James Kloppenberg - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by James Kloppenberg
The American Historical Review, 1992
... few days before Dewey's birth John Brown had launched his unsucc... more ... few days before Dewey's birth John Brown had launched his unsuccessful raid on a federal armory.Dewey's father, a staunch Republican, fol-lowed the sectional crisis with great interest and even made it the basis for one of his ads ("To secede or sow seed, that's the question. ...
The Cambridge Companion to Rorty, 2021
The Tocqueville Review, 1996
Democracy in America is nol a classic text—at least if one accepts Mark Twain's definition of... more Democracy in America is nol a classic text—at least if one accepts Mark Twain's definition of a classic as a book everyone wants to have read but no one wants to read. By that measure Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding might be a classic, or perhaps Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit or James's Principles of Psychology. But by Twain's standard Democracy in America emphatically is not a classic, because it is a book that people continue to read and reread, a book that continues to engage readers and repay their efforts, a book cited and endorsed by both Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton at their parlies' National Conventions in the summer of 1996.
William James never developed a comprehensive political philosophy. The radically pluralist epist... more William James never developed a comprehensive political philosophy. The radically pluralist epistemology and metaphysics for which “pragmatism” became his shorthand represented a revolt against all closed systems of thought. Yet James’s very resistance to certainty and finality led him to participate actively in civic life. Varying by context, this activity was consistently guided by James’s pragmatist accounts of individual experience, moral obligation, and social interdependence, which to him implied a collective, ongoing responsibility to balance freedom, justice, and order amid complexity and change. Though providing no detailed blueprint for achieving and maintaining that balance, James’s writings suggest a suite of practices and institutions that, in various forms and degrees, have proven effective in the past and deserve continued trial. These writings also articulate a regulative ideal by which to evaluate all such experiments: an ideal of popular participation in all levels...
The Tocqueville Review, 2006
Tocqueville Democracy in America continues to enjoy a position of rominence in American culture. ... more Tocqueville Democracy in America continues to enjoy a position of rominence in American culture. But in much of the historical scholarship written on early America, the larger topic of democracy has been displaced. In this essay I discuss the reasons for both of those phenomena, for the continuing fascination with Tocqueville in the culture at large, and for the less central position his argument concerning American democracy enjoys among historians of early America.
The Tocqueville Review, 1992
Toequevilie's Democracy in America, like most great books, displays a tich appreciation of pa... more Toequevilie's Democracy in America, like most great books, displays a tich appreciation of paradox. Unlike so many commentators on America, who have sought to unmask either the greatness or venality of the people or their leaders, or the triumphs or tragedies flowing from America's political, economic, or social institutions, Tocquevillc understood that conflicting values have been held in suspension in American culture.
Religion and Politics Beyond the Culture Wars, 2021
Journal of American History, 2021
Journal of Deliberative Democracy, 2019
Notwithstanding notable exceptions, historical investigation is far from central in deliberative ... more Notwithstanding notable exceptions, historical investigation is far from central in deliberative scholarship and even recent work on participatory research stresses the need for more historical work. The aim of our introduction to this collective volume is to assess and to draw attention to the contribution of historical analysis in the current scholarly debate on democracy, in particular regarding the ways in which participation and deliberation emerge and develop in New England's famous town meetings. Town meetings have traditionally been cited as one of the fullest and earliest realizations of the idea of democratic government and of deliberation at work. Nowadays the great debate on deliberative and participatory democracy has contributed to restoring the town meetings as a symbol of democratic deliberation. The critical study of how one of the oldest and most inspiring forms of democratic participation has evolved is not only a fascinating endeavor in itself, it is also a unique opportunity to better understand how and to what extent these institutional practices, inspired by ideals of deliberation and participation, can support-or impede-the democratization of today's societies.
Global Intellectual History, 2018
Modern Intellectual History, 2017
When I began work on Toward Democracy more than twenty years ago, I planned to write a short book... more When I began work on Toward Democracy more than twenty years ago, I planned to write a short book explaining how and why ideas about self-government developed in European and American thought from the middle of the eighteenth century to the present. Teaching courses and writing articles on republican, liberal, and democratic ideas, I found thinkers reflecting again and again on searing experiences of fratricidal violence, and as a result the theme of civil war became more prominent in my understanding of democracy. Had my analysis begun in the eighteenth century, I would have missed—as US historians often do—the shaping force of the devastating sixteenth-century wars of religion, the murderous mid-seventeenth-century English Civil War, and the less violent but no less crucial English revolution of 1688. Attempts to establish non-monarchical regimes, or even to modify monarchies to include elements of popular participation, foundered for multiple reasons, but among them were recollec...
