Understanding the Founding: The Crucial Questions, 2nd Edition (American Political Thought)

Amazon.com Price: $24.95 (as of 19/04/2019 18:13 PST- Details)

Categories: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Description

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 The united states’s founding. This new edition retains all the strengths of the original at the same time as adding a substantial new section addressing a major but prior to now unaddressed issue and also significantly revising Gibson’s invaluable conclusion and bibliography.

In the original edition, which used to be built upon his previous work in Interpreting the Founding, Gibson addressed four key questions: Were the Framers motivated by their economic interests? How democratic used to be the Framers’ Constitution? Will have to we interpret the Founding the use of 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 a very powerful and vexing latest debates on the American founding. The new chapter makes a speciality of 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.

Related products

Home » Shop » Books » Subjects » Arts and Photography » History and Criticism » History » Asia » Japan » General » Understanding the Founding: The Crucial Questions, 2nd Edition (American Political Thought)

Recent Products