Description

Ronald J. Pestritto's and Thomas G. West's earlier volume The American Founding and the Social Compact addressed the nature of the thought and philosophy of the men who shaped the American founding. In this second volume in a trilogy, Pestritto and West examine the fate of the founders' principles in the nine teeth century, when these principles faced their first great challenges. Support of slavery, culminating in secession and civil war, came from the South; and after the war came positivism, relativism, and radical egalitarianism, which originated in Europe and infiltrated American universities, where intellectuals repudiated the founders' views as historically obsolete and insufficiently concerned with true human liberation. In ten chapters covering major thinkers in nineteenth-century American political thought, contributors discuss the rise and resolution of ideological conflicts in the early generations of the American republic. In Challenges to the American Founding Pestritto and West have compiled an invaluable resource for the roots of the twentieth-century departure in American politics from the political vision of the American founders.

Table of Contents

Part 1 Prologue
Chapter 2 Republicanism and Constitutional Government in the Political Thought of Andrew Jackson
Part 3 The Challenge of Pro-Slavery Thought
Chapter 4 John C. Calhoun and the New Science of Race and Politics
Chapter 5 Lincoln, Secession, and Revolution: The Civil War Challenge to the Founding
Chapter 6 Jefferson Davis and Self-Government
Chapter 7 Protecting the Privileges of Citizenship: Founding, Civil War, and Reconstruction
Part 8 The Challenges of Positivism, Relativism, and Progressivism
Chapter 9 Theology, Metaphysics, and Positivism: The Origins of the Social Sciences and the Transformation of the American University
Chapter 10 Shoreless Ocean, Sunless Sea: Henry Adams's Democracy
Chapter 11 Walt Whitman's Civic Religion for America
Chapter 12 Jane Addams, Benjamin Franklin, and the Problem of Welfare Dependency
Chapter 13 Woodrow Wilson, American History, and the Advent of Progressivism

Product details

Published 20 Dec 2004
Format Paperback
Edition 1st
Extent 314
ISBN 9780739108727
Imprint Lexington Books
Dimensions 215 x 145 mm
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Anthology Editor

Ronald J. Pestritto

Anthology Editor

Thomas G. West

Contributor

John E. Alvis

Contributor

Herman Belz

Contributor

John Marini

Contributor

Will Morrisey

Contributor

Joel Schwartz

Contributor

David Upham

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