Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination

This is a superb collection of essays. Appleby is the foremost critic of the so-called republican synthesis that has come to pervade a number of disciplines besides history The debate over republicanism is still very much alive and her essays reveal a sharp and shrewd analytical mind ideally equipped for argument. These pieces are less traditional reconstructions of the past and more historical polemics, and as polemics they have had and will continue to have a major influence on our understanding of early American history. -- Gordon S. Wood, Brown University Joyce Appleby is one of the most subtle intellectual historians at work these days, and the essay is the art form that comes most comfortably to her Read together, one is impressed by the steadiness and force of her writing style. These essays position Joyce Appleby as an intellectual historian who has carved out a space between what she calls The Cambridge SchoolPocock, Skinner, et al.and the older tradition which concentrated on Locke and Hobbes largely abstracted from the social context in which they lived. Appleby is exemplary in her insistence that we search for the economic context in which some thoughts about government seem persuasive and in which others do not; she is sensitive to class as few intellectual historians are. -- Linda K. Kerber, University of Iowa

Joyce Appleby was Professor of History, Emerita, at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Introduction: Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination I. Political and Economic Liberalism in Seventeenth-Century England 2. Locke, Liberalism, and the Natural Law of Money 3. Modernization Theory and Anglo-American Social Theories 4. Ideology and the History of Political Thought 5. Liberalism and the American Revolution 6. The Social Origins of American Revolutionary Ideology 7. John Adams and the New Republican Synthesis 8. The American Heritage--The Heirs and the Disinherited 9. The American Model for the French Revolutionaries 10. The "Agrarian Myth" in the Early Republic 11. Republicanism and Ideology 12. What Is Still American in Jefferson's Political Philosophy? 13. Republicanism in Old and New Contexts Sources Index