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Conceptual Change and the Constitution

Conceptual Change and the Constitution

Edited by Terence Ball and J. G. A. Pocock

Sales Date: March 9, 1999

232 Pages, 6.00 x 9.00 in

Paperback
9780700603695
Published: March 1999

$27.95

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In this volume distinguished historians and political scientists examine political discourse during that short span of years from the Revolution through ratification, a period of profound political and conceptual change. The concepts of “sovereignty,” “representation,” “liberty,” “virtue,” “republic,” “democracy”—even “constitution” itself—were virtually recoined. Others, like “federalism,” were new inventions. Out of the vehement political arguments and debates of the period came not only a new Constitution but a new political vocabulary—a political idiom that was distinctly recognizably American.

Terence Ball is professor of political science at the University of Minnesota. J. G. A. Pocock is Harry C. Black Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University.

J. G. A. Pocock is Harry C. Black Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University.

"A corrective to the all-too-facile tendency to find a conceptual uniformity in the Founders’ thought."—Choice
"Politics is a communicatively constituted activity. Words are its coin, and speech its medium. And yet, notoriously, the words which make up this medium have hotly contested and historically mutable meanings."—from the Introduction
"These well-written essays provide new insight into the history of the period."—Virginia Magazine of History and Biography
"This volume calls attention to the changing or multiple meanings of key concepts and terms in Revolutionary-era political thought. As against the tendency to stress the relative homogeneity of the ideas that coalesced in the late 1780s, this collection creates, in effect, a set of case studies that illuminate the range of issues around which new and disputed positions formed."—Jack Rakove, author of The Beginnings of National Politics

Preface

1. Introduction, Terence Ball and J.G.A. Pocock

2. Conceptual Change and Constitutional Innovation, James Farr

3. Constitution: Changing Meanings of the Term from the Early Seventeenth to the Late Eighteenth Century, Gerald Stourzh

4. States, Republics, and Empires: The American Founding in Early Modern Perspective, J. G. A. Pocock

5. State Sovereignty and the Making of the Constitution, Peter S. Onuf

6. James Wilson's New Meaning for Sovereignty, Garry Wills

7. The Language of Faculty Psychology in The Federalist Papers, Daniel Walker Howe

8. “A Republic—If You Can Keep It”, Terence Ball

9. “Commons” and “Commonwealth” at the American Founding: Democratic Republicanism as the New American Hybrid, Russell L. Hanson

10. Some Second Thoughts on Virtue and the Course of Revolutionary Thinking, Lance Banning

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