The Social Contract in America
From the Revolution to the Present Age
Mark Hulliung
Because most Americans believe that government requires the consent of the governed, the idea of the social contract may come as close to a public philosophy as we’ve ever had. And, as Mark Hulliung reminds us, we have frequently fought our greatest political battles by wielding one or another version of social contract theory.
Hulliung’s book is the first to examine the role of the social contract across the entire sweep of American history, well beyond the Revolution and Founding periods. While he pays close attention to the contested versions of the social contract from 1765 to 1861, he also underscores its relevance after the Civil War, from late nineteenth-century land reform to the rights revolution of the late twentieth century.
By considering this lengthy timeline, Hulliung demonstrates the life and death of what may be the most expansive and persistent form in our country’s political discourse, one that has figured in virtually all major controversies in American history. He shows how it has been enlisted by advocates of seemingly every major cause, from Henry George to Martin Luther King and Justice Clarence Thomas, whose view that constitutional authority rests in the consent of the people of each individual state, rather than of the nation as a whole, echoed the version of the social contract once held by southern slave owners.
Hulliung treats the social contract as not one theory but several, considering the Americanization of Grotius and Pufendorf as well as Locke. He examines alternative readings of the contract in the struggles between claims of alienable versus inalienable rights; between consent given once and for all versus consent reaffirmed with each generation; and between the sovereignty of the people in various states versus the sovereignty of the people of the nation.
Innovative and provocative, Hulliung’s study clearly shows that, until we come to terms with the centrality of the social contract in American history—and the significance of its possible demise—something essential will be missing from our accounts of the past and our understanding of the present.
“This extraordinary new book is the finest contribution to the study of social contract theory in the United States since Louis Hartz’s celebrated The Liberal Tradition in America.”—Patrick Riley, author of Will and Political Legitimacy: The Foundations of Social Contract Theory from Hobbes to Hegel
“Provocative, thoughtful, and comprehensive.”—John Patrick Diggins, author of Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History
“Lucidly written and powerfully argued.”—Peter Onuf, author of Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood
MARK HULLIUNG is Richard Koret Professor of the History of Ideas at Brandeis University and author of five other books, including most recently Citizens and Citoyens: Republicans and Liberals in America and France.
September 2007264 pages, 6 x 9
American Political Thought
Cloth ISBN 978-0-7006-1540-7 $29.95
Cradle of America
Four Centuries of Virginia History
Peter Wallenstein
Virginia is definitely for lovers—of history!
As the site of the first permanent English settlement in North America, the birthplace of a presidential dynasty, and the gateway to western growth in the nation’s early years, Virginia can rightfully be called the “cradle of America.” In this first single-authored history of Virginia since the 1970s, Peter Wallenstein traces major themes across four centuries in a brisk narrative that recalls the people and events that have shaped the Old Dominion.
Historical accounts of Virginia have often emphasized harmony and tradition, but Wallenstein focuses on the impact of conflict and change. From the beginning, Virginians have debated and challenged each other’s visions of Virginia, and Wallenstein shows how these differences have influenced its sometimes turbulent development. Casting an eye on blacks as well as whites, and on people from both east and west of the Blue Ridge Mountains, he traces such key themes as political power, racial identity, and education.
Bringing to bear his long experience teaching Virginia history, Wallenstein takes readers back, even before Jamestown, to the Elizabethan settlers at Roanoke Island and the inhabitants they encountered, as well as to Virginia’s leaders of the American Revolution. He chronicles the state’s dramatic journey through the Civil War era, a time that revealed how the nation’s evolution sometimes took shape in opposition to the vision of many leading Virginians. He also examines the impact of the civil rights movement and considers controversies that accompany Virginia into its fifth century.
The text is copiously illustrated to depict not only such iconic figures as Pocahontas, George Washington, and Robert E. Lee, but also such other prominent native Virginians as Edgar Allan Poe, Carter G. Woodson, and Patsy Cline. Sidebars throughout the book offer further insight, while maps and appendixes of reference data make the volume a complete resource on Virginia’s history.
As people in Virginia and elsewhere prepare to observe the 400th anniversary of Jamestown’s settlement, Wallenstein’s fresh interpretation marks a significant commemoration of that beginning of Virginia—and America—and shows us that the adventure of Virginia has in many ways been the adventure of America.
“From Pocahontas to Patsy Cline, from William Byrd I
to Harry Byrd, Jr., Cradle of America brings to life four hundred years of Virginia history. Crisp writing and innumerable fascinating stories illuminate the roles of Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans in creating this iconic southern state that so profoundly shaped the nation.”—James L. Roark, author of Masters without Slaves
“Wallenstein’s wide-ranging and most impressive history provides a gift of magnificent proportions to those seeking to understand the roots of Virginia and its region. Here is an important starting point for understanding America.”—James Oliver Horton, coauthor of Slavery and the Making of America
“A lovely book, and the most innovative and imaginative history of the Old Dominion we have yet seen.”—William C. Davis, author of Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America
PETER WALLENSTEIN is professor of history at Virginia Tech. His books include Blue Laws and Black Codes: Conflict, Courts, and Change in Twentieth-Century Virginia.
