Table of Contents

Introduction: Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America

Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop



Part One: From Colony To Nation (1608–1776)


Ch. 1 John Winthrop, John Cotton, and Nathaniel Niles: The Basic Principles of Puritan Political Thought

Michael J. Rosano


Ch. 2 Thomas Hutchinson and James Otis on Sovereignty, Obedience, and Rebellion

Howard L. Lubert


Ch. 3 Thomas Paine: The American Radical

John C. Koritansky

Ch. 4 Benjamin Franklin: A Model American and an American Model

Steven Forde


Part Two: The New Republic (1776–1820)


Ch. 5 Liberty, Constitutionalism, and Moderation: George Washington’s Harmonizing of Traditions

Paul O. Carrese


Ch. 6 John Adams and the Republic of Laws

Richard Samuelson


Ch. 7 Legitimate Government, Religion, and Education: The Political Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson

Aristide Tessitore


Ch. 8 The Political Science of James Madison

Michael P. Zuckert

Ch. 9 Alexander Hamilton on the Grand Strategy of Free Government

Karl-Friedrich Walling


Ch. 10America’s Modernity: James Wilson on Natural Law and Natural Rights

Eduardo A. Velásquez


Ch. 11Anti-Federalist Political Thought: Brutus and The Federal Farmer

Murray Dry


Ch. 12The New Constitutionalism of Publius

James R. Stoner, Jr.


Ch. 13Union, Constitutionalism, and the Judicial Defense of Rights: John Marshall

Matthew J. Franck


Part Three: A Divided Nation (1820–1865)


Ch. 14John Quincy Adams on Principle and Practice

David Tucker


Ch.15Union and Liberty: The Political Thought of Daniel Webster

Sean Mattie


Ch. 16Henry Clay and the Statesmanship of Compromise

Kimberly C. Shankman


Ch. 17 For Constitution and Country? John C. Calhoun, American Politics, and the Union

George D. Alecusan


Ch. 18The Art of the Judge: Justice Joseph Story and the Founders’ Constitution

Peter Schotten


Ch. 19James Fenimore Cooper: Nature and Nature’s God

John E. Alvis


Ch.20Religion, Nature, and Disobedience in the Thought of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau

Bryan-Paul Frost


Ch.21“Proclaim Liberty throughout the Land”: Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and the Abolition of Slavery

Richard S. Ruderman

Ch. 22Abraham Lincoln: The Moderation of a Democratic Statesman

Steven Kautz


Part Four: Growth of an Empire (1865–1945)



Ch.23 Walt Whitman and Politics by Other Means

Peter S. Field


Ch. 24Feminism as an American Project: The Political Thought of Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Melissa S. Williams


Ch. 25Mark Twain on the American Character

David Foster


Ch. 26Pricking the Bubble of Utopian Sentiment: The Political Thought of William Graham Sumner

Lance Robinson


Ch. 27Booker T. Washington and the “Severe American Crucible”

Peter W. Schramm


Ch. 28Co-workers in the Kingdom of Culture: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Vision of Race Synthesis

Jonathan Marks


C. 29Henry Adams and Our Ancient Faith

Christopher Flannery


Ch. 30Jane Addams as Civic Theorist: Struggling to Reconcile Competing Claims

Jean Bethke Elshtain


Ch. 31Herbert Croly’s Progressive “Liberalism”

Thomas S. Engeman


Ch. 32Theodore Roosevelt and the Stewardship of the American Presidency

Jean M. Yarbrough


Ch. 33Woodrow Wilson, the Organic State, and American Republicanism

Ronald J. Pestritto


Ch. 34The Making of the Modern Supreme Court: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and Louis D. Brandeis

David F. Forte

Ch. 35John Dewey’s Alternative Liberalism

David Fott


Ch. 36Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Second Bill of Rights

Donald R. Brand


Part Five: New Challenges at Home and Abroad (1945–present)



Ch. 37Ayn Rand: Radical for Capitalism

William R. Thomas


Ch. 38Walker Percy’s American Thomism

Peter Augustine Lawler


Ch. 39Russell Kirk’s Anglo-American Conservatism

James McClellan


Ch. 40The Two Revolutions of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Peter C. Myers