Global Intellectual History, 2018
About 40 years ago, the field of US intellectual history entered a period of self-doubt about the... more About 40 years ago, the field of US intellectual history entered a period of self-doubt about the rigor of its methods, about the narrowness of its archive and its interests, even about the ontological gravity of the subjects it treated. The causes of this self-doubt were various, but their convergence seemed a consequence of seismic shifts in the way history was practiced as a discipline beginning in the last quarter of the 20th century, such as the ascendency of social history over political and cultural history, the increasing interest in 'bottom up' methods of research, and, most of all, skepticism about whether ideas themselves, rather than social and economic forces for which those ideas came to be seen as proxies, played any role in shaping history. Aware of this crisis of confidence, some of the most important practitioners of US intellectual history gathered in December 1977 at Wingspread, an educational conference facility in Wind Point, Wisconsin (in a building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright), to share views about the problems their field had begun to face and to reflect about how to solve those problems. The proceedings of this conference, edited by Paul Conkin and John Higham, were published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1979 as New Directions in American Intellectual History. The problems considered at the Wingspread conference were of several kinds. First was a criticism of the vaulting ambitions of intellectual historians of the generation of Perry Miller, Henry Steele Commager, and Merle Curti, who sought to characterize 'the American mind' on the basis of a double handful of charismatic texts. Such a treatment does not do justice, the critics felt, to the granularity and to the dense crosscurrents of argument and affiliation of intellectual discourse as it happens. Connected with this criticism was the implication that concentration on high-profile thinkers and public intellectuals restricted intellectual history to a concern with an elite circle, a limitation that seemed as dated as a focus on political and military leaders had come to seem in political history. Intellectual historians were tasked to broaden their archive in just the way that literary scholars of the same period were seeking to broaden their canon. The archive was to be enlarged not merely by the inclusion of countervailing or non-elite sources, and by attending to how ideas were refracted across the internal boundaries of society such as those of gender, class, religion, and region,
Journal of American History, 2019
Since Donald J. Trump took office in January 2017, his presidential administration has been beset... more Since Donald J. Trump took office in January 2017, his presidential administration has been beset with accusations of corruption. The charges range broadly, from conflicts of interest to receipt of emoluments, from campaign finance violations to conspiracy to defraud. Such allegations raise questions about the history of corruption in the United States. To better understand that history, the JAH invited seven scholars to join us in an online conversation between October and November 2018. We asked these participants fundamental questions about the definition, nature, practice, and periodization of corruption in the United States. Read together, their answers offer views of corruption in an array of public institutions: in elections; in local, state, and federal governments; in banking and finance; in industry and unions; and in law enforcement. Though they chronicle an astonishingly rich and sweeping history of corruption and reform, these historians challenge us in unexpected ways. They force us to acknowledge that the power of corruption to mobilize resources and marshal energies has, at times, promoted the public good. They compel us to admit that the capacity of corruption to redistribute wealth has, on occasion, benefited poor and underserved communities. They oblige us to recognize that crusades against corruption have, in many instances, advanced the ends of partisanship rather than the aims of democracy. Corruption, these scholars agree, blunts good government and corrodes the public faith. Yet, corruption is often a matter of political perspective. It can be functional. It resists most efforts at eradication. Corruption does indeed have a history. But that history is more intricate-more ethically and politically complex-than we might readily imagine. The JAH is indebted to all of the participants for their thought-provoking engagement.
