitization of immigration. Second, we explore the counter-securitization of Trump as a threat to “progressive” America. Third, we analyse how Trump securitized the opposition, conflating the constructed threat posed by immigration with political elites. We show how this led to greater polarization of US political debate, which became underwritten by securitized language. Finally, we note security's referent differed for both groups, with Trump's ethnocentric “real” America opposed to the liberal America endorsed by his critics..

Commodifying the Oriental Other. Liberal American media and reproduction of racism

Commodifying the Oriental Other. Liberal American media and reproduction of racism

A U.S. Tripartite Experiment in the Kennedy Administration

Seeing the United States as a model for laissez-faire economies discourages research on the distinctive features of the U.S. political economy. The conventional view is that the U.S. economy suffers from chronic coordination problems, in which market actors engage in arm’s-length transactional relationships. This article challenges such generalization by delving into an unexplored tripartite experiment conducted by Labor Secretary Arthur Goldberg during the Kennedy administration in the early 1960s through the President’s Advisory Committee on Labor-Management Policy (LMAC). The experiment was a product of policy entrepreneurs’ attempts to tackle the decline of U.S. manufacturers’ market competitiveness and worsening labor-management relations, rather than being merely a negligible outlier of mainstream American liberalism. Given the absence of peak business and labor associations, these entrepreneurs designed the LMAC in a way that made it different from its European counterparts. Drawing from the literature on political entrepreneurship and creative syncretism in American political development, I describe where the tripartite experiment failed and how it paved the way toward industrial pluralism in a legal sense, and toward growth liberalism or reactionary Keynesianism in an economic sense. The article contributes to the burgeoning literature concerning various U.S. policy experiments to address problems in market coordination.

Separate and Unequal: The Kerner Commission and the Unraveling of American Liberalism

Separate and Unequal: The Kerner Commission and the Unraveling of American Liberalism

Zheng He and the American Liberal Arts Education: contexts and complications

Zheng He was a eunuch of Moslem family heritage who held great authority early in the Ming Dynasty, primarily under the Yongle emperor (reign: 1402–24), as he led seven maritime expeditions, of which three reached the eastern coast of Africa. Of recent English language projects on Zheng He, Henry Tsai (1996) explores the context of the eunuchs of the Ming Dynasty in defining Zheng He’s work, and Edward Dreyer (2007) and Timothy Brook (2010) portray Zheng He within the context of the Chinese tributary system. However, other images also hold power over the Western imagination: Louise Levathes (1994) portrays Zheng He’s travels as trade missions and Gavin Menzies’s popularized Zheng He (2002) is first and foremost an explorer designed to be compared to Western explorers. While Zheng He can be partially understood through comparison to fifteenth-century Western navigators, we limit our knowledge when we identify him and his expeditions through the lens of Western traders and explorers. It is important instead to identify Zheng He within the framework of fifteenth-century Chinese history and culture. An examination of resources and methods for teaching Zheng He in an undergraduate liberal arts curriculum can serve as a case study for important issues to consider when infusing Asian Studies into undergraduate studies.

What Love Is Not: Lessons from Martin Luther King, Jr.

AbstractFocusing on the concept and practice of love sheds light on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s negative political theology. King was fundamentally concerned with what love is not, and it is this negation that colors his political vision. I do not take King’s political theology to be either primarily derivative of American liberal Protestantism or primarily derivative of folk African American religion, or of some syncretism of these. Rather, I take King to be participating in a tradition of negative theology that pairs the critique of idolatry with attention outward and inward, to the marginalized and to spiritual life.

Teach for Arabia: American Universities, Liberalism, and Transnational Qatar. NehaVora, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019, 232 pp.

Teach for Arabia: American Universities, Liberalism, and Transnational Qatar. NehaVora, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019, 232 pp.

Toward a 2.0 Compact for the Liberal Arts

New demands on learning coupled with new concerns about a changing world have resulted in a new focus on what constitutes a durable learning experience in a liberal arts setting. While the noise of a crisis in the liberal arts can be distracting at times, what we learn is that different types of schools continue to answer the question of why the liberal arts remain an effective educational option. This essay argues that they are only beginning to address what is durable and adaptable about the liberal arts in the face of automation. While many have endorsed the LEAP (Liberal Education and America's Promise) framework developed by the American Association of Colleges & Universities, which called for the liberal arts to be in the nation's service, the original framework did not fully anticipate the rate, scale, and far-reaching impact of automation. What is needed is a liberal arts 2.0, one that prepares learners to become robot-proof in a world in which many will find themselves with robotic helpers.

