History of American Political Thought

Bryan-Paul Frost, Jeffrey Sikkenga

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2019
• Edition: 2
• eBook ISBN:
  9798881880866
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Revised and updated, this long-awaited second edition provides a comprehensive introduction to what the most thoughtful Americans have said about the American experience from the colonial period to the present. The book examines the political thought of the most important American statesmen, activists, and writers across era and ideologies, helping another generation of students, scholars, and citizens to understand more fully the meaning of America.


This new second edition of the book includes chapters on several additional historical figures, including Walt Whitman, Lyndon Baines Johnson, and Ronald Reagan, as well as a new chapter on Barack Obama, who was not prominent in public life when the first edition was published. Significant revisions and additions have also been made to many of the original chapters, most notably on Antonin Scalia, which now updates his full legacy, increasing the breadth and depth of the collection.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments to the Second Edition
• Preface and Acknowledgments to the First Edition
• Introduction. Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America
• 1. John Winthrop, John Cotton, and Nathaniel Niles: The Basic Principles of Puritan Political Thought
• 2. Thomas Hutchinson and James Otis on Sovereignty, Obedience, and Rebellion
• 3. Thomas Paine: The American Radical
• 4. Benjamin Franklin: A Model American and an American Model
• 5. Liberty, Constitutionalism, and Moderation: George Washington’s Harmonizing of Traditions
• 6. John Adams and the Republic of Laws
• 7. Legitimate Government, Religion, and Education: The Political Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson
• 8. The Political Science of James Madison
• 9. Alexander Hamilton on the Grand Strategy of Free Government
• 10. America’s Modernity: James Wilson on Natural Law and Natural Rights
• 11. Anti-Federalist Political Thought: Brutus and The Federal Farmer
• 12. The New Constitutionalism of Publius
• 13. Union, Constitutionalism, and the Judicial Defense of Rights: John Marshall
• 14. John Quincy Adams on Principle and Practice
• 15. Union and Liberty: The Political Thought of Daniel Webster
• 16. Henry Clay and the Statesmanship of Compromise
• 17. For Constitution and Country? John C. Calhoun, American Politics, and the Union
• 18. The Art of the Judge: Justice Joseph Story and the Founders’ Constitution
• 19. James Fenimore Cooper: Nature and Nature’s God
• 20. Religion, Nature, and Disobedience in the Thought of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau
• 21. “Proclaim Liberty throughout the Land”: Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and the Abolition of Slavery
• 22. Abraham Lincoln: The Moderation of a Democratic Statesman
• 23. Walt Whitman and Politics by Other Means
• 24. Feminism as an American Project: The Political Thought of Elizabeth Cady Stanton
• 25. Mark Twain on the American Character
• 26. Pricking the Bubble of Utopian Sentiment: The Political Thought of William Graham Sumner
• 27. Booker T. Washington and the “Severe American Crucible”
• 28. Co-workers in the Kingdom of Culture: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Vision of Race Synthesis
• 29.Henry Adams and Our Ancient Faith
• 30. Jane Addams as Civic Theorist: Struggling to Reconcile Competing Claims
• 31. Herbert Croly’s Progressive “Liberalism”
• 32. Theodore Roosevelt and the Stewardship of the American Presidency
• 33. Woodrow Wilson, the Organic State, and American Republicanism
• 34. The Making of the Modern Supreme Court: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and Louis D. Brandeis
• 35. John Dewey’s Alternative Liberalism
• 36. Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Second Bill of Rights
• 37. Ayn Rand: Radical for Capitalism
• 38. Walker Percy’s American Thomism
• 39. Russell Kirk’s Anglo-American Conservatism
• 40. The Two Revolutions of Martin Luther King, Jr.
• 41. Malcolm X: From Apolitical Acolyte to Political Preacher
• 42. Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem: The Popular Transformation of American Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century
• 43. “The Secret Heart of America”: Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Bold Synthesis of American Thought
• 44. John Rawls’s “Democratic” Theory of Justice
• 45. Henry Kissinger: The Challenge of Statesmanship in Liberal Democracy
• 46. Irving Kristol and the Reinvigoration of Bourgeois Republicanism
• 47. The Jurisprudence of William Joseph Brennan, Jr., and Thurgood Marshall
• 48. Ronald Reagan: Statesman and Original Political Thinker
• 49. The Textualist Jurisprudence of Antonin Scalia
• 50. “Yes, We Can”: The Progressive Political Thought of Barack Obama
• Index
• About the Contributors