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The Rise and Fall of Democracy in Early America describes and explores the emergence of a directly democratic political culture in America, the Federalists' theoretical campaign against that culture, and the legacy of the struggle over democracy for politics today. The Rise and Fall of Democracy in Early America traces the rise of democracy in America beginning with the Puritans of New England; the radicalization during the eighteenth century of Puritan notions of community, autonomy, and participation; and the Antifederalist attempt to preserve a democratic political culture in the face of Federalist efforts to centralize power and distance it from the people by the passage of the 1787 Constitution. Despite its historical concerns, this book is not a history of institutions or a history of ideas. It is a work of political theory that explores certain early American texts and debates, and discusses the theoretical questions raised by those texts and debates, emphasizing those issues most relevant to democratic thought in our own time. Among the many insights into our democratic heritage that Joshua Miller affords us in his discussion of the Puritan theory of membership and the Antifederalist theory of autonomous communities is the hitherto obscured affinity between democracy and conservatism. Whereas many treatments of early American political thought make the debate over the ratification of the Constitution appear dry and abstract, this book shows the clash of political values and ideals that were at the heart of the struggle. It illustrates how the Federalists employed a democratic-sounding vocabulary to cloak their centralizing, elitist designs. Miller introduces readers to a political theory of direct democracy that is presented as an alternative to Marxism, liberalism, and mainstream conservatism. This new democratic theory based on an early American political tradition should serve as a stimulus for rethinking the directions we are taking in politics today.
The Rise and Fall of Democracy in Early America describes and explores the emergence of a directly democratic political culture in America, the Federalists' theoretical campaign against that culture, and the legacy of the struggle over democracy for politics today. The Rise and Fall of Democracy in Early America traces the rise of democracy in America beginning with the Puritans of New England; the radicalization during the eighteenth century of Puritan notions of community, autonomy, and participation; and the Antifederalist attempt to preserve a democratic political culture in the face of Federalist efforts to centralize power and distance it from the people by the passage of the 1787 Constitution. Despite its historical concerns, this book is not a history of institutions or a history of ideas. It is a work of political theory that explores certain early American texts and debates, and discusses the theoretical questions raised by those texts and debates, emphasizing those issues most relevant to democratic thought in our own time. Among the many insights into our democratic heritage that Joshua Miller affords us in his discussion of the Puritan theory of membership and the Antifederalist theory of autonomous communities is the hitherto obscured affinity between democracy and conservatism. Whereas many treatments of early American political thought make the debate over the ratification of the Constitution appear dry and abstract, this book shows the clash of political values and ideals that were at the heart of the struggle. It illustrates how the Federalists employed a democratic-sounding vocabulary to cloak their centralizing, elitist designs. Miller introduces readers to a political theory of direct democracy that is presented as an alternative to Marxism, liberalism, and mainstream conservatism. This new democratic theory based on an early American political tradition should serve as a stimulus for rethinking the directions we are taking in politics today.
The Rise and Fall of Democracy in Early America describes and explores the emergence of a directly democratic political culture in America, the Federalists' theoretical campaign against that culture, and the legacy of the struggle over democracy for politics today. The Rise and Fall of Democracy in Early America traces the rise of democracy in America beginning with the Puritans of New England; the radicalization during the eighteenth century of Puritan notions of community, autonomy, and participation; and the Antifederalist attempt to preserve a democratic political culture in the face of Federalist efforts to centralize power and distance it from the people by the passage of the 1787 Constitution. Despite its historical concerns, this book is not a history of institutions or a history of ideas. It is a work of political theory that explores certain early American texts and debates, and discusses the theoretical questions raised by those texts and debates, emphasizing those issues most relevant to democratic thought in our own time. Among the many insights into our democratic heritage that Joshua Miller affords us in his discussion of the Puritan theory of membership and the Antifederalist theory of autonomous communities is the hitherto obscured affinity between democracy and conservatism. Whereas many treatments of early American political thought make the debate over the ratification of the Constitution appear dry and abstract, this book shows the clash of political values and ideals that were at the heart of the struggle. It illustrates how the Federalists employed a democratic-sounding vocabulary to cloak their centralizing, elitist designs. Miller introduces readers to a political theory of direct democracy that is presented as an alternative to Marxism, liberalism, and mainstream conservatism. This new democratic theory based on an early American political tradition should serve as a stimulus for rethinking the directions we are taking in politics today.
This first examination in almost forty years of political ideas in the seventeenth-century American colonies reaches some surprising conclusions about the history of democratic theory more generally. The origins of a distinctively modern kind of thinking about democracy can be located, not in revolutionary America and France in the later eighteenth century, but in the tiny New England colonies in the middle seventeenth. The key feature of this democratic rebirth was honoring not only the principle of popular sovereignty through regular elections but also the principle of accountability through non-electoral procedures for the auditing and impeachment of elected officers. By staking its institutional identity entirely on elections, modern democratic thought has misplaced the sense of robust popular control which originally animated it.
Sharpening the debate over the values that