DAMN GREAT EMPIRES! WILLIAM JAMES AND THE POLITICS OF PRAGMATISM BY ALEXANDER LIVINGSTON

Reviewed by: Damn Great Empires! William James and the Politics of Pragmatism by Alexander Livingston Shannon Sullivan Alexander Livingston Damn Great Empires! William James and the Politics of Pragmatism New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. 264 pp. I admit that when I think of pragmatism’s contributions to political philosophy, I primarily think of Jane Addams and John Dewey. Their contributions to democratic theory and practice have been extremely important in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere, so much so that “pragmatist politics” and “Deweyan democracy” are virtually [End Page 209] synonymous. I also think of W.E.B. Du Bois’s criticisms of anti-Black racism and white supremacy in the United States and across the globe. In any case, my first instincts have never been to turn to William James for political inspiration or insight. (To be fair, I’d say the same thing about other classical pragmatists such as Charles Sanders Peirce.) I’m not alone in thinking and feeling this way. Cornel West (1989: 60), for example, once claimed that “James was preoccupied with the state of his and others’ souls, not the social conditions of their lives…. In regard to politics, James has nothing profound or even provocative to say.” Even James himself claimed in 1899 that his “political philosophy evidently belongs to the future; certainly not to the past or present” (epigram in Livingston 2016). For all I knew before reading Damn Great Empires! William James and the Politics of Pragmatism (2016), the “damn” in Alexander Livingston’s title might have been an adjective rather than a verb, conveying James’s enthusiasm for rather than his condemnation of large imperial nations. But a verb it is, and with an exclamation mark from James to boot. Livingston’s remarkably refreshing book has written a new chapter in the story of what pragmatism has to contribute to political philosophy, and it has changed my thinking about the value of James’s philosophy for political purposes. As important as the concept of democracy is, it is not the only or the final word on how pragmatists might approach political theory and action. James’s contribution is not merely to insert individuality into democracy (cf. Rondel 2017), a reading of James that has value but which still seems to assume that the topic of democracy exhausts his political insights. On Livingston’s account, James instead provides an anti-imperialist critique of modern nations that is shaped by its “anarchist edges” (George Cotkin, quoted in Livingston 2016: 9). Rather than a full-blown Anarchist (capital “A”) ideology, what we find in James is an anarchist (lowercase “a”) criticism of what he called “bigness,” which led him to oppose empire building. Eloquently elaborated by Livingston and read with an “anarchist squint” (Scott 2012), James’s political vision becomes both apparent and appealing. James’s political philosophy is found primarily in his Nachlass, the notes, letters, and editorials that James wrote especially in the last ten years of his life (from 1899–1900). These were the years after the 1898 Spanish-American War, which as Livingston argues (2016: 2), triggered a kind of political awakening for James. While James has been understood variously—and somewhat inconsistently—as “an apolitical scholar, a harbinger of fascism, or a proto-Deweyan democrat” (2016: 7), Livingston convincingly demonstrates that James instead should be considered an anti-authoritarian, anti-imperialist thinker. In Livingston’s view, James’s most significant contribution to pragmatist political philosophy is to “reorient[t] political thought towards the problem of empire as a way of life” (2016: 7, emphasis in original). [End Page 210] Chapter 1 of Damn Great Empires! demonstrates how James’s former student, Ralph Barton Perry, significantly shaped the reception of James’s political thought. Perry was a liberal who advocated individualism, toleration, and democracy, and he used James’s philosophy to advance American liberalism in the twentieth-century era of the two World Wars. In doing so, Perry was combatting an emerging interpretation of James’s philosophy as proto-fascist. In the 1920s, James’s pragmatism became aligned with the anti-intellectualism in Europe that fed into Italian fascism. Italian dictator Benito Mussolini even infamously claimed...

Robert Chiles. The Revolution of ’28: Al Smith, American Progressivism, and the Coming of the New Deal. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018. Pp. ix+286. $55.00 (cloth).

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewRobert Chiles. The Revolution of ’28: Al Smith, American Progressivism, and the Coming of the New Deal. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018. Pp. ix+286. $55.00 (cloth).Kristoffer SmemoKristoffer SmemoWashington University in St. Louis Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Political Thought Volume 8, Number 4Fall 2019 Published in association with the American Political Thought organized section of the American Political Science Association and the Jack Miller Center Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/705661 Views: 38Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Defiant: Protest Movements in Post- liberal America

The Defiant: Protest Movements in Post- liberal America

Laicidad y anticlericalismo

De acuerdo con la postura dominante sobre la laicidad, ésta debe ser concebida en relación con el reconocimiento del pluralismo y prestando atención a no reprodu- cir sesgos antirreligiosos. El artículo defiende una propuesta alternativa: la laicidad como anticlericalismo, cuyo elemento distintivo consiste en instaurar un arreglo institucional de separación estricta y de exclusión de los contenidos religiosos de las instituciones del Estado. Se argumenta que esta forma de concebir la laicidad responde adecuadamente a la pregunta por el lugar de la religión en la esfera pública en el contexto de los Estados liberales y democráticos latinoamericanos.