American Political Thought. Ken Kersch

buildings, and public monuments like the Lincoln or the Vietnam memorials. The relationship between the stories Americans have told themselves over the course of their history interact with political philosophies in diverse and complicated ways. Sometimes the stories are enlisted to illustrate and reinforce a particular political framework or philosophy. At other times, they evince their own distinctive, and orthogonal, dynamics.

Conclusion

      Many Americans are inclined to treat the study of American political thought as a catechism. In this catechism, the country is held to adhere to a set of abstract, and celebrated, creedal commitments – liberty, equality, democracy, justice – which its institutions were designed to honor and implement. Individuals and the nation may not always live up to these American ideals, and its institutions may from time to time fail to realize them, but, if that is the case, a course correction is always on order, to set the nation – “man’s last best hope on earth” (Lincoln) – back on the right path to the realization of its noblest ideas.

Others, however, approach the subject entirely differently. Many of these other approaches emphasize pluralism, contention, and an open-endedness, provisionality, and perpetual incompleteness that does not lend itself to catechism. In one important study, for instance, Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics since Independence (1987), the Princeton historian Daniel Rodgers posited a cynosure set of words (utility, natural rights, the people, government, interests, the state, and freedom) around which the conceptual debates of American political life have dilated over the course of American history. Given who they are and what they do, great poets – Robert Frost in “The Black Cottage” (1914), for instance, or Tracy K. Smith in “Declaration” (2018) – have also emphasized the open-endedness of core American events and ideas, while still gesturing toward the idea of a discernable American political tradition. Argument, contestation, and irresolution may, by some lights, be as constitutive of a political culture and tradition as unity and finality. Power might matter. But power might be challenged, and shift. In this regard, in her poem, Smith acts not only as legatee subject, but also as self-determining agent of American political thought.

      For native-born Americans, the tradition of American political thought is presumably a birthright and inheritance. For naturalized Americans, it is often a chosen history and family. For non-Americans, given the global reach and influence of US power, politics, institutions, and ideas in the twenty-first century, whether undertaken willfully or not, it is commonly an encounter. Knowing the history, habits, perils, and promise of American political thinking is an illuminating part of any rounded political education.

Questions

      1 Is there a substantive content to “American” political thought as a distinctive subject of study (as opposed, for instance, to the study of political theory, intellectual history, or even the study of American politics more generally)? If so, in what sense?

      2 Is it possible to construct a canon of American political thought? If so, what are the standards enlisted to determine selection for inclusion in, or exclusion from, the canon?

      3 In studying American political thought, how accurate or helpful is it to talk about core, shared understandings of concepts like “liberty,” “equality,” “democracy,” or “justice”?

      4 How might we think about the political thought of particular individuals across the temporal span of their lives and experiences? Does it make sense to speak of the political thought of, for instance, James Madison, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, or Ronald Reagan as if they had a stable philosophy that extended across the entirety of their lives?

      5 How useful, or dangerous, is it to posit an “American exceptionalism”?

      6 What is gained or lost in positing either a hegemony or a (delimited) pluralism of overarching ideologies or frameworks to understand American political thought? Relatedly, does it ever make sense to enlist the category of “we” in our discussions of American political thought?

      7 Do you think political philosophies or ethically constitutive stories have been more influential in shaping the contours of American political thought? How and in what ways?

      8 How much of the American political thought tradition has been determined by broad, impersonal social forces (geography, demography, economics, ideology), and how much by individual agency?

      9 In studying American political thought, how useful, or dangerous, is it to avail ourselves of apparently hermetic categories – often in the form of binaries – to get an analytic grip on the politics of a moment (e.g. founders v. loyalists; liberal v. republican; Federalists v. Antifederalists; the people v. the interests (or elites); progressives/liberals v. conservatives)?

      10 What role does time (chronology/development) play in American political thought? Is there a consistency to ideational frameworks across time? Or do things change over time in critical ways? Relatedly, how might we think about the forces driving chronological patterns? How is the influence of ideas, ideologies, and frameworks temperally reproduced or institutionalized or, for that matter, interrupted and de-institutionalized?

      11 How much of the study of American political thought should be about what is (in a positivist sense), and how much should be about what ought to be (in a normative sense)?

      12 Are progressives/liberals and conservatives likely to study American political thought in different ways? Americans and non-Americans? Members of historically powerful and historically marginalized groups?

      13 Is the American political thought tradition one of which Americans should be proud, ashamed, or something in between? Why?

Notes

      1 1. Locke: “[T]he beginning of politic[al] society depends upon the consent of the individuals to join into, and make one society; who, when they are thus incorporated, might set up what form of government they thought fit.” Second Treatise of Civil Government (1689), Ch. VIII. In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson slightly altered Locke’s formulation of the animating rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

      2 2. Locke: “[F]reedom of men under government is to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society, and made by the legislative power erected in it; a liberty to follow my own will in all things, where that rule prescribes not; and not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of another man.” Ibid., Ch. IV.

      3 3. Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty” (1958); Benjamin Constant, “The Liberty of the Moderns and The Liberty of the Ancients” (1819).

      4 4. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses (1761), Book IV, Ch. 8.

      5 5. Believing this to have been a mistake, the framers of the pro-slavery Constitution of the Confederate States of America (1861) remedied the omission by announcing its promulgation by “We, the people of the Confederate States … invoking the favor and guidance of Almighty God ….”

      6 6. Isaac Kramnick, “‘The Great National Discussion’: The Discourse of Politics in 1787” (1988).

      7 7. Rogers M. Smith, “Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America” (1993); Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in US History (1999).

2 Settlement, the Road to Revolution, the Founding, and the Early Republic

      The Theological Dimensions of Colonial American Thought

      In the early seventeenth century, European colonists began to settle the original strip of land that became the United States on North America’s Atlantic coast, previously populated exclusively by native aboriginal tribes. Commerce provided much of the impetus for the European migration, including the early Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam (later, New York). Over time, fueled