Isaac Kramnick Research Articles

Godless Citizens in a Godly Republic: Atheists in American Public Life. By R. Laurence Moore and Isaac Kramnick

Godless Citizens in a Godly Republic: Atheists in American Public Life. By R. Laurence Moore and Isaac Kramnick

Radical Cross-Writing for Working Children: Toward a Bottom-Up History of Children's Literature

Radical Cross-Writing for Working Children:Toward a Bottom-Up History of Children's Literature Elizabeth Massa Hoiem (bio) In a letter to the editor of the Radical newspaper The Poor Man's Guardian, an anonymous article signed "M.A.B." urges the "mothers and teachers of both sexes, (whose business it is to instruct the rising generation)," to read educational literature with their families. Self-identifying as a wife and mother, M.A.B. provides the following list of suggested works: "the 'poor Man's Guardian,' Mr. Cobbett's 'History of the Reformation,' the 'Poor Man's book of the Church,' 'Church Examiner,' 'The National Holiday,' the 'Political Writings of Mr. Paine, and other such excellent publications.'"1 Such pamphlets and periodicals touting constitutional reform, deism, general strikes, and redistribution of wealth are the kind of dangerous literature that made British elites ask whether teaching poor children to read "would only tend to make the people study politics, and lay them open to the arts of designing men" (Hansard HC Deb 24 April 1807). These recommended readings look nothing like the early nineteenth-century moral tales, domestic fiction, or imaginative literature widely anthologized in the Norton Anthology of Children's Literature or Patricia Demers's From Instruction to Delight, and none of the authors single out children as their intended audience. Yet M.A.B.'s recommendations point to a tradition of Radical working-class cross-writing from Britain's First Industrial Revolution that warrants integration into our histories of children's literature.2 I establish this tradition by focusing on the 1830s as a watershed decade, when Radicals first identified children as an important audience. The writings of Thomas Paine or William Benbow may not strike us as children's literature. But the suggestion that their texts were recommended reading for young people begs the question why we accept as children's literature classics some adult works that were appropriated by children, [End Page 1] such as Robinson Crusoe, but not Paine's Rights of Man or his defense of deism, Age of Reason. Neither do we include Radical works that explicitly target a working youth audience, such as William Cobbett's surprisingly seditious A Grammar of the English Language.3 Such exclusions are all the more remarkable given that some "church and king" polemical literature, written to counteract Paine's influence among poor adults and children, passes as children's literature, including Hannah More's Village Politics and Sarah Trimmer's The Family Magazine and The Servant's Friend (Jackson 174–90). Those Radical Dissenters and reformers who regularly attract scholarship—William Godwin, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, and Mary Wollstonecraft—are specifically bourgeois Radicals, tied to Unitarianism and rational Enlightenment values—in Godwin's case, vilified but not imprisoned.4 The pattern suggests that we may unwittingly eliminate from consideration those texts written for and embraced by Radical working-class readers.5 This oversight stems from a scholarly consensus that pioneers of children's literature publishing (e.g., John and Elizabeth Newbery, John Marshall, and John Harris) served middle-class readers with books that reflect their values. Thus, the rise of English children's book publishers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is closely associated with the rise of middle-class families, with parents who could afford to purchase books and whose children had the time and education necessary to read them. Rigorous studies have established and embellished this narrative: Isaac Kramnick charts the eighteenth-century transition from aristocratic to bourgeois values by locating the Dissenting Protestant doctrine—that life is a race fairly won through hard work—in children's literature from Little Goody-Two Shoes to The Little Engine that Could (99–132). Offering a more nuanced reading, Andrew O'Malley in The Making of the Modern Child argues that by the late eighteenth century, "Children's literature became one of the crucial mechanisms for disseminating and consolidating middle-class ideology" (11). Approaching children's books through the history of reading, M. O. Grenby's The Child Reader, 1700–1840 confirms that no one profession dominated children's book ownership, but "irrespective of authors' or publishers' intentions, children's literature was consumed predominantly by middle...

Two Laskis: Harold Laski: A Life on the Left, by Isaac Kramnick and Barry Sheerman MP; Harold Laski: A Political Biography, by Michael Newman

The Political QuarterlyVolume 83, Issue s1 p. 410-420 Part II: Reviews, 1957 to 2008: 1990s Two Laskis: Harold Laski: A Life on the Left, by Isaac Kramnick and Barry Sheerman MP; Harold Laski: A Political Biography, by Michael Newman† First published: 16 January 2015 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-923X.02404_31Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume83, Issues1September 2012Pages 410-420 RelatedInformation

Political Individuals and Providential Nature in Locke and Pope

While John Locke and Alexander Pope are often treated as political opposites, this essay contends that Locke's Two Treatises shares important conceptual ground with Pope's Essay on Man . Both writers give consenting individuals agency and the social contract transformative power, even as both also insist that the created world offers clues about how God wants societies to work. I propose that these unexpected similarities confirm recent work in ecocriticism and the history of science that suggests that eighteenth-century nature could have moral or political content. Indeed, the similarities raise far-reaching questions about the contours of the consent-giving subject in the period's contractarian thought.