March 2007448 pages, 82 photographs, 6-1⁄8 x 9-1⁄4
Cloth ISBN 978-0-7006-1507-0, $29.95 (t)
Understanding the Founding
The Crucial Questions
Alan Gibson
Over the course of the last century, scholars have furiously debated four questions concerning the Founders and their act of creation. Were the Framers motivated by their economic interests? How democratic was the Framers’ Constitution? Should we interpret the Founding using philosophical or strictly historical approaches? What traditions of political thought were most important to the Framers?
In Understanding the Founding: The Crucial Questions, Alan Gibson examines the preconceptions that scholars bring to these questions, explores the deepest sources of scholars’ disagreements over them, and suggests new and thoughtful lines of interpretation and inquiry. Building on his previous work, Interpreting the Founding, which offers a synoptic overview of the competing perspectives that have informed modern scholarship on the Founders, Gibson now examines this same century of scholarship from the standpoint of the most important debates that it has generated.
In evaluating the economic interpretation of the Constitution, Gibson establishes what has and has not been proven about the economic and social characteristics of the Federalists and Anti-Federalists and makes suggestions for future research. Gibson’s analysis of the character of the original Constitution sets forth a complex and judicious view of the Framers’ intentions regarding democracy, arguing that scholars have often disagreed, not because they have vastly different understandings of the Framers’ aims, but because they differ among them-selves about how to define democracy. In examining the controversy over interpretive approaches, Gibson suggests a new synthesis of the insights of linguistic contextualists and philosophical rationalists; and in revisiting the liberalism-versus-republicanism debate, he analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of alternative accounts of the interactions of multiple traditions in the political thought of the Founders.
Gibson’s incisive analysis brings clarity to these complex and sprawling debates and sheds new light on the institutional and intellectual foundations of the American political system. Urging us to move forward from a puerile affection for the Founders to a deeper understanding of their place in the history of political thought and a more balanced assessment of the strengths and limitations of the system that they founded, he also provides a provocative view of the proper role of the Founders’ ideas today.
“What an impressive achievement is this exhaustively thorough, crisply written, shrewdly analytical study of the principal interpretations that have shaped the history of the U.S. Constitution.”—Joyce Appleby, author of Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans
“Gibson demonstrates once again why he is one of the best of the political theorists working on the founding.”—Gordon S. Wood, author of Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different
”Superb. Taken together with his Interpreting the Founding, Gibson’s book provides the essential point of departure for future work on our Constitutional beginnings.”—Peter Onuf, author of Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood
ALAN GIBSON is associate professor of political science at California State University–Chico. His previous book, Interpreting the Founding: Guide to the Enduring Debates over the Origins and Foundations of the American Republic, was also published by Kansas.
232 pages, 6 x 9American Political Thought
Cloth ISBN 978-0-7006-1519-3, $29.95
April 2007
Benjamin Franklin Unmasked
On the Unity of His Moral, Religious, and Political Thought
Jerry Weinberger
Moral paragon, public servant, founding father; scoundrel, opportunist, womanizing phony: There are many Benjamin Franklins. Now, as we celebrate the tercentenary of Franklin’s birth, Jerry Weinberger reveals the Franklin behind the many masks and shows that the real Franklin was far more remarkable than anyone has yet discovered.
Taking the Autobiography as the key to Franklin’s thought, Weinberger argues that previous assessments have not yet probed to the bottom of Ben’s famous irony and elusiveness. While others take the self-portrait as an elder statesman’s relaxed and playful retrospection, Weinberger unveils it as the window to Franklin’s deepest reflections on God, virtue, justice, equality, natural rights, love, the good life, the modern technological project, and the place and limits of reason in politics and human experience. Along the way, Weinberger explores Franklin’s ribald humor, usually ignored or toned down by historians and critics, and shows it to be charming—and philosophic.
Following Franklin’s rhetorical twists and turns, Weinberger discovers a serious thinker who was profoundly critical of religion, moral virtue, and political ideals and whose grasp of human folly constrained his hopes for enlightenment and political reform. This close and amusing reading of Franklin portrays a scrupulous dialectical philosopher, humane and wise, but more provocative and disturbing than even the most hardboiled interpreters have taken Franklin to be—a freethinking critic of Enlightenment freethinking, who played his moral and theological cards very close to the vest.
Written for general readers who want to delve more deeply into the mind of a great man and great American, Benjamin Franklin Unmasked shows us a massively powerful intellect lurking behind the leather-apron countenance. This lively, witty, and revelatory book is indispensable for those who want to meet the real Franklin.
September 2005352 pages, 6 x 9
American Political Thought
Cloth ISBN 0-7006-1396-X, $34.95
July 23, 2007