Republican Synthesis Research Articles

Whiteness: The Career of a Concept

This article revisits the historiography of whiteness studies. While discussing the dramatic rise and sudden fall of whiteness studies, this article demonstrates that the elusive and protean definition of whiteness was at the heart of the strange career of this concept. With the publication of David R. Roediger’s classic The Wages of Whiteness in 1991, whiteness studies grew dramatically and settled as a subfield in American history. However, since the beginning of the 2000s, the scholarship on whiteness has quickly declined. While tracing the trajectory of whiteness studies, this article borrows Daniel T. Rodgers’s framework for analyzing the scholarship of republicanism. Rodgers interpreted the “republican synthesis” of the 1980s as a “paradigm shift” and claimed that the rise and fall of republicanism studies originated from the lack of a clear definition of republicanism. Similarly, the flexible definition of whiteness made scholars possible to apply the concept freely to a wide range of topics. In so doing, the concept of whiteness became a hollow signifier losing its original meaning.

Craig Bruce Smith. American Honor: The Creation of the Nation’s Ideals during the Revolutionary Era.

Honor, virtue, and ethics are the driving forces behind this fresh look at the American Revolution. Such a focus may strike some scholars as quizzical or even downright dangerous; Craig Bruce Smith anticipates these objections as he introduces his careful and colorful study American Honor: The Creation of the Nation’s Ideals during the Revolutionary Era. Smith analyzes “American variants of honor that are in several ways unique to a nonaristocratic Western nation” (251 n. 4). He highlights several distinct features of American honor, particularly Benjamin Franklin’s notion of “ascending honor”: Franklin believed that an ethics-based meritocracy ought to supersede older notions of hereditary honor (12). And so Smith’s book revives the republican synthesis. Its narrative structure echoes Gordon S. Wood’s The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1991) by tracing the triumph of a natural aristocracy (ethocracy?) over the monarchical Leviathan, followed by a Jacksonian-style fall from grace. For a brief moment, Americans put their best selves in the service of national virtue and the public good, until the ascendance of individualism led to atomization and archaic assertions of personal honor. Republican honor, with its persistent inequalities and loose guardrails against selfishness, gave way in fairly short order. As Jan Lewis wrote in “The Republican Wife: Virtue and Seduction in the Early Republic,” “Republican advocacy of virtue was powerless before persons who had no conscience” (William and Mary Quarterly 44, no. 4 [October 1987]: 689–721, here 715).

Carla J. Mulford. Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire.

In Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire, Carla J. Mulford offers an intellectual and literary biography that explains how the man many historians have considered to be a committed imperialist ultimately joined the revolution to end the British Empire in part of North America. Rather than arguing for any one particular moment when Franklin turned his back on Britain’s imperial project, Mulford details how early modern liberalism shaped his evolving response to empire throughout his life. Pulling common threads through Franklin’s voluminous writings over time, Mulford argues that Franklin’s turn against the empire was gradual. Thus, Alexander Wedderburn’s humiliation of Franklin in the Cockpit in 1774 was not the beginning of his disillusionment with empire, but the end. In fact, it was “a turn that had been deliberated for over twenty years” (16). Mulford is concerned with much more than quibbles over chronology. Although focused specifically on Franklin, the book’s important contribution is its explanation of the origins of the American Revolution. If that subject matter seems well-worn, Mulford’s methodology is not. Rather than revive the republican synthesis of Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood, Mulford sides more with Joyce Appleby in arguing that “the phrase early modern liberalism helps to cut a clear path through the staggeringly confusing historiography” (5). Even though the phrase did not exist in Franklin’s lifetime, which she acknowledges, it best describes Franklin’s intellectual world with its dual concerns of liberty of person and liberty of conscience. Franklin had long had doubts that Britain would secure these liberties for the American colonists, doubts ultimately confirmed in 1774. This historiographical and conceptual framework serves Mulford’s method well with its blending of “historical documentary biography with aesthetic concerns about the life of the mind” (x). She has synthesized an impressive amount of Franklin’s writing, revealing an intellectual coherence and seriousness that many previous biographers have found elusive because of the many (often satiric) personas Franklin adopted as a writer.