Ch. 41Malcolm X: From Apolitical Acolyte to Political Preacher

Lucas E. Morel


Ch. 42Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem: The Popular Transformation of American Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century

Natalie Fuehrer Taylor and Daryl McGowan Tress


Ch. 43“The Secret Heart of America”: Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Bold Synthesis of American Thought

Daniel T. Carrigg and James A. Morone


Ch. 44John Rawls’s “Democratic” Theory of Justice

David Lewis Schaefer


Ch. 45Henry Kissinger: The Challenge of Statesmanship in Liberal Democracy

Peter Josephson


Ch. 46Irving Kristol and the Reinvigoration of Bourgeois Republicanism

Laurence D. Cooper


Ch. 47The Jurisprudence of William Joseph Brennan, Jr., and Thurgood Marshall

Bradley C. S. Watson


Ch. 48Ronald Reagan: Statesman and Original Political Thinker

Steven F. Hayward


Ch. 49The Textualist Jurisprudence of Antonin Scalia

Ralph A. Rossum


Ch. 50“Yes, We Can”: The Progressive Political Thought of Barack Obama

Jeffrey Sikkenga


Index


About the Contributors

About the Author

Bryan-Paul Frost is endowed professor of political science at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette.

Jeffrey Sikkenga is professor of political science at Ashland University.

Reviews

History of American Political Thought is a feast for the mind, a first-rate collection of essays by first-rate scholars. Reaching wide and deep, it brims with insights about the philosophers, poets, novelists, activists, jurists, and political leaders who contributed to the intellectual life of this nation. Rigorous yet readable, this book is bound to become a standard reference about the ideas that undergird American politics. It will be a valuable resource for students and scholars, indeed for anyone with a serious interest in serious political questions.
*John J. Pitney Jr., Roy P. Crocker Professor of American Politics, Claremont McKenna College*

Featuring erudite essays of the highest order, this superb collection highlights the richness of the American political tradition, with leading scholars engaging America’s greatest and most important thinkers, jurists, and statesmen. Frost and Sikkenga’s History of American Political Thought is by far the best and most comprehensive volume of its kind, and its updated 2nd edition will no doubt continue to an essential resource for students and researchers.
*Patrick Cain, Lakehead University*

This comprehensively encyclopedic set of lively and insightful essays, having become a minor classic over the past fifteen years, is here updated and enlarged in ways that make it an even more essential supplement to all teaching and study of the whole of American political thought.
*Thomas L. Pangle, University of Texas at Austin*

This multi authored volume, edited by Frost and Sikkenga, is ‘the best fit’ for how I prefer to approach the study of American political thought in an academic course. In their essays, each author expounds the philosophical orientations and elucidates the main tenets of their notable subject with thoroughly proficient analyses that read much like a high quality narrative. The reader benefits by being shown the important connections between the political ideas of numerous significant figures and the various “isms” that cross the spectrum of political ideology. This new edition gives added value by including extra chapters on the political philosophy of presidents Lyndon Baines Johnson, Ronald Reagan, and Barack Obama.
*Troy Goodale, Tusculum University*

This excellent collection has always been the most useful and reliable guide to American political thinkers. Its impressive range has been extended further with new entries on Walt Whitman, LBJ, Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama. In addition, every chapter of the original edition whose author is still alive has been revised and updated, though all of high quality to begin with. The volume has thus succeeded admirably at rendering its first edition obsolete. What were the visions of America that informed not only the Washingtons and Lincolns but the Elizabeth Cady Stantons and William Graham Sumners? Now you’ll know.
*Clifford Orwin, University of Toronto*

Bryan-Paul Frost and Jeffrey Sikkenga are to be congratulated for putting together the most thoughtful, comprehensive, and accessible collection on American political thought ever assembled. This volume is a significant improvement over an already wonderful first edition. One learns what the most serious and gifted American Founders, statesmen, writers, jurists, diplomats, publicists, and citizens have thought about what it means to be an American. Here one confronts unity and diversity and the great debates about liberty and equality, religion and politics, the role of the courts, as well as America's role in the world. A feast for reflective citizens and inquiring scholars alike.
*Daniel J. Mahoney, Assumption College*