Like dye cast into water, liberal assumptions color everything
American, from ideas about human nature to fears about big
government. Not the dreaded "L" word of the 1988 presidential
campaign, liberalism in its historical context emerged from the
modern faith in free inquiry, natural rights, economic liberty, and
democratic government. Expressed in the nation-building acts of
revolution and constitution-writing, liberalism both structured and
limited Americans' sense of reality for two centuries.
The nation's scholars were unable to break away from
liberalism's pervasive hold on the American mind until the last
generation--when they recovered the lost world of classical
republicanism. Ornate, aristocratic, prescriptive, and concerned
with the common good, this form of republicanism held sway among
the founding fathers before the triumph of liberal thought, with
its simple, egalitarian, rational, and individualistic emphasis.
The two concepts, as Joyce Appleby shows, posed choices for
eighteenth-century thinkers much as they have divided
twentieth-century scholars.
Entering one of the liveliest debates in the scholarly world
about our ideological roots, Appleby follows the labyrinthine
controversies that these two perspectives have generated in their
day and in ours. In doing so, she addresses the tensions that
remain to be resolved in the democratic societies of the late
twentieth century--the complex relations between individual and
community, personal liberty and the common good, aspiration and
practical wisdom.
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