The Royalist Revolution: Monarchy and the American Founding, by Eric Nelson

The Royalist Revolution: Monarchy and American Founding, by Eric Nelson. Cambridge, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014. 390 pp. $29.95 US (cloth). Eric Nelson's new book is a controversial analysis of American founding. Far from being a revolt against repeated injuries and usurpations of royal power as stated in Declaration of Independence, American rebellion was a revolt in favour of royal government, driven by conviction that parliament had usurped just prerogatives of crown. Those attuned to history of American Revolution will be struck by significance of this claim. While intellectual origins of Revolution have long been subject of controversy--from Lockean liberalism of Hartz, to turn of Bailyn, Pocock, and Wood, to neo-liberalism of Appleby--few have gone so far as to suggest as a progenitor of movement. There is much to commend Nelson's intellectual revisionism. What Nelson terms royalism was a significant strand of thought and framed how many colonists understood imperial crisis. They saw in George III an executive capable of offering them protection from tyranny of parliament and imagined that he would listen to their pleas for redress. The king's rejection of colonial petitions turned Americans toward republicanism in 1776. Nelson takes his argument into era of constitution to explain why, despite their disappointments in 1775, revolutionaries kept faith with a powerful executive and saw independent prerogative powers as a crucial check to legislative tyranny. The modern--albeit circumscribed--presidential veto can be interpreted as a reflection of patriot royalism. For Nelson, 1787 Constitution was not a counterrevolution against radicalism of 1775-76; but nor was it a radical experiment in popular sovereignty. It was product of ideological consistency and inherent of Revolution: the Constitution ... upheld spirit of '75 (p. 185). The book's greatest achievement is to counter triumphalist reading of revolutionary values that have come to be described as republican synthesis. In Nelson's interpretation, revolutionary Americans were not as radical as we once thought. They wanted to turn back clock on British constitution and, far from being harbingers of modern age, were profoundly at odds with constitutional evolutions in eighteenth-century Britain. He reminds us that American Revolution was not first of modern revolutions but last of early modern revolutions. But Nelson stops short of endorsing conservative revolution theory favoured by those on modern American right and contextualizes revolutionary ideology as very much a product of its time and place. In entirely reconstructing our history of origins of Revolution, however, there are issues with this book. Nelson states that patriot was not coterminous with American Revolution as a whole (p. 9) and that he is only describing one strand of thought. One gets sense that this statement is a reaction to criticisms Nelson received in a William and Mary Quarterly roundtable in 2011 than it is a genuine statement of his reservations. …

From Liberty to Liberality: The Transformation of the Pennsylvania Legislature, 1776–1820 (review)

From Liberty to Liberality: The Transformation of Pennsylvania Legislature, 1776-1820. By Antony Joseph. (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2012. Pp. 220. Cloth $65.00.)Reviewed by Joseph S. FosterAnthony Joseph challenges early American historians with a new perspective on period which Americans went from Revolution to nascent stages of American capitalism. He rejects contention that capitalism guided Americans toward developing public good through pursuit of private interest; rather, he espouses idea of a generous, rational, broadminded, and moderate set of principles that had their foundation birth of 1776, and that influenced Americans to harmonize the interests of private individuals to produce good of all (6).Joseph traces traditional historiographical interpretations of late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, beginning with Louis Hartz, who depicted a middling class that pursued its own interests after war without interference from state. This view was challenged by later historians, who suggested emergence of a Revolutionary era republicanism that was profoundly communal and state-conscious. That latter paradigm valued protection of individual from tyranny as its supreme responsibility. Joseph writes, however, that historians agree that was eased out of its place American political culture and replaced with an emerging classical that stressed an individualistic, market-driven society where state and national legislatures became arenas for clashing interests. That particular school of thought, however, had competition from historians who posited that classical liberalism, which emphasized individualism, private property, and natural rights existing independent of any government, was always driving force behind early American political and social development. That would link Revolutionary era and early National period to such eighteenth-century thinkers as Adam Smith and to early nineteenth-century Jeffersonians. Joseph finally focuses on Gordon Wood, one of architects of republican synthesis, and argues that Wood drops word liberalism his latest work and instead describes post-war order as a democratic middle class, which takes interpretation full circle back to Hartz.For Joseph, however, entire debate has missed point as historians mistakenly conflated essence of classical with American liberalism, latter having found its partial origins liberality, itself a body of thought and behavior that emerged from republicanism, but which is distinct from that idea. Liberality, he contends, is a classical virtue that emphasizes a rational generosity that avoids extravagance and parsimony, that comprehends an issue in its full sweep, and that is open to a broad range of possibilities. Its opposites are parochialism and narrow mindedness (5-6). The argument is subtle, as he hinges his thesis on way which Americans perceived their role development of their political economy. The theory of classical liberalism, according to Joseph, was not widespread until after American Civil War, and thus was not operating principle for early nineteenth-century Americans; rather, they perceived that their behavior reflected an emerging sense of a perception that borrowed republican sense of economy and suspicion of any institution's ability to become abusive its powers, and combined it with a growing willingness to have government use its authority to fund private citizens their individual pursuits, which, turn, promoted public good.To substantiate his argument, Joseph examines changing nature of Pennsylvania state legislature from 1776 to 1820, a period which that institution, born fire of republicanism, gradually transformed itself into an entity that found liberality as its central denning core. …

Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different. By Gordon S. Wood. (New York: Penguin, 2006. xiv, 321 pp. Paper, $16.00, ISBN 978-0-14-311208-2.)