A “Foundation in Nature”: New Economic Criticism and the Problem of Money in 1690s England

People in 1690s England were concerned about money. They needed to decide how they wanted to deal with problems like a degraded currency and with new realities like credit and national debt. This essay argues that many contemporary English writers addressed these problems by paying close attention to created natural world.These writers wanted their money and their economic systems more generally to have - John Locke put it - a Foundation in Nature.1 Exciting recent work that attempts to do economic history history of science has recognized something similar: in Margaret Schabas's words, until mid-nineteenth century economic theorists regarded phenomena of their discourse part of same natural world studied by natural philosophers.2 1 extend Schabas's argument to focus on what this belief meant for pragmatics of economic theorizing. English economic thinkers of 1690s approached natural world a rich source of concrete clues about proper ways to order their economies, even about God's will for human economies. Silver bullion could dramatize imperative of not meddling with value, or invite governments to take advantage of its stretchiness. Bits of metal could actually prompt human decisions.This argument - that contemporaries understood natural world a key source of information about how economy should be ordered - is unusual. A more usual story about 1690s takes period a crucial site for emergence of modern capitalist ideas, emergence of modern world itself. Important work in the new economic criticism explores a move away natural order in this period, towards an immaterial economic order. These scholars are fascinatfed] with debt and with proto-capitalist phenomena like paper money, and with processes by which economy was loosened its natural material base and built instead on imaginations and a play of signifiers. For example, with historical and theoretical nuance, James Thompson traces complex cultural processes by which eighteenth-century England shifted from realist to nominalist conceptions of [monetary] value, in a dematerialization metal to paper medium, and Sandra Sherman and Colin Nicholson investigate how resulting new sense of money's insubstantiality and instability (even fictionality) affected contemporary writers.3 The assumption guiding this work - an assumption encouraged by both liberal and Marxist narratives of modernization - is that, English economy became more modern, it increasingly lost touch with nature.4Of course, new economic critics also recognize that some contemporaries made sense of these developments by appealing to material world - land. In this, they are good students of J. G. A. Pocock's influential work on civic humanism. Pocock argues that civic humanists of Country party in early eighteenth-century England resisted corruptions of a new finance by grounding political personality in land. Land quite literally connected owner to country and its ancient customs, enabling him to contemplate public good free that corrupting mix of human fantasy, appetite, and selfinterest characteristic of emergent commercial society.5 Much recent scholarship associates Pocock's argument that civic humanism could be used as vehicle of a basically hostile perception of early modern capitalism with Isaac Kramnick's treatment of politics of nostalgia. Scholars thus recognize both a new money culture and a deeply conservative eighteenth-century reaction against it.6 Novelty, credit, City, and Daniel Defoe are on one side, and a conservative Country tradition, land, bullion, and Lord Bolingbroke, on other. Of course, best new economic critics argue that these categories were contested late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century constructs. And they recognize that at any given moment economic thought proceeded a messy mixture of the residual and the emergent. …

<i>Il Craftsman. Giornalismo e cultura politica nell’Inghilterra del Settecento (The Craftsman: Journalism and Political Culture in Eighteenth-Century England)</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Il Craftsman. Giornalismo e cultura politica nell’Inghilterra del Settecento (The Craftsman: Journalism and Political Culture in Eighteenth-Century England) Flavio Gregori Guglielmo Sanna. Il Craftsman. Giornalismo e cultura politica nell’Inghilterra del Settecento (The Craftsman: Journalism and Political Culture in Eighteenth-Century England). Milano: Franco Angeli, 2006. Pp. 327. €26 (paper). Mr. Sanna retraces the eighteenth-century background of the formation of the [End Page 125] media as an autonomous and impartial power in the state, or “the fourth power.” He correctly underlines that the Craftsman’s self-presentation as champion of freedom of press did not imply the existence of an already fully developed public opinion. The journal’s contributors, in fact, had only a vague idea of public opinion as consensus gentium; actually, they maintained that one’s opinion could be detrimental to the correct formation of reasonable political thought. Mr. Sanna thus criticizes Habermas’s influential interpretation of the Craftsman as the first organ of public engagement in political debate. Although he thinks that journals and gazettes contributed to the crisis of the ancien régime, he does not believe that they had already become “the fourth estate” in the eighteenth century. Contextualizing the Craftsman in the political aftermath of the Licensing Act of 1695 and in the British “paper wars” of the 1720s and 1730s, Mr. Sanna stresses the role of the aristocraticélites in the creation and production of the journal and in the preservation of ancien régime constitutionalism. His discussion of the English ancien régime does not add to accounts by historians, such as J. C. D. Clark, J. G. A. Pocock, Jeremy Black, and Frank O’Gorman. The book’s central chapters (four and five), devoted to the political background and monarchical versus republican models, recapitulate well-known ideas and studies. Mr. Sanna, however, has original things to say about the aristocrats who contributed and subscribed to the Craftsman; he provides a useful and meticulous account of the journal’s complex reception, its distribution in the country, and subscribers. One might have expected a deeper discussion of the journal’s reception abroad, which contributed to the spreading of the myth of English political freedom. For Mr. Sanna, the Craftsman became an elaborate, hard-to-untangle skein. Thus, in his view, Caleb d’Anvers’s periodical was much more than simply Bolingbroke’s organ of propaganda, as in Isaac Kramnick’s interpretation; instead, it was a laboratory of political ideas and the composite result of general participation, offering a cross section of contemporary English society. Mr. Sanna’s approach in untangling the “skein” (“matassa”) of the Craftsman is well-read and diligent. Despite inconsistent hyphenations (“Cra-/ ftsman,” “Craf -/ tsman,” “Licensi-/ ng,” “Jo-/ hn,” “Lo-/ rds”), this book commends itself to Italian readers. Flavio Gregori Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia Copyright © 2012 Roy S. Wolper, W. B. Gerard, E. Derek Taylor, and David F. Venturo