Politics, Religion & Ideology, 2018
because in the author’s understanding, democracy is intrinsically good. Individuals whose prejudi... more because in the author’s understanding, democracy is intrinsically good. Individuals whose prejudiced pronouncements and ways were integral to their standing as champions of democracy in their own eras—Andrew Jackson and Stephen A. Douglas, for example—are accordingly cursorily dismissed as unimportant for the history of democracy, except in the sense that they betrayed it or served as foils for noble individuals such as Alexis de Tocqueville and Abraham Lincoln. Martin Van Buren, whose influence on Democratic Party development and democratic party theory is undeniable, receives a single, fleeting mention and only because he happened to be the target of a cited partisan attack by a Whig newspaper opponent (p. 637). In short, Kloppenberg cannot consider any of these individuals as authentic advocates of democracy because none of them espoused ideas and policies that align with widely accepted modern notions of what is moral. The version of democracy that animates Toward Democracy is thus ahistorically narrow and generally blind to the possibility that modern democracy contains within it various illiberal, exclusionary imperatives. Pointed critique notwithstanding, my appreciation of Kloppenberg’s tome runs deep. The product of extraordinarily extensive and intensive reading and thought, Toward Democracy merits—in a way no other book I know so thoroughly merits—the scholarly cliché that “no short review can do justice to this book.” Clearly and engagingly written, it will reward and challenge a wide range of scholars, including but not limited to historians of democracy, the age of religious wars, the English Civil War, the Enlightenment, the American and French revolutions, and American constitutionalism. The benefits of prophetic urgency consequently far outweigh any costs incurred.
The SHAFR Guide Online
Book Review American Colonies, the first volume of The Penguin History of the United States, was ... more Book Review American Colonies, the first volume of The Penguin History of the United States, was published to critical acclaim in 2001. This groundbreaking work by historian Alan Taylor broadly surveyed not only those English colonies that later became the United States, but also the often-overlooked rest of North America and the West Indies, including the French, Spanish, and Dutch colonizers, as well as the Amerindians they supplanted and the Africans they forcibly transported and enslaved. 1 Some fifteen years after the publication of American Colonies, Taylor-a professor of history at the University of Virginia who has won two Pulitzer Prizes for other fine works of early American history-has written a sequel of sorts: American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804. 2 The plural implication in the title, American Revolutions, is deliberate. Americans tend to think of the American Revolution as a singular event, but in fact, what occurred here in the latter part of the eighteenth century was a series of social, economic, and political revolutions, both among its English inhabitants as well as among competing cultures. As in American Colonies, Taylor leans more to the "big history" approach to relationships and interdependencies frequently ignored by a more traditional historical methodology. Thus, he reveals how events, ideas, and individuals acting in one arena often produced striking consequences elsewhere. Especially unintended consequences. The British decision to permit a French and Roman Catholic element to persist and be tolerated in that portion of Canada that was her prize after the French and Indian War generated a frustrating barrier to conquest and annexation for the
Choice Reviews Online, 1999
This spirited analysis and defence of American liberalism demonstrates the complex and rich tradi... more This spirited analysis and defence of American liberalism demonstrates the complex and rich traditions of political, economic, and social discourse that have informed American democratic culture from the seventeenth century to the present. The Virtues of Liberalism provides a convincing response to critics both right and left. Against conservatives outside the academy who oppose liberalism because they equate it with license, James T. Kloppenberg uncovers ample evidence of American republicans' and liberal democrats' commitments to ethical and religious ideals and their awareness of the difficult choices involved in promoting virtue in a culturally diverse nation. Against radical academic critics who reject liberalism because they equate it with Enlightenment reason and individual property holding, Kloppenberg shows the historical roots of American liberals' dual commitments to diversity, manifested in institutions designed to facilitate deliberative democracy, and to government regulations of property and market exchange in accordance with the public good. In contrast to prevailing tendencies to simplify and distort American liberalism, Kloppenberg shows how the multifaceted virtues of liberalism have inspired theorists and reformers from Thomas Jefferson and James Madison through Jane Addams and John Dewey to Martin Luther King, Jr., and then explains how these virtues persist in the work of some liberal democrats today. Endorsing the efforts of such neo-progressive and communitarian theorists and journalists as Michael Walzer, Jane Mansbridge, Michael Sandel, and E. J. Dionne, Kloppenberg also offers a more acute analysis of the historical development of American liberalism and of the complex reasons why it has been transformed and made more vulnerable in recent decades. An intelligent, coherent, and persuasive canvas that stretches from the Enlightenment to the American Revolution, from Tocqueville's observations to the New Deal's social programs, and from the right to worship freely to the idea of ethical responsibility, this book is a valuable contribution to historical scholarship and to contemporary political and cultural debates.