It has taken Gordon S. Wood nearly forty years to assemble his cast of “revolutionary characters” and place them all onto the stage of the republican synthesis he helped create. These essays have been published independently elsewhere and revised for this volume. There is little new aside from the introduction, which asserts that the founders “unleashed … egalitarian forces” that prevented the “character” they embodied from being reproduced in the nation they created (p. 26). In that sense, they became truly “revolutionary characters,” with goals and ideals informed by the Enlightenment, empowered by republicanism, but ultimately impeded by egalitarianism. These players are also “characters” in the theatrical sense of the word. George Washington is Wood's hero—the ultimate republican citizen and the most perfect example of the “gentleman” described in the introduction, deemed worthy of governing the fledgling republic. Benjamin Franklin is second only to Washington, Wood argues in a greatly condensed version of his 2004 assessment (The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin), and is more difficult to grasp because his true character has been obscured by eighteenth-century misconceptions and the resultant myths, placing him within the “bumptious capitalism of the early Republic” (p. 90). Thomas Jefferson is the epitome of the naïve, enlightened intellect and represents the duality, nay, hypocrisy of America.

The Politics of Liberty in England and Revolutionary America by Lee Ward

161 LEE WARD. The Politics of Liberty in England and Revolutionary America. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2004. Pp. x ⫹ 459. $90. There are two competing stories about the ideological meaning of England ’s Exclusion Crisis and its aftermath . According to one, the ‘‘Liberal Consensus,’’ the key figure was Locke, whose Second Treatise of Government, written during the crisis although not published until many years later, defended the propositions that all people bear natural rights, that political authority comes from the consent of the governed , and that subjects have a right to revolt against their sovereign when the latter fails to uphold the terms of the social contract. On this view, the Whig side in the Exclusion Crisis was really interested in limited government and individual liberty; and their aborted revolution served as the first warning of the coming age of tolerance, commerce, secularism, and the rise of ‘‘possessive individualism.’’ After Locke’s ideas finally won out during the Glorious Revolution of 1688, it took less than a century for them to jump the Atlantic and serve as the ideological foundation of the American Revolution. In the alternative story, called the ‘‘Republican Synthesis,’’ the key thinker of the Exclusion Crisis was James Harrington, along with the other civic humanists of the middle- and lateseventeenth century, who defended the importance of participatory government, the separation of powers, a written constitution , and the cultivation of civic virtue over bare individual liberty. On this view, the Whig side of the Exclusion Crisis was really interested in civic virtue as expressed in collective self-rule by the gentry, and their aborted revolution served as the first warning of the coming age of democracy, egalitarianism , nationalism, and the rise of ‘‘republicanism.’’ Needless to say, after Harrington’s ideas finally won out during the Glorious Revolution of 1688, it took less than a century for them to jump the Atlantic and serve as the ideological foundation of the American Revolution. These two stories have dominated the study of Anglo-American politics for nearly a century. The ‘‘liberal’’ reading came on the scene in the 1920’s as a needed corrective to a narrowly economic interpretation of Anglo-American political history, but as soon as it had established its claim that ideas are a fundamental force in political history, the fight was on regarding which ideas dominated during this tumultuous period . The champions of the two camps constitute a who’s who of modern intellectual history, with the likes of Carl Becker, Louis Hartz, and Richard Hofstadter on the ‘‘liberal’’ side and Caroline Robbins, Gordon Wood, and J. G. A. Pocock on the ‘‘republican.’’ Today, these interpretations have reached a kind of stalemate. Most historians would agree that people’s ideas and values play an essential role in the movement of political history, and also that both liberal and republican ideologies were at work in this period on both sides of the north Atlantic. In his new book, Mr. Ward, wishing to end the stalemate, argues that that liberalism and republicanism were two strands of a single, complex Whig political philosophy that used every means at its disposal to oppose divine right absolutism. The point of his study is: ‘‘Through detailed analysis of the major Whig Exclusion era tracts by James Tyrrell, Al- 162 gernon Sidney, and John Locke, we will observe the emergence of distinctively liberal and republican modes of thought and discourse.’’ For the most part, it succeeds wonderfully. Mr. Ward’s simple but profound contribution to the debate shows that the liberal and republican interpretations present a false dichotomy—they both can be true. The intellectual forces that shaped the Exclusion Crisis and Glorious Revolution drew strength from the principles of natural liberty and individual rights as well as from the principles of civic virtue and political participation . The Whig political discourse of the period emphasized the value of liberty as well as the importance of virtue, which means that it is overly simplistic and schematic to reduce the whole conversation to a single paradigm. Mr. Ward does an excellent job of recreating the intellectual milieu of the Exclusion Crisis by revivifying the major alternative political philosophies, many of which are virtually unknown today, that formed the...