Religious Freedom and the Constitution , and: Republicanism, Religion, and the Soul of America (review)

Reviewed by: Religious Freedom and the Constitution, and: Republicanism, Religion, and the Soul of America Matthew L. Harris (bio) Religious Freedom and the Constitution. By Christopher L. EisgruberLawrence G. Sager. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Pp. 333. Cloth, $28.95.) Republicanism, Religion, and the Soul of America. By Ellis Sandoz. (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2006. Pp. 230 pages. Cloth, $39.95). Ever since the Supreme Court announced in 1947 that the separation of church and state was enshrined in the Constitution, there has been a [End Page 481] powerful separationist impulse within the Court. It began in the 1940s; picked up steam in the 1960s with the prayer and Bible cases; then came to a crescendo in the 1990s and twenty-first century with such cases as prayer at school graduation ceremonies, Ten Commandments in courtrooms, and most recently, prayer at high school athletic contests. In each of these cases, the Court removed religion from the public sphere but, in doing so, the justices struggled to understand the nature and meaning of the First Amendment. If their divided opinions tell us anything, it is that they could not agree on how much was too much religion in the public sphere. Scholars have not been much help either, at least in offering the Court a clear roadmap of what church and state meant to the Founders. Witness in recent years the rancorous debate among scholars, as they have argued and debated the religious origins of the nation’s founding. During the last decade, scholars on the right have forcefully maintained that “the United States during the Founding Period was a Christian nation” (James Hutson, Forgotten Features of the Founding: The Recovery of Religious Themes in the Early Republic, Lanham, MD, 2003, 126), while scholars on the left have steadfastly asserted that it was founded as a secular society. What provoked the debate was the publication in 1996 of Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore’s The Godless Constitution, in which the authors, both Cornell University professors, offered a blistering attack on the religious right, vigorously challenging their assertion that the nation was founded on Christian principles. It was not a Christian founding, Kramnick and Moore argued, but a secular one—one where the Founders wanted to keep the church and the state separate. In their own right (and without fully acknowledging it), the two books under review have added to this debate. Ellis Sandoz, a political theorist by training, reveals the major role that Protestant Christianity played in the formation of the American republic. In Republicanism, Religion, and the Soul of America, he posits a Christian nation where American republicanism was nurtured and sustained “under Providential guidance” (xi). According to Sandoz, republicanism was rooted in key texts of Protestant civilization, including common-law constitutionalism, Latin and Greek classics, and most especially the Bible. The Founders, he argues, were well-versed in Biblical language, which influenced them as they fought a revolution and wrote a constitution. To make his case, Sandoz rummages through the Founders’ speeches and writings, culling certain quotes to support his thesis. We are told that George Washington and [End Page 482] John Adams called for official days of prayer and fasting during their presidencies, Benjamin Rush and Samuel Adams frequently quoted Jesus in their public and private writings, and officials at the Continental Congress were thoroughgoing Christians who attended church during their time in office. All of this, presumably, is proof that, in Tocqueville’s words, the men and women who founded America “brought a Christianity which . . . can only [be] describe[d] as democratic and republican. . . . It was religion that gave birth to . . . America. One must never forget that” (3, 80). The problem with Sandoz’s argument is that he selectively quotes from the Founders’ writings, ignoring their letters, pamphlets, and public statements that would undercut his position. He loves to cite the “Christian” Founders—Benjamin Rush and Samuel Adams, in particular—but he rarely deals with the more “secular”-minded ones, namely Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, or James Madison. Similarly, he does not address interpretations that differ from his. He shows no awareness, for example, of Kramnick or Moore’s arguments, Derek Davis’s...

Tocqueville: Frenchman for all Seasons?

