Understanding the founding : the crucial questions / Alan Gibson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Gibson, Alan Ray, 1961-

Series:

American political thought

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Constitutional history--United States.

Constitutional history.

United States.

United States--Politics and government.

Politics and government.

Physical Description:

x, 418 pages ; 24 cm.

Edition:

Second edition, revised and expanded.

Place of Publication:

Lawrence : University Press of Kansas, [2010]

Summary:

The first edition of Alan Gibson's Understanding the Founding is widely regarded as an invaluable guide to the last century's key debates surrounding America's founding. This new edition retains all of the strengths of the original while adding a substantial new section addressing a major but previously unaddressed issue and also significantly revising Gibson's invaluable conclusion and bibliography. In the original edition, which was built upon his previous work in Interpreting the Founding, Gibson addressed four key questions: Were the Framers motivated by their economic interests? How democratic was the Framers' Constitution? Should we interpret the Founding using philosophical or strictly historical approaches? What traditions of political thought were most important to the Framers? He focused especially on the preconceptions that scholars brought to these questions, explored the deepest sources of scholars' disagreements over them, and suggested new and thoughtful lines of interpretation and inquiry. His incisive analysis brought clarity to the complex and sprawling debates and shed new light on the institutional and intellectual foundations of the American political system. Gibson has now added a path-breaking new chapter entitled "How Could They Have Done That? Founding Scholarship and the Question of Moral Responsibility," which reprises and critiques on of the most important and vexing contemporary debates on the American founding. The new chapter focuses on how the men who fought a revolution in the name of liberty and declared to the world that "all men are created equal" could have supported the institution of slavery and even owned slaves themselves, accepted the legal and social subordination of women, and been responsible for Indian removal and genocide against Native Americans. Efforts to criticize or defend the Founders on these issues now constitute a daunting body of scholarship addressing what David Brion Davis has called the "dilemmas of slaveholding revolutionaries ." Gibson's astute and fair-minded analysis of this scholarship offers keen insights into how we might move toward more mature and responsible evaluations of the Founders.

Contents:

Still hazy after all these years : the economic interpretation and the cloudy legacy of empirical analysis

Democracy and the founders' constitution : towards a balanced assessment

How should we study the American founding? : in defense of historically sensitive political philosophy

Ancients, moderns, and Americans : the republicanism-liberalism debate revisited

How could they have done that? : slavery and the question of moral responsibility

Taking historiography seriously.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780700617517

0700617515

9780700617524

0700617523

OCLC:

643569866