The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere (review)

Reviewed by: The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere Bruce Burgett (bio) The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere. Elizabeth Maddock Dillon. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. 310 pp. For several decades now, scholarship focused on the U.S. early republic has been bedeviled by the L-word. Liberalism has served as a central problematic and, often, as the central antagonist in and across a wide array of books and articles, ranging from the republican synthesis historiography inspired by the publication of J. G. A. Pocock's The Machiavellian Moment in 1975 to the public sphere debates that followed in the wake of the English translation of Jurgen Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere in 1989. In all cases, the consensus historiography of an earlier generation was under fire. Despite heated arguments about the place of race, gender, sex, and class in the diverse historical conjunctures of the late eighteenth century, nearly everyone agreed that the liberal origins of the U.S. republic could no longer be taken for granted. Descriptive reconstructions of the republican vocabularies of virtue, corruption, and publicness boomed in the fields of cultural, political, and social history, while literary and political theorists of various stripes critiqued the normative implications of liberalism for a rethinking of democracy in the late twentieth century. With the collapse of global communism in 1989 and the widely contested rise of neoliberalism over the two ensuing decades, this emphasis on the importance of understanding the historical genesis and limitations of liberalism has continued to shape many of the questions central to politically engaged scholarship today. How can we best think about the rise in the late eighteenth century of politically ascriptive categories such as race and gender alongside the deployment of the enlightenment universalisms that liberalism claims as its historical genealogy?What is the relation between these forms of ascription and the development of ideologies and structures of privacy and private property? What is the status of the liberal nation-state in the world system of the period? Elizabeth Maddock Dillon's The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Public Sphere takes this now well-established set of debates as its critical terrain. In six long and cogently argued chapters that span the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, Dillon dwells on the [End Page 391] shifting significance of privacy as its referent morphed from the (narrowly distributed) ability to hold property and head a household to the (presumably universal) capacity to act as a subject motivated by interiorized desires and drives. Across all of these deployments of privacy, Dillon suggests that liberalism gained its force not by excluding non-property-holding and non-household-heading subjects from political power but by including all subjects within complex structures of political and social inequality. As indicated by her subtitle, Dillon locates this revised understanding of liberalism within the debates inspired by Habermas's historical reconstruction of the rise of the eighteenth-century bourgeois "literary public sphere" as a site of critical contestation concerning the structure of state power, the economic relations of the marketplace, and the intimate relations of the household. Taking the history of gender as her primary index of inequality, Dillon argues in her first two chapters against two commonplace dismissals of Habermas: that he simply defends the normative claims of enlightenment rationality in the face of its many historical failures and that he locates the intimate sphere of the family as the unproblematic origin of the public-oriented subjectivity that engages in rational-critical debate. Instead, Dillon's Habermas is deeply aware of the ways in which the literary and political public spheres of the eighteenth century linked rational-critical debate to the (re)production of public-oriented privacies and subjectivities. This more sympathetic (and accurate) reading of Habermas leads to the two major insights that guide the remainder of Dillon's study. First, liberal discourses of publicity and privacy create what Dillon refers to as a "recursive loop," one in which "the intimate sphere 'prequalifies' certain subjects for participation in the political public sphere, and in which the public sphere in turn produces the very...

The Consent of the Governed: The Lockean Legacy in Early American Culture (review)