The American Historical Review, 1992
... few days before Dewey's birth John Brown had launched his unsucc... more ... few days before Dewey's birth John Brown had launched his unsuccessful raid on a federal armory.Dewey's father, a staunch Republican, fol-lowed the sectional crisis with great interest and even made it the basis for one of his ads ("To secede or sow seed, that's the question. ...
The Cambridge Companion to Rorty, 2021
The Tocqueville Review, 1996
Democracy in America is nol a classic text—at least if one accepts Mark Twain's definition of... more Democracy in America is nol a classic text—at least if one accepts Mark Twain's definition of a classic as a book everyone wants to have read but no one wants to read. By that measure Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding might be a classic, or perhaps Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit or James's Principles of Psychology. But by Twain's standard Democracy in America emphatically is not a classic, because it is a book that people continue to read and reread, a book that continues to engage readers and repay their efforts, a book cited and endorsed by both Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton at their parlies' National Conventions in the summer of 1996.
William James never developed a comprehensive political philosophy. The radically pluralist epist... more William James never developed a comprehensive political philosophy. The radically pluralist epistemology and metaphysics for which “pragmatism” became his shorthand represented a revolt against all closed systems of thought. Yet James’s very resistance to certainty and finality led him to participate actively in civic life. Varying by context, this activity was consistently guided by James’s pragmatist accounts of individual experience, moral obligation, and social interdependence, which to him implied a collective, ongoing responsibility to balance freedom, justice, and order amid complexity and change. Though providing no detailed blueprint for achieving and maintaining that balance, James’s writings suggest a suite of practices and institutions that, in various forms and degrees, have proven effective in the past and deserve continued trial. These writings also articulate a regulative ideal by which to evaluate all such experiments: an ideal of popular participation in all levels...
The Tocqueville Review, 2006
Tocqueville Democracy in America continues to enjoy a position of rominence in American culture. ... more Tocqueville Democracy in America continues to enjoy a position of rominence in American culture. But in much of the historical scholarship written on early America, the larger topic of democracy has been displaced. In this essay I discuss the reasons for both of those phenomena, for the continuing fascination with Tocqueville in the culture at large, and for the less central position his argument concerning American democracy enjoys among historians of early America.
The Tocqueville Review, 1992
Toequevilie's Democracy in America, like most great books, displays a tich appreciation of pa... more Toequevilie's Democracy in America, like most great books, displays a tich appreciation of paradox. Unlike so many commentators on America, who have sought to unmask either the greatness or venality of the people or their leaders, or the triumphs or tragedies flowing from America's political, economic, or social institutions, Tocquevillc understood that conflicting values have been held in suspension in American culture.
Religion and Politics Beyond the Culture Wars, 2021
Journal of American History, 2021
Journal of Deliberative Democracy, 2019
Notwithstanding notable exceptions, historical investigation is far from central in deliberative ... more Notwithstanding notable exceptions, historical investigation is far from central in deliberative scholarship and even recent work on participatory research stresses the need for more historical work. The aim of our introduction to this collective volume is to assess and to draw attention to the contribution of historical analysis in the current scholarly debate on democracy, in particular regarding the ways in which participation and deliberation emerge and develop in New England's famous town meetings. Town meetings have traditionally been cited as one of the fullest and earliest realizations of the idea of democratic government and of deliberation at work. Nowadays the great debate on deliberative and participatory democracy has contributed to restoring the town meetings as a symbol of democratic deliberation. The critical study of how one of the oldest and most inspiring forms of democratic participation has evolved is not only a fascinating endeavor in itself, it is also a unique opportunity to better understand how and to what extent these institutional practices, inspired by ideals of deliberation and participation, can support-or impede-the democratization of today's societies.
Global Intellectual History, 2018
Modern Intellectual History, 2017
When I began work on Toward Democracy more than twenty years ago, I planned to write a short book... more When I began work on Toward Democracy more than twenty years ago, I planned to write a short book explaining how and why ideas about self-government developed in European and American thought from the middle of the eighteenth century to the present. Teaching courses and writing articles on republican, liberal, and democratic ideas, I found thinkers reflecting again and again on searing experiences of fratricidal violence, and as a result the theme of civil war became more prominent in my understanding of democracy. Had my analysis begun in the eighteenth century, I would have missed—as US historians often do—the shaping force of the devastating sixteenth-century wars of religion, the murderous mid-seventeenth-century English Civil War, and the less violent but no less crucial English revolution of 1688. Attempts to establish non-monarchical regimes, or even to modify monarchies to include elements of popular participation, foundered for multiple reasons, but among them were recollec...