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, translated, edited, and with an introduction by Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop. Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 2000. xciii, 722 pp. $35.00 U.S. (cloth). Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America and Two Essays on America, translated by Gerald Bevan, with an Introduction by Isaac Kramnick and Notes by Jeff Seliger. New York, N.Y., Penguin, 2003. lii, 896 pp. $10.00 U.S. (paper). Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the Revolution, Vol.One, edited and with an introduction and critical apparatus by Francois Furet and Francoise Melonio; translated by Alan S. Kahan. Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1998. xi, 451 pp. $32.50 U.S. (cloth). Tocqueville Between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life, by Sheldon Wolin. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2001. viii, 650 pp. $35.00 U.S. (cloth). The Tocqueville Reader A Life in Letters and Politics, edited by Olivier Zunz and Alan S. Kahan. Malden, MA, Oxford, Melbourne, and Berlin, Blackwell Publishing, 2002. xviii, 358 pp. $24.95 U.S. (paper). Alexis de Tocqueville, Writings on Empire and Slavery, edited and translated by Jennifer Pitts. Baltimore and London, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. xxxviii, 277 pp. $47.00 U.S. (cloth), $21.95 U.S. (paper). Now that Marx is said to have become part of history, academics, intellectuals, pundits, politicians, and journalists around the world are paying increasing attention to the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville. The French aristocrat's Democracy in America had enjoyed enormous popularity--especially the first volume, published in the United States in 1838, in which Jacksonian Americans could see themselves as a vital, egalitarian, God-fearing people in the vanguard of the inevitable progress of liberty and equality and as a model for the (civilized) world. (The second volume, which appeared in 1840, engendered less interest, in part because it was not as readable--more theoretical and also less flattering, paying more attention to the downside of the democratic revolution than the first volume.) By 1848--the annus mirabilis which also saw the publication of the Communist Manifesto--Democracy had gone through twelve editions. But after the Civil War Americans turned to other commentators that seemed more appropriate for addressing new concerns such as industrialization--excepting the contrarian Henry Adams who professed great admiration for Tocqueville, perhaps because he was out of step with the temper of his rimes. Not until 1888 did his fellow Americans find a worthy successor to Tocqueville with the publication of James Bryce's The American Commonwealth which was less visionary and more pragmatic than Democracy in America, more Anglo Saxon and less Gallic (as they would have put it), and for those reasons now virtually forgotten. (1) The historians of the following generation, notably Frederick Jackson Turner and Charles A. Beard, likewise felt little need for Tocqueville, perhaps because his emphasis on went counter to their belief that American history was driven by conflict. Reigning supreme for two generations, the Progressive historians were not eclipsed until the rise of Nazi Germany, World War II, and especially the Cold War, which led Americans to reconsider their identity as separate from Europe and defined by a consensus vis-a-vis totalitarianism. Tocqueville, they discovered, proved particularly useful in this enterprise. It was fortuitous that historian George Wilson Pierson had already prepared the groundwork with his path-breaking Tocqueville and Beaumont in America (1938). A revised edition of the classic Henry Reeve/Francis Bowen translation by Phillips Bradley, which appeared in 1945, (2) became the preferred source for a number of interpretations of American history taking Tocqueville as their inspiration--notably David Riesman, whose famous Lonely Crowd (1950) (3) bears an allusive Tocquevillian title, Louis Hartz's The Liberal Tradition in America (1955), and Marvin Meyers' The Jacksonian Persuasion (1957)--are representative texts of the new school. …

Edmund Burke and His Critics: The Case of Mary Wollstonecraft

Edmund Burke and His Critics: The Case of Mary Wollstonecraft James Conniff A number of interesting questions concerning the development of English political thought in the French Revolutionary period remain matters of controversy. In this essay I propose to consider two of them: why did the Whigs split on the Revolution, and why and how did some of the disaffected Whigs reconcile with Edmund Burke. Various answers have been suggested. The currently dominant position was first articulated some years ago when J. G. A. Pocock suggested that the revolutionary debate was largely a struggle between Whig ancient constitutionalists, Burke among them, and a republican alliance of disciples of Harrington and Machiavelli. 1 In his Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism Isaac Kramnick disagreed, arguing that the late eighteenth-century radicals should be seen as Lockeans pursuing “a new Liberal ideal, a society of achievement, a social order of competitive individualism in which social mobility was possible and the rightful reward for ingenious people of talent and hard work” was economic success crowned by wealth. 2 In his view English society was then characterized by a struggle in which the middle class, led by religious Dissenters, was rising to challenge the domination of the existing economic and political elite. For Kramnick such figures as Joseph Priestley, Thomas Paine, and Richard Price were advocates for this class, and their political theories represented its ideology. 3 According to Kramnick, these writers were intent on creating a practical science which could be used to promote the happiness of mankind through reform of the political system. Intent on rewarding merit, the radicals advocated the virtues of commercial civilization and [End Page 299] opposed the lazy indolence of both rich and poor. 4 Other scholars have followed Kramnick’s lead and sought to expand the reach of his thesis. In a recent biography of Paine, Jack Fruchtman treated Paine as a civic humanist, a radical critic of English society, and a defender of commercial republics. 5 Similarly, Joyce Appleby and Drew McCoy have employed republicanism to explain American politics in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. 6 It seems to me that the focus on the radical Whig’s critique of Edmund Burke is indeed a good place to start. In the preface to the English edition of The Rights of Man Paine maintained that “from the part Mr. Burke took in the American Revolution, it was natural that I should consider him a friend to mankind ... but no sooner did he see the old prejudices wearing away, than he immediately began sowing the seeds of a new inveteracy, as if he were afraid that England and France would cease to be enemies.” 7 In Paine’s view Burke and his allies among the Old Whigs were simply hypocrites. They supported reform, he said, only when it benefitted themselves. Intent on their own self-interest, they could never admit that, “it is to a nation that the right of forming or reforming, generating or regenerating constitutions and governments belong;... those subjects ... are always before a country as a matter of right....” 8 Yet as James Boulton has suggested, Paine actually spoke for only a relatively small segment of Burke’s critics. 9 Other more moderate Whigs like Philip Francis and James Mackintosh disagreed with Paine while also rejecting Burke’s violent rhetoric and what they perceived as his opposition to all reform. Over the course of the controversy these moderates maintained contact with Burke, argued respectfully with him, and often continued to work with him on other issues. Moreover, Burke and at least some of his critics shared a common commitment to progress achieved by gradual reform within a context of social stability. Where they differed most was in two areas of subordinate theoretical concern. First, within the common framework of progress, they debated matters of detail, timing, and pace. Second, they disagreed on a number of specific issues which involved such concepts as human nature, equality, the degree of flexibility within the social system, and the value of education, associated with progress. It is, I believe, the disagreement on these subordinate issues which [End Page 300] explains the Whig split. Their limited reconciliation followed in turn...

The Godless Constitution: The Case against Religious Correctioness.

Journal Article The Godless Constitution: The Case against Religious Correctness. By Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore. (New York: Norton, 1996. 191 pp. $22.00, ISBN 0-393-03961-7.) Get access John E. Semonche John E. Semonche University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 83, Issue 3, December 1996, Page 1005, https://doi.org/10.2307/2945680 Published: 01 December 1996

Political Newtonianism: The Cosmic Model of Politics in Europe and America

OR a long time, of the principal paradigms used to interpret the F politics of the founding fathers of the United States was political Newtonianism. This body of thought, developed in the eighteenth century, put ideas and metaphors of Enlightened science to use in constructing political mechanisms and rationalizing political order. In recent years, this interpretation has been neglected in favor of a variety of emphases drawn from other discrete traditions of political ideology.1 But the conflicts and irresolutions of these competing paradigms open the way for a fresh consideration of Newtonian concepts that were formative and fundamental in the political consciousness of the men who created the state and federal systems of the new republic. Several years ago, Isaac Kramnick dissented from interpretations of America's founding period that emphasize a search for one exclusive or even hegemonic paradigm of political culture. After considering four paradigms-

BOOK REVIEW

Book reviewed in this article:Harold laski; A Life on the left. By Isaac Kramnick and Barry Sheerman, MP.Harold laski; A Political biography. By Michael Newman.A Citizens’inquiry: The Opshal Report on Northern Ireland. Edited by A. Pollak.Privatization, Public Ownership and the Regulation of Natural Monopoly. By Christopher Foster.Ethics in Public Service. Edited by Richard A. Chapman.Post‐liberalism: Studies in Political Thought. By John Gray.Democracy; The Unfinished Journey, 508 bc to 1993 ad. Edited by John Dunn.The Nature of Fascism. By Roger Griffin.Ernest Bevin. By Peter Weiler.The Power Game: The Struggle for Coal. By David Powell.Understanding Scotland: The Sociology of a Stateless Nation. By David McCrone.

Facing Up to the Founders

To those who once traveled what Peter Onuf and I used call road '87 (and beyond) -a road that carried this writer from Ketchikan in the Alaskan panhandle Ankara in the Anatolian plain, with a stop in Kalamazoo the appearance of this volume marks what must surely be the final belated gasp of the bicentennial. Most of the ten essays printed here were originally delivered at the 1987 rendition of the series of Revolutionary-era symposia that Ronald Hoffman has so ably directed for the United States Capitol Historical Society. Although time has stripped the bloom of novelty from the roses of interpretation offered by at least four of the authors (Jennifer Nedelsky, Isaac Kramnick, Calvin Jillson, and the peripatetic Onuf),' this volume still provides as fair a sample of the approaches that historians and political scientists take toward their common subject as any other volume the Bicentennial inspired. Collective works like these typically defy ready summary, and in this particular case it does not help that the editors have not used the five years since the original conference provide a happier title. They would have done better ask Ralph Lerner cede the title of his essay, Facing Up the Founding, which for two reasons describes the contents of this volume far more accurately (and snappily) than the cliche we are given instead. First, just as the subject of many of these essays is less the Constitution as text or event than the portentously indefinite notion of Founding of the American regime, so the critical ideas they examine often turn out have little do with the substantive contents of the Constitution, but lie or float instead in the realm of what John Murrin calls fundamental values: notions of religion, property, natural rights, even character. Second, the belief that founding is something we have face up to better captures the posture that many of the authors adopt as they try bridge the gap between the prosaic conventions of scholarship and the deeper reflections that commem-

Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism: Political Ideology in Late Eighteenth-Century England and America.

Journal Article Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism: Political Ideology in Late Eighteenth-Century England and America. By Isaac Kramnick. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990. xii + 304 pp. Cloth, $42.50; paper, $14.95.) Get access James T. Kloppenberg James T. Kloppenberg Brandeis University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 78, Issue 3, December 1991, Pages 1058–1059, https://doi.org/10.2307/2078837 Published: 01 December 1991

