Understanding the Founding

The Crucial Questions
Second Edition, Revised and Expanded

by Alan Gibson

Series: American Political Thought

Sales Date: September 7, 2010

430 Pages, 6.00 x 9.00 in

Paperback
9780700617524
Published: September 2010

$29.95

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Hardcover
9780700617517
Published: September 2010

$60.00

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Description
Authors
Praise
Table of Contents

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.

Preface to the Second Edition

Introduction to the Second Edition

1. Still Hazy after All These Years: The Economic Interpretation and the Cloudy Legacy of Empirical Analysis

-Beard’s Thesis: An Interpretation
-The Case against Beard’s Economic Interpretation
Recasting the Economic Interpretation
Conclusions and Inconclusiveness: What Empirical Analysis Has and Has not Established

2. Democracy and the Founders’ Constitution: Toward a Balanced Assessment

-The Contours of the Continuing Confrontation
-Confronting the Hermeneutic Impasse
-The Strategy and Limitations of This Analysis
-The Question of Inclusiveness
-Accountability and Responsiveness
-Political Equality and Apportionment
-Thinking Clearly and Talking Intelligently about Democracy and Good Government

3. How Should We Study the American Founding? In Defense of Historically Sensitive Political Philosophy

-Bailyn and Wood: Enveloping Behaviorism and Idealism
-Skinner: Challenging “Great Books” and “Perennial Questions”
-The Contributions of the Linguistic Contextualism
-Interpreting the American Founding: Historical Integrity and the Paradox of Relevance

4. Ancients, Moderns, and Americans: The Republicanism-Liberalism Debate Revisited

-Transcending Republicanism versus Liberalism
-The Multiple Traditions Approach: Alternative Interpretations of Interaction
-Retrospect: What We Should Have Learned
-Prospect: The Agenda for Scholars
5. How Could They Have Done That? Slavery and the Question of Moral Responsibility
-The Founders on Trial: The Academic Debate beneath the Culture Wars
-Prosecutors: the Neo-Garrisonian Constitution and the Myth of the Anti-Slavery Jefferson
-Vindicators: The Lincolnian Constitution, the Founders̱ Accomplishments, and the Case for the Anti-Slavery Jefferson
Historicists: The Founders’ Moral Universe
-Central Issues and Foundational Differences
-The Case against Prosecuting and Vindicating
-The Contributions and Limitations of Historicism
-Toward More Responsible Moral Judgments

6. Taking Historiography Seriously

-Searching for the Essence of the American Amalgam: Which Traditions? Whose Multiple Traditions Approach?
-Foundational Concepts and the Unionists Paradigm: The Continued Search for New Interpretive Categories
-On the Founders’ Contribution to the History of Political Thought
-From Intention to Consequence: The Framers’ Constitution and the Development and Character of American Democracy
-Appropriate and Inappropriate Appropriations
-Understanding the Founding

Notes

Bibliography

Index