Global Intellectual History, 2018
About 40 years ago, the field of US intellectual history entered a period of self-doubt about the... more About 40 years ago, the field of US intellectual history entered a period of self-doubt about the rigor of its methods, about the narrowness of its archive and its interests, even about the ontological gravity of the subjects it treated. The causes of this self-doubt were various, but their convergence seemed a consequence of seismic shifts in the way history was practiced as a discipline beginning in the last quarter of the 20th century, such as the ascendency of social history over political and cultural history, the increasing interest in 'bottom up' methods of research, and, most of all, skepticism about whether ideas themselves, rather than social and economic forces for which those ideas came to be seen as proxies, played any role in shaping history. Aware of this crisis of confidence, some of the most important practitioners of US intellectual history gathered in December 1977 at Wingspread, an educational conference facility in Wind Point, Wisconsin (in a building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright), to share views about the problems their field had begun to face and to reflect about how to solve those problems. The proceedings of this conference, edited by Paul Conkin and John Higham, were published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1979 as New Directions in American Intellectual History. The problems considered at the Wingspread conference were of several kinds. First was a criticism of the vaulting ambitions of intellectual historians of the generation of Perry Miller, Henry Steele Commager, and Merle Curti, who sought to characterize 'the American mind' on the basis of a double handful of charismatic texts. Such a treatment does not do justice, the critics felt, to the granularity and to the dense crosscurrents of argument and affiliation of intellectual discourse as it happens. Connected with this criticism was the implication that concentration on high-profile thinkers and public intellectuals restricted intellectual history to a concern with an elite circle, a limitation that seemed as dated as a focus on political and military leaders had come to seem in political history. Intellectual historians were tasked to broaden their archive in just the way that literary scholars of the same period were seeking to broaden their canon. The archive was to be enlarged not merely by the inclusion of countervailing or non-elite sources, and by attending to how ideas were refracted across the internal boundaries of society such as those of gender, class, religion, and region,
Journal of American History, 2019
Since Donald J. Trump took office in January 2017, his presidential administration has been beset... more Since Donald J. Trump took office in January 2017, his presidential administration has been beset with accusations of corruption. The charges range broadly, from conflicts of interest to receipt of emoluments, from campaign finance violations to conspiracy to defraud. Such allegations raise questions about the history of corruption in the United States. To better understand that history, the JAH invited seven scholars to join us in an online conversation between October and November 2018. We asked these participants fundamental questions about the definition, nature, practice, and periodization of corruption in the United States. Read together, their answers offer views of corruption in an array of public institutions: in elections; in local, state, and federal governments; in banking and finance; in industry and unions; and in law enforcement. Though they chronicle an astonishingly rich and sweeping history of corruption and reform, these historians challenge us in unexpected ways. They force us to acknowledge that the power of corruption to mobilize resources and marshal energies has, at times, promoted the public good. They compel us to admit that the capacity of corruption to redistribute wealth has, on occasion, benefited poor and underserved communities. They oblige us to recognize that crusades against corruption have, in many instances, advanced the ends of partisanship rather than the aims of democracy. Corruption, these scholars agree, blunts good government and corrodes the public faith. Yet, corruption is often a matter of political perspective. It can be functional. It resists most efforts at eradication. Corruption does indeed have a history. But that history is more intricate-more ethically and politically complex-than we might readily imagine. The JAH is indebted to all of the participants for their thought-provoking engagement.