Reviewed by: The Consent of the Governed: The Lockean Legacy in Early American Culture Edward Larkin (bio) The Consent of the Governed: The Lockean Legacy in Early American Culture. Gillian Brown. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2001. Pages 237, Price 49.95, ISBN 0-674-00298-9. For the past three decades, with the ascendancy of the republican synthesis in historical and literary studies of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, John Locke's contributions and influence over [End Page 170] this crucial era in American cultural and political history have been downplayed by most scholars of early America. Jay Fliegelman's Prodigals and Pilgrims and, more recently, Steven Dworetz's The Unvarnished Doctrine both offer important challenges to this view of Locke's influence. Gillian Brown's new book, The Consent of the Governed, represents a stunning new addition to the study of Locke's American influence and clearly establishes Locke's centrality to the formation of the nation and its incipient cultural production. Rather than seeking to overturn the place of republicanism in early America, Brown shows how Locke's philosophy and particularly his pedagogical theories played an integral role in the development of new ideas, most significantly a particular sense of the individual, in Europe and America that would make the American Revolution possible. She deconstructs the binarism between liberalism and republicanism that has profoundly marked the study of early America in recent years, and offers a more nuanced and compelling understanding of the philosophical foundations of late eighteenth-century Anglo-American culture. Instead of competing with republicanism, in fact, in Brown's analysis Lockean ideas serve as a critical foundation for "the civic sense registered by republicanism" (9). With claims such as this one in her introduction, Brown makes it clear that her book will yield a significantly different understanding of Locke's influence on the eighteenth century and the literature produced as a consequence of the dissemination of his thought. Principally focused on Locke's complex theories of consent, The Consent of the Governed deftly traces the development of this influential concept, which informed theories of education, politics, and family relations in the eighteenth century. The first major task of Brown's book is to recover Locke's ideas as they appeared and were circulated in the eighteenth century. As Brown points out early in her text, for the last half-century or so we have received a version of Locke that has served the political and ideological needs of twentieth-century liberals, that is distinctly different from the Locke that eighteenth-century Americans would have encountered. The center of her book is ameticulous close reading of Locke's theories of consent and education and the various versions of them that circulated in early America. Brown's readings of Locke are not only fascinating and insightful but also original. In perhaps the most startling and provocative insight of the book, Brown points out the extent to which Locke's notions of consent are located specifically in the person of the child. For [End Page 171] this reason, Locke's educational theories supersede his political arguments in their breadth of influence on eighteenth-century culture. In the first half of the study, then, Brown analyzes a number of key texts where children or childhood figure prominently, beginning with the New England Primer. Her reading of the ways the various woodcuts illustrating the text supplement, complement, and complicate the written messages of the Primer is nothing less than a tour de force of literary and visual analysis. Repeatedly, the woodcuts, rather than simply confirming the message of text, generate their own potential meanings and invite readers to meditate on the meaning of the words attached to them. The meanings generated by the woodcuts often compete (even if only slightly) with the meanings offered by the verses. By offering the child a choice, this supplementary relationship between the words and the woodcuts in the Primer asks the child to decide for him- or herself what is the ultimate meaning embedded in the text. Thus, the relationship between the words and the woodcuts in the Primer enacts the process of consent that is so central to the pedagogical mission of...

The Consent of the Governed: The Lockean Legacy in Early American Culture

The Consent of the Governed: The Lockean Legacy in Early American Culture. By Gillian Brown. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001. Pp. 237. $49.95.) Gillian Brown's brilliant extended essay on the complexities of Locke's doctrine of informed consent and its formative influence on the character and literature of early America rekindles the debate over the intellectual roots of American thought. Locke's prominent influence on the Founders, once a commonplace in American political thought, came under assault with Gordon Wood's emphasis on a more communitarian ideology in The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787(1969). Bolstered by J.G.A. Pocock's magisterial work, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (1975), a rash of studies located the American experience more in civic republicanism than in Lockean liberalism. Jay Fliegelman's Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority (1982), however, reasserted Locke's formative influence over late eighteenth-century thought through his sensationalist model of the human mind. He argued that Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) revolutionized the way parents and educators understood the relationships between familial relations, education, and the shaping of moral character. In turn, Locke's influence lay directly behind the developing British colonial rhetoric about proper patriarchy versus tyranny and about educating a citizenry for effective self-government. Gillian Brown, a professor of English at the University of Utah, engages the debate in much the same theoretical way as Fliegelman, and with equal brilliance. She places Locke's theories of learning, as well as his conviction of the potentiality and vulnerability of the child, squarely in the midst of revolutionary rhetoric and elaborates on how it served to provide political safeguards sought by critics of republican values. Reconfiguring the historiographical debate between Lockean liberalism and civic republicanism, Brown suggests numerous ways in which Locke's liberal vision of informed consent enforces and sustains (rather than competes with) an emerging republican synthesis. Her rereading of Locke clarifies . . . the citizen's continuous labor of crediting and discrediting ideas (8). She uses the tools of literary criticism to elucidate the ideology and reception of the literature that shaped the cultural face of the new nation: The New England Primer, children's fables, and novels. So effortlessly and articulately does Brown assert Locke's omniscient presence in the literature that she sets a high standard for the interdisciplinary work of cultural studies. The Consent of the Governed is composed of two complementary but separate arguments. The first half of the book explores the Lockean legacy as found in a variety of literatures for children, particularly The New England Primer and oft-told fables like Tom Thumb. Here she argues that Locke's principle of informed consent determined the shape and character of the didactic literature that made up the reading diet of colonial children. In addition, she effectively shows how children were expected to process and internalize the messages of this literature on their way to becoming good citizens of the new republic. The second part of the book uses early American novels to explore the difficulties and contradictions inherent in a theory of consensual politics: that is, how to deal with the possibilities of poor or destructive choices. Brown argues that John Locke's epistemology-that children's minds selected and ordered information received rather than being born knowing inherent truths-permeated the creation of most eighteenth-century literature for children. As the future citizens who would secure the success of the republican experiment, children had to be inculcated with civic virtues and be able to choose rightly from competing ideas. …

The Value of Conspiracy Theory

For several decades, many historians and cultural critics have lamented a primal pathology of American culture, tendency of political leaders and their followers to view the world in conspiratorial terms (Curry and Brown vii). Coincident with this condemnation, of course, is denial of the validity of conspiracy theories one recent study defines them as fears of nonexistent (Pipes 1) which are read, rather, as symptoms of broader cultural dynamics. But more is at stake here than the conspiratorial outlook itself: the methodological protocols of interpreting conspiracy theories explain much of the critical interest, such that one prominent historian of early America, Bernard Bailyn, interrupted his analysis of The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967) with A Note on Conspiracy. At issue for critics of American conspiracy theory, then, is not simply the more reliable description of events or culture, but, more fundamentally, a saner understanding of that culture. This essay attempts a methodological rehabilitation of conspiracy theories on the dual assumptions that the eighteenth century was rife with actual conspiracies and that conspiracy theories from that moment offer valuable insights. But as with the adversaries of conspiratorial consciousness, my concern will be primarily methodological. An explication of conspiracy theories, I argue, provides the contours for a necessary theoretical program uniting structural and cultural analysis. Accordingly the first part of this essay surveys the dominant historiographical critiques of conspiracy theory, highlighting important similarities between the republican synthesis school and poststructuralist literary

Virtue, Commerce, and the Enduring Florentine Republican Moment: Reintegrating Italy into the Atlantic Republican Debate

Republicanism has dominated the historiographies of English and American political thought for the past two decades.' Its success derives principally from J. G. A. Pocock's The Machiavellian Moment, which presents a sweeping vision of an ancient Aristotelian republican language that persisted for centuries in the mental landscape of the western world. Resurrected in Renaissance Florence, the language of republicanism continued to resonate powerfully in Stuart and Hanoverian Britain and colonial America. Pocock and those sympathetic to his work attributed the power and significance of republicanism to its internal discursive coherence over time; because of its deep roots in the European classical and Renaissance past, republicanism-not liberalism-provided the intellectual weapon with which the English and the Americans rebelled against the Stuart and Hanoverian monarchies. Pocock's provocative repudiation of the significance of John Locke and liberalism, as well as his suggestion that the revolutions of 1641, 1688, and 1776 were animated not by a utopian, forward-looking political ideology but by a backward-looking desire to restore a classical political order, generated a still-ongoing academic debate.2 This paper is the result of a Mellon summer seminar on early modern political thought (Northwestern University, July 1999). Thanks especially to Timothy Breen, Edward Muir, Alison Brown, Sean Field, and the anonymous reviewers of JHI. ' On The Machiavellian Moment the literature is too extensive for comprehensive citation; but see Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge, 1998); Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford, 1997); Robert E. Shalhope, Toward a Republican Synthesis: The Emergence of an Understanding of Republicanism in American Historiography, William and Mar' Quarterly, 29 (1972), 49-80. 2 See Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Societv; 1649-1776, ed. D. Wootton (Stanford, 1994); Joyce Appleby, Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 279; Steven Pincus, Neither Machiavellian Moment nor Posses-

The Social and Cultural Dynamics of Soldiering in Hood's Texas Brigade

JUST BEFORE THE START OF THE BLOODY PENINSULA CAMPAIGN OF JUNE 1862, the soldiers of the Fourth Texas Infantry Regiment purchased a horse for General John Bell Hood, commander of what came to be known as Hood's Texas Brigade. Later, as the regiment assembled at dress parade, First Sergeant J. M. Bookman presented the horse to General Hood. Sir: In behalf of the non-commissioned officers and privates ..., I present you this war-horse. He selected and purchased by us for this purpose, not that we hoped by so doing to court your favor, but simply because we, as freemen and Texans, claim the ability to discern, and the right to reward, merit wherever it may be found. In you, sir, we recognize the soldier and the gentleman. In you we have found a leader whom we are proud to follow--a commander whom it is a pleasure to obey; and this horse we tender as a slight testimonial of our admiration. Moved by this gesture of deference and respect from his men, General Hood sprang into the saddle and promised to act as their rallying point when the struggle came.(1) These Texas soldiers--who soon earned a reputation as the toughest combat troops in Robert E. Lee's fabled Army of Northern Virginia--did not always behave so deferentially toward officers. In fact, when the Texas regiments came to Virginia, they clashed frequently with the Confederate government over the authority to select their own regimental and staff officers. men of the Texas regiments claimed the right to veto any appointment that proved unacceptable to them. Fourth Texas Regiment, for instance, refused to accept the assignment of Colonel R. T. P. Allen to lead their unit. He had been in camp for only a short while when several soldiers hoisted Allen onto his horse, and using switches, drove him out of the regimental grounds amid the hoots and jeers of the boys; and he was never seen again.(2) This study examines the social and cultural dynamics of leadership, command, and soldiering in Hood's Texas Brigade for clues to unravel the broader enigma of the antebellum southern social structure, particularly with regard to the place and status of plain folk, yeoman farmers, and other non-elite whites. Much of the literature about the antebellum South hinges on the long-standing debate over whether the Old South an elitist slaveholding aristocracy or an agrarian plain-folk democracy.(3) drift of many recent studies has been toward synthesis, arguing that antebellum society represented a hybrid of hierarchy and equality.(4) However, even studies that recognize the complexity and paradoxes of this society fall short as social history, because the class dynamic that they advance to link elite and commoner, rich and poor, is too one-sided. planters' hegemony is a given. The nonslaveholder, according to one historian, was in a very passive, dependent position vis-a-vis the planter.(5) Studies based on the so-called republican synthesis also tend to infer yeoman values and ideas from the language and behavior of political elites; consequently, the social relation is seen from the top down, the capacity of plain folk to form their own lives is shortchanged, and thus the truly dynamic, interactive, and relational nature of power in the antebellum South has not been fully understood.(6) common soldiers of Hood's Texas Brigade fought the Civil War mainly on their own terms, defending and justifying their right to do so by drawing on a unique mix of ideological and cultural resources. Their conduct as soldiers combined beliefs about popular sovereignty and natural liberty with backcountry shaming rituals of social control, like the charivari, that were used to hold privates and officers alike to particular standards of conduct defined by the volunteer soldiers themselves. This essay examines how popular constitutional ideas and traditional forms of community action affected the performance of one of the elite fighting units in the Army of Northern Virginia. …

Black political thought in the making of South African democracy

Foreword Chapter 1: Nationality and Race Chapter 2: Racial Proletarianization: Movements in the Evolution of A Concept Chapter 3: Liberalism, Populism, and Socialism Chapter 4: A New Left Battles Apartheid Chapter 5: The Black Republican Synthesis Chapter 6: An Enduring Duality

Parties, Politics, and the Sectional Conflict in Tennessee. 1832-1861 (review)

74CIVIL WAR HISTORY Koistinen divides his book into two parts. Part I discusses what he terms the "pre-industrial phase" of warfare. The American Revolution is the focus of this section. For Koistinen, the mobilization for the American Revolution was the most complex in American history because "the process of warfare created the nation" (? i). The Mexican War, and especially the American Civil War, represent the transitional phase between the preindustrial and industrial stages ofwar mobilization. Although the title indicates that the volume begins with the colonial era, the book, in fact, starts with the Revolution. But the main focus is on the Civil War period. Indeed, the author devotes six of his ten chapters to the mobilization efforts, both military and civilian, ofthe Union and the Confederacy. Koistinen's argument is not particularly new or revisionist. Rather, he has synthesized an enormous amount of literature on war mobilization. For example, his coverage of Confederate mobilization echoes the work of Richard Goff, Robert C. Black III, and Douglas Ball. Although he states in his notes that he utilized primary sources extensively, the citations are composed overwhelmingly of secondary literature. Still, those notes are invaluable, for they approximate a bibliographic essay (in the absence of a comprehensive bibliography). Koistinen states that his research interests he in the twentieth century and that he views nineteenth-century warfare and its political economy from a twentiethcentury perspective. That bias is reflected in his treatment of the Civil War years. Indeed, the book's emphasis on the roots oftotal war in the Civil War period allows Koistinen to lay the groundwork for his second volume. Beating Plowshares Into Swords does not conclude with any startling revelations or path-breaking interpretations. Nonetheless, it provides the scholar and student with a comprehensive synthesis of some of the best monographs on war, mobilization, and the evolution of the American political economy. Mary A. DeCredico United States Naval Academy Parties, Politics, and the Sectional Conflict in Tennessee. 1832-1861. By Jonathan M.Atkins. (Knoxville: University ofTennessee Press, 1997. Pp. xviii, 371. $38.00.) The republican synthesis has come at last to Tennessee. Jonathan M. Atkins's aim is to reshape our understanding ofantebellum politics in theVolunteer State by drawing on the insights of modern political historians who have traced the long-lasting influence of the Founding Fathers' ideology. He has succeeded admirably. Atkins rejects the notion, put forth by Richard P. McCormick and others, that the Whig and Democratic parties were essentially vote-getting machines devoid of ideological substance. In Tennessee at least, says Atkins, the parties BOOK REVIEWS75 were highly ideological. They shared a republican worldview that depicted America's cherished liberties as perpetually threatened by corrupt, self-seeking interests. Where the two parties differed was in their response to the continuing crisis of freedom: Whigs believed that economic development and an activist government would safeguard liberty, while Democrats feared that too much of either would destroy it. This basically chronological study thoroughly analyzes the political maneuvering and propagandizing that marked Tennessee's first party system from its birth in the late 1830s to its demise after the i860 election. (Scholars will still want to consult Paul H. Bergeron's Antebellum Politics in Tennessee, however, especially for detailed analysis of election returns.) Atkins challenges the assertion of William J. Cooper, Jr., that at the heart of antebellum Southern politics was the defense of slavery. In Atkins's view, the defense of slavery was but one element ofthe republican agenda. Whig and Democratic politicians got elected not simply by assuring the voters of their fidelity to slavery but by promising that their party's measures would better protect the citizens' freedoms, including the freedom to own slaves. Until 1861 the overwhelming majority of Tennessee voters of both parties rejected Southern-rights extremism and agreed that slavery and liberty would be safe only in an undivided Union. Atkins offers a persuasive explanation for the state's consistently conservative response to the sectional conflicts that drove many other Southern states toward fire-eating radicalism and secession. Likewise , he makes clear how and why the state abruptly changed course with the outbreak of war. Most Tennessee citizens immediately aligned themselves with the...

A jacobin, liberal, socialist, and republican synthesis: the original political thought of Charles Dupont-White (1807–1878)

Known to his contemporaries as a ‘publiciste celebre’,1 Charles Dupont-White (1807–1878) was a French pamphleteer whose writings on political economy, history, philosophy, and politics achieved con...

The Republican Synthesis Revisited: Essays in Honor of George Athan Billias.

The Republican Synthesis Revisited: Essays in Honor of George Athan Billias.

Canon Wars II the Return of the Founders

Higher education in contemporary America has been embroiled in a number of bitter controversies in the recent past. One of the most acrimonious debates concerns the status of the traditional canon of Western thought and its privileged place in the curriculum. Critics of the canon, most notably supporters of multiculturalism, charge that the traditional approach favors the perspective of DWEMS, dead white European males. Lorraine Smith Pangle and Thomas L. Pangle's The Learning of Liberty enters this emotional debate clearly on the side of tradition. The Pangles believe that a pernicious radical egalitarianism has infected recent scholarship and higher educational policy. Multiculturalism, in the Pangles's view, has unleashed a form of relativism that has undermined the pursuit of those eternal truths that the great philosophers of the Western tradition sought to uncover in their writings. Virtue is the central focus of this inquiry. In particular, the Pangles are interested in the connection between virtue and modem republicanism. In an earlier work, The Spirit of Modern Republicanism (1988), Thomas Pangle attacked the historians associated with the new republican synthesis, challenging the conception of virtue employed by scholars associated with this intellectual paradigm. Modern republicanism, Pangle argued, unlike classical republicanism, was deeply imbued with Lockean ideas. Modern commercial republics did not aspire to the austerity and sacrifice of personal interest that characterized the republics of antiquity. The problem for modern republics was to cultivate the requisite virtue needed for the survival of republican government while still promoting the ideals of liberty and economic growth. The Pangles's study of the educational philosophy of the Founders is shaped by the methodological and philosophical approach of the conservative political philosopher Leo Strauss. The Learning of Liberty reveals all of the

Liberal Republicans or Republican Liberals? The Political Thought of the Founders Reconsidered

Discussions of the political thought of the Founders once concentrated exclusively on the Federalists. The Antifederalist opponents of the Constitution were generally dismissed as men of little faith, consigned to the margins of the American political tradition. One of the distinguishing features of recent scholarship is its willingness to acknowledge that our constitutional tradition was shaped by the lively debate between Federalists and Antifederalists. Supporters of the Constitution refined and elaborated their understanding of the document in response to Antifederalist complaints. Most scholars would now grant that recovering the original understanding of the Constitution requires exploring the points of view of both sides of the ratification controversy. Richard Sinopoli's thoughtful study of the role of citizenship in the political thought of the Federalists and Antifederalists makes a number of important contributions to our understanding of the Founding period. 1 The Foundations of American Citizenship is framed in terms of the current scholarly controversy over the relative influence of republican and liberal ideas on the political thought of the Founders. Proponents of the republican synthesis argue that virtue was a crucial concept in American political discourse during the Founding period. Virtue required individuals to take an active part in government and further required individuals to act in the public interest. Against this view, proponents of the neoliberal interpretation argue that American political discourse was evolving toward a liberal political philosophy that stressed the primacy of individual rights and accepted the reality of interest-oriented political behavior. More than one commentator on this historiographic controversy has suggested that the existing labels now employed by historians fail to capture the complexity of eighteenth-century po-

The Republican Synthesis Revisited: Essays in Honor of George Athan Billias

The Republican Synthesis Revisited: Essays in Honor of George Athan Billias