Reviews and Short Notices: Late Modern

HistoryVolume 76, Issue 248 p. 508-546 Reviews and Short Notices: Late Modern First published: October 1991 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-229X.1991.tb01545.xAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Abstract The Englishman's England: Taste, Travel and the Rise of Tourism. By Ian Ousby. Conflict and Stability in Scottish Society, 1700–1850. Edited by T. M. Devine. The French Revolution: An Economic Interpretation. By Florin Aftalion. Revolution in the House: Family, Class and Inheritance in Southern France, 1775–1825. By Margaret H. Darrow. Revolutionary News: The Press in France, 1789–1799. By Jeremy Popkin. Jacobinism and the Revolt of Lyon, 1789–1793, By W. D. Edmonds. The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke: Volume VIII, The French Revolution, 1790–1794. Edited by L. G. Mitchell. Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism: Political Ideology in late Eighteenth-Century England and America. By Isaac Kramnick. Lord Grey. By E. A. Smith. The Duke of Wellington and the Command of the Spanish Army, 1812–1814. By Charles J. Esdaile. Wellington: Studies in the Military and Political Career of the First Duke of Wellington. Edited by Norman Gash. Rebecca's Children: A Study of Rural Society, Crime and Protest. By David Jones. England's ‘Prussian Minister’: Edwin Chadwick and the Politics of Government Growth, 1832–1854. By Anthony Brundage. Height, Health and History: Nutritional Status in the United Kingdom, 1750–1980. By Roderick Floud, Kenneth Wachter and Annabel Gregory. Industrialization and the Working Class: The English Experience, 1750–1900. By John Belcham. The French Economy in the Nineteenth Century: An Essay in Econometric Analysis. By M. Lévy-Leboyer and M. Bourguignon. The Spirit of the Oxford Movement: Tractarian Essays. By Owen Chadwick. Science and Reform: Selected Works of Charles Babbage. Edited by A. Hyman. The Correspondence of Charles Darwin: Volume V, 1851–1855. Edited by Charles Burkhardt and Sydney Smith. The Crimean War: British Grand Strategy against Russia, 1853–1856. By Andrew D. Lambert. The Chancellor as Courtier: Bernhard von Bülow and the Governance of Germany, 1900–1909. By Katharine Anne Lerman. Class and Ethnicity in the Pale: The Political Economy of Jewish Workers' Nationalism in late Imperial Russia. By Yoav Peled. Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution, 1917–1921. By Orlando Figes. Hungary in the First World War. By József Galántai. Alfred Orage and the Leeds Arts Club, 1893–1923. By Tom Steele. Arthur Henderson. By Chris Wrigley. For Anarchism: History, Theory and Practice. Edited by David Goodway. Syndicalism in France: A Study of Ideas. By Jeremy Jennings. ‘The Workers Themselves’: Revolutionary Syndicalism and International Labour, 1913–1923. By Wayne Thorpe. The Formation of the Polish Community in Great Britain, 1939–1950. By Keith Sword with Norman Davies and Jan Ciechanowski. Polish Paradoxes. Edited by Stanisplaw Gomulka and Antony Polonsky. A Social and Economic History of Twentieth-Century Europe. By Gerold Ambrosius and William H. Hubbard. The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy. By David Cannadine. Dorian. By Hervé Coutau-Begarie and Claude Huan. France, the Cold War and the Western Alliance, 1944–1949: French Foreign Policy and Post-War Europe. By John W. Young. American Labor and Postwar Italy, 1943–1953: A Study of Cold War Politics. By Ronald L. Filipelli. Religious Orthodoxy and Popular Faith in European Society. Edited by Ellen Badone. Fin de Siècle Socialism and Other Essays. By Martin Jay. Countdown to Rebellion: British Policy in Cyprus, 1939–1955. By George Horton Kelling. The Foundation of British Defence Policy Towards the Middle East, 1948–1956. By David Devereux. The Churchill-Eisenhower Correspondence, 1953–1955. By Peter G. Boyle. The Attlee and Churchill Administrations and Industrial Unrest: A Study in Consensus. By J. D. Smith. The Robert Hall Diaries, 1954–1961. Edited by Alec Cairncross. Statin: The Glasnost Revelations. By Walter Laqueur. The Fruits of Fascism: Postwar Prosperity in Historical Perspective. By Simon Reich. The German Economy in the Twentieth Century. By Hans-Joachim Braun. British Feminism in the Twentieth Century. Edited by Harold L. Smith. The Blackwell Biographical Dictionary of British Political Life in the Twentieth Century. Edited by Keith Robbins. Montague Burton: The Tailor of Taste. By Eric M. Sigsworth. Volume76, Issue248October 1991Pages 508-546 RelatedInformation

The Staging of the Constitution, or, the Republican Masque of "The Federalist Papers"

In 'Great National Discussion': The Discourse of Politics in 1787, Isaac Kramnick argues that three discursive paradigms governed America in 1787: Civic Humanism and Liberalism, the language of virtuous Republicanism, and the language of Power and the State.' Kramnick, however, has missed the first act: the leading paradigm for language and action in American political life of the Constitutional period was theatre. To legitimate the power play of the new Constitution, Hamilton, Madison, and Jay played Publius on the artfully and self-consciously constructed stage of the United States of The Federalist Papers.2 In projecting the new Republican

The language of politics and political culture in France, England, the USA, and the Dutch Republic

In a paper that has a title as hopelessly pretentious as mine, it is well to begin with a few disclaimers. I cannot possibly offer a detailed comparison of the political cultures or political languages of France, England, the British North American colonies, and the Dutch Republic at the end of the eighteenth century. Rather, I hope to bring out a few of the major themes that helped define the distinctive qualities of French revolutionary discourse by comparing it with the operation of political language in the other countries. I cannot hope, however, even to catalogue the different kinds of political language used in any one country. Isaac Kramnick, for example, has identified four 'distinguishable idioms' of 1787-1788 in America: republicanism, Lockean liberalism, work-ethic protestantism, and state-centered theories of power and sovereignty1. And that is just America in 1787-1788. A discussion of such a typology for any one of these four countries would occupy much more of your time than I can possibly demand, though Kramnick's categories might serve as an interesting base for comparison. Nor am I trying to revive what Robert Palmer called the 'comparative constitutional history of Western Civilization', for I cannot hope to adequately address the workings of such major concepts as private rights, public authority, law, sovereignty, and political representation — much less liberty, equality, and fraternity or their attendant institutional incarnations. All these disclaimers aside, there is some basis for comparison here. All of these countries experienced the 'Atlantic Revolution' of the eighteenth century in some decisive way. In England, where no revolution occurred, opposition politics took on new shapes and stridency in the Wilkes Affair. To some extent, all of these countries experienced a broadening of popular political participation and a nationalization of political discourse. But the differences between them are also instructive. My major focus will be on the different uses of the national past as a point of reference. I should make clear from the start that I focus on the operation of political discourse not only because it distinguishes the French Revolution from the other Atlantic political movements but also and more importantly because political discourse was an essential feature in revolutionary political culture. It is my view that political culture was the arena of greatest innovation during the French Revolution. In this I follow the opinion of Francois Furet, but with many differences: though I agree that the establishment of a democratic political culture was much more important than innovations in the socio-economic realm and that political culture had its own inherent and often autonomous dynamic, I have a much more positive view than he does ofthat

That great writer in the English language

That great writer in the English language Rod McGillis This issue of the Quarterly is largely devoted to essays on historical children's literature, and this gives me the opportunity to speak of a writer whom Samuel Pickering calls "one of the glories of eighteenth-century English children's books" (168). I speak of Anna Laetitia Barbauld. Mrs. Barbauld's biographer, Betsy Rogers, refers to her as "one of the most effective pamphleteers of the eighteenth century," and "the first serious writer for children" (108, 71). Wordsworth informed Henry Crabb Robinson that Mrs. Barbauld was "the first of our literary women" (Rogers 148). Maria Edgeworth called her "the most respectable and elegant female writer that England can boast" (143). Isaac Kramnick refers to her as "perhaps the most important woman radical in the 1790s," after Mary Wollstonecraft (33). Dr. Johnson paid Mrs. Barbauld a compliment when he noted that although no imitators of his style had "hit it," in her essay "On Romance," "Miss Aiken (Mrs. Barbauld) has done it the best, for she has imitated the sentiment as well as the diction." In short, Mrs. Barbauld has received high praise from her contemporaries and ours. William Hazlitt, Mrs. Trimmer, Coleridge, Mary Wollstonecraft all praised her, and she was undoubtedly influential in her day. Mrs. Barbauld was the eldest child of John Aiken who in 1758, when Anna Laetitia was fifteen, became a tutor at the dissenting Academy at Warrington. She lived there for fifteen years and, as her niece Lucy Aiken informs us, she "in some degree overcame her father's scruples" regarding the education of women and gained, along with the male pupils at the Academy, a classical education (Works I vii). She was apparently courted by the French revolutionary Jean Paul Marat, but she accepted another Frenchman, Rochemont Barbauld, a year after her first volume of poems appeared in 1773. She became a well known writer for children after the publication of her Lessons for Children (1778) and Hymns in Prose for Children (1781). Her other published work includes an edition in six volumes of Samuel Richardson's letters (1804) and a fifty volume work, The British Novelists (1810). She must have been a formidable woman. A member of a hypnotist's society once attempted to hypnotise her, "but after a long and unpleasant operation of rubbing the temples and forehead, he was obliged to desist without success" (Rogers 94). This is an indication, I think, of her strength of mind. Clearly, she had a strong character; she coped with her husband's recurring bouts of insanity (he died insane in London in 1808), for eleven years she ran a boy's school at Palgrave in Suffolk, and throughout her life she wrote many books and pamphlets. She died in 1825 while living at Stoke Newington and her epitaph says she was "endowed by the Giver of all good with wit, genius, poetic talent, and a vigorous understanding." This glory of eighteenth century children's books, we might think, ought to command our attention. What we mostly remember of Mrs. Barbauld, however, are anecdotes such as the one in which Elton Hammond, brother of a friend of Mrs. Barbauld's, left among his papers one entitled, "The Best Way of Killing Mrs. Barbauld"—by shooting, stabbing, or by poison (Rogers 145). But she is most famous as the object of Charles Lamb's ire. In a well known letter to Coleridge, Lamb remarks: "Goody Two Shoes is almost out of print. Mrs. Barbauld's stuff has banished all the old classics of the nursery . . . Science has succeeded to poetry no less in the little walks of children than with men. Is there no possibility of averting this sore evil? . . . Damn them! I mean the cursed Barbauld crew, those blights and blasts of all that is human in man and child." Much of this ill will has a personal source. Lamb may have held a grudge against Mrs. Barbauld for an unfavourable review of John Woodvil (1802) in the Annual Review that he thought Mrs. Barbauld wrote. Coleridge, who also had unkind things to say of Mrs. Barbauld, might well express pique for Mrs. Barbauld's astute comments...

The Effects of Property on Godwin's Theory of Justice

The Effects of Property on Godwin's Theory of Justice GREGORY CLAEYS IN THIS ARTICLE I want to explore the logic behind, and the consequences of, an apparent contradiction in William Godwin's theory of justice which evidently arose during both the composition and the rewriting of his chief work, the Enquiry concerning Political Justice.' My argument begins with the presupposition that when Godwin began to compose the eighth book of his Political Justice, "Of Property," he felt obliged to set forth a different standard of justice from that outlined earlier in the work, even though his earlier sections had gone to the printers and hence could not be altered immediately . In these sections, and particularly the chapter entitled "Of Justice," Godwin had developed a conception of justice in which the single standard of just behavior in cases of moral conflict was preference for that individual whose worth to society was the greatest, where worth was defined largely in terms of a contribution to cultural and intellectual development. Hence, in Godwin's famous 'fire case,' where we are obliged to rescue either our own mother or the philosopher Fenelon from a conflagration, we must choose the latter. In his first serious examination of the problem of property, however, Godwin introduced a concept of desert based on physical need. Realizing that he had set forth two potentially contradictory accounts of justice, Godwin argued that it was impossible that need could ever conflict with virtue, because property was not an appropriate reward for virtue at all. This required , however, that he completely avoid any conflation of property with virtue, a task at which he was not entirely successful in the first edition, I am grateful to Dr. Istvan Hont for helpful clarifications and to the Research Centre, King's College, Cambridge, for helping to fund my research. ' All references here will be to the accessible reprint of the third edition, Isaac Kramnick, ed., (London: Penguin Books 1976), hereafter cited as PJ. Where changes in the various editions affect the argument here, the first edition will be cited as "'PJ(1793)." [8~] 82 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 22" 1 JAN 1984 where industriousness is temporarily considered as a form of virtue. This problem was removed in the second edition, but at this point several other consequences of Godwin's intellectual development became apparent which were to alter once again his conception of the relation of property to virtue. These consequences stem firstly from Godwin's complete rejection of governmental interference in virtually all areas of civil life (his 'anarchism'), and secondly from his desire in 1794-95 to emphasize his case against violent revolution by strengthening his portrayal of the sanctity of existing property relations. The rejection of governmental interference led him to reconsider private means of caring for the poor, of virtuously disposing of one's own wealth. His reaction to the extreme levelling doctrines associated with the French Revolution, on the other hand, helped prompt Godwin to introduce concepts of rights which had been severely attacked in the first edition. Not wishing to defend existing inequalities of property, however, Godwin developed the concept of a just claim to unequal property, a claim which entailed that wealth be used solely to make the poor independent of the rich, rather than either simply dispensing it to them (making them dependent on the rich) or employing them at any task whatsoever, where their labor could not contribute to their growth as rational beings. By arguing that this sole dispensation of wealth establishes a just claim to maintain unequal amounts of property, however, Godwin ultimately adhered to two theories of justice (merit and need). Moreover, he also subdivided the latter in order to incorporate a new, largely economic rather than cultural, concept of public utility. This meant that Godwin's needs theory of justice itself now had two potentially contradictory components, one based upon the claim of the poor to have their needs immediately satisfied, the other upon the ability of the rich to claim that the aggregate social utilities resulting from their mode of dispensing wealth would be greater. The latter claim, moreover, is essentially a merit claim bearing a strong similarity...

Two Recent Critical Approaches to Eighteenth Century Children's Literature

Two Recent Critical Approaches to Eighteenth Century Children's Literature Susan R. Gannon (bio) Isaac Kramnick . " Children's Literature and Bourgeois Ideology: Observations on Culture and Industrial Capitalism in the Later Eighteenth Century," in Culture and Politics from Puritanism to the Enlightenment, ed. Perez Zagorin. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1980. Ronald Paulson . " Children, Popular and Sub-culture in the Eighteenth Century," a paper delivered at the session on Historical Criticism in Children's Literature at the 96th Annual M L A Convention in December, 1981. Program Arranged by the Division on Children's Literature, Elizabeth Francis Presiding. The American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies not long ago gave its Clifford Prize for the best scholarly article of the year to Isaac Kramnick for "Children's Literature and Bourgeois Ideology: Observations on Culture and Industrial Capitalism in the Late Eighteenth Century." Such evidence that the scholarly establishment is beginning to take serious interest in the study of historical children's literature is encouraging. However, a careful reading of Kramnick's piece may trouble scholars interested in children's literature as literature. For in his effort to demonstrate that from its very beginnings in the late eighteenth century children's literature in English has been designed to serve ideological objectives, Kramnick often misses the essential meaning of texts he is attempting to interpret. Kramnick describes the emergence of a liberal bourgeois creed in the late eighteenth century holding that "merit, talent and hard work should dictate social, economic, and political rewards, not privilege, rank, and birth" (p. 206). He traces a number of influences which, he maintains, combined to foster the creation of literature for children in this period which "self-consciously expressed the values of . . . the middle class and served as an important vehicle for the socialization of children to these values" (p. 211). The major part of Kramnick's paper consists of interpretive summaries of such works as The History of Goody Two-Shoes, The Robins, Sandford and Merton, Harry and Lucy, and Little Jack; in each case, the work is seen essentially as an attempt to disseminate the bourgeois ideology and spread "the new stereotypical roles of men and women, of boys and girls, which were emerging in the bourgeois family" (p. 204). The main strength of Kramnick's lively and well written article lies in his description of the intellectual background of the industrious English middle class of the late eighteenth century. He suggests some interesting connections between the ethical doctrines of businessmen like Wedgewood, the training offered in the dissenting academies, the teachings of intellectuals like Priestley, and the sort of homely advice on the conduct of daily life offered by children's books of the period. Unfortunately, his readings tend to reduce very individual—though sometimes odd and flawed—literary texts to the status of mere vehicles for rather simplistically conceived social and economic propaganda. The strengths and weaknesses of Kramnick's approach are evident in his treatment of one of the works he studies in detail, " The History of Little Goody Two-Shoespublished in 1765 by John Newberry [sic]" (p. 216). Kramnick sheds light on possible sources of some of the practical wisdom about getting ahead in life which school-mistress Margery Two-Shoes presents to her students, but his citation of her schoolroom maxims is highly selective, designed to reflect only themes "of an interesting ideological nature" (p. 218), and overlooking much of her more unworldly advice. For Kramnick, the message conveyed by Margery's story is simply that "success comes to the self-reliant, hardworking, independent individual" (p. 217). But both Margery's teaching and the thematic development of her own story are susceptible of quite different readings. In his search for evidence to support his thesis, Kramnick overlooks the full force of the religious dimension in the book; its echoes of the Job story; its stress not on individual effort, but Divine Providence; and the extent to which it presents reading itself as an activity which will bring not only financial but spiritual profit. Kramnick's interpretation of the interpolated story of Mr. Lovewell will illustrate the shortcomings of his approach. Lovewell is a London servant who...