Politics, Religion & Ideology, 2018
because in the author’s understanding, democracy is intrinsically good. Individuals whose prejudi... more because in the author’s understanding, democracy is intrinsically good. Individuals whose prejudiced pronouncements and ways were integral to their standing as champions of democracy in their own eras—Andrew Jackson and Stephen A. Douglas, for example—are accordingly cursorily dismissed as unimportant for the history of democracy, except in the sense that they betrayed it or served as foils for noble individuals such as Alexis de Tocqueville and Abraham Lincoln. Martin Van Buren, whose influence on Democratic Party development and democratic party theory is undeniable, receives a single, fleeting mention and only because he happened to be the target of a cited partisan attack by a Whig newspaper opponent (p. 637). In short, Kloppenberg cannot consider any of these individuals as authentic advocates of democracy because none of them espoused ideas and policies that align with widely accepted modern notions of what is moral. The version of democracy that animates Toward Democracy is thus ahistorically narrow and generally blind to the possibility that modern democracy contains within it various illiberal, exclusionary imperatives. Pointed critique notwithstanding, my appreciation of Kloppenberg’s tome runs deep. The product of extraordinarily extensive and intensive reading and thought, Toward Democracy merits—in a way no other book I know so thoroughly merits—the scholarly cliché that “no short review can do justice to this book.” Clearly and engagingly written, it will reward and challenge a wide range of scholars, including but not limited to historians of democracy, the age of religious wars, the English Civil War, the Enlightenment, the American and French revolutions, and American constitutionalism. The benefits of prophetic urgency consequently far outweigh any costs incurred.
The SHAFR Guide Online
Book Review American Colonies, the first volume of The Penguin History of the United States, was ... more Book Review American Colonies, the first volume of The Penguin History of the United States, was published to critical acclaim in 2001. This groundbreaking work by historian Alan Taylor broadly surveyed not only those English colonies that later became the United States, but also the often-overlooked rest of North America and the West Indies, including the French, Spanish, and Dutch colonizers, as well as the Amerindians they supplanted and the Africans they forcibly transported and enslaved. 1 Some fifteen years after the publication of American Colonies, Taylor-a professor of history at the University of Virginia who has won two Pulitzer Prizes for other fine works of early American history-has written a sequel of sorts: American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804. 2 The plural implication in the title, American Revolutions, is deliberate. Americans tend to think of the American Revolution as a singular event, but in fact, what occurred here in the latter part of the eighteenth century was a series of social, economic, and political revolutions, both among its English inhabitants as well as among competing cultures. As in American Colonies, Taylor leans more to the "big history" approach to relationships and interdependencies frequently ignored by a more traditional historical methodology. Thus, he reveals how events, ideas, and individuals acting in one arena often produced striking consequences elsewhere. Especially unintended consequences. The British decision to permit a French and Roman Catholic element to persist and be tolerated in that portion of Canada that was her prize after the French and Indian War generated a frustrating barrier to conquest and annexation for the
Choice Reviews Online, 1999
This spirited analysis and defence of American liberalism demonstrates the complex and rich tradi... more This spirited analysis and defence of American liberalism demonstrates the complex and rich traditions of political, economic, and social discourse that have informed American democratic culture from the seventeenth century to the present. The Virtues of Liberalism provides a convincing response to critics both right and left. Against conservatives outside the academy who oppose liberalism because they equate it with license, James T. Kloppenberg uncovers ample evidence of American republicans' and liberal democrats' commitments to ethical and religious ideals and their awareness of the difficult choices involved in promoting virtue in a culturally diverse nation. Against radical academic critics who reject liberalism because they equate it with Enlightenment reason and individual property holding, Kloppenberg shows the historical roots of American liberals' dual commitments to diversity, manifested in institutions designed to facilitate deliberative democracy, and to government regulations of property and market exchange in accordance with the public good. In contrast to prevailing tendencies to simplify and distort American liberalism, Kloppenberg shows how the multifaceted virtues of liberalism have inspired theorists and reformers from Thomas Jefferson and James Madison through Jane Addams and John Dewey to Martin Luther King, Jr., and then explains how these virtues persist in the work of some liberal democrats today. Endorsing the efforts of such neo-progressive and communitarian theorists and journalists as Michael Walzer, Jane Mansbridge, Michael Sandel, and E. J. Dionne, Kloppenberg also offers a more acute analysis of the historical development of American liberalism and of the complex reasons why it has been transformed and made more vulnerable in recent decades. An intelligent, coherent, and persuasive canvas that stretches from the Enlightenment to the American Revolution, from Tocqueville's observations to the New Deal's social programs, and from the right to worship freely to the idea of ethical responsibility, this book is a valuable contribution to historical scholarship and to contemporary political and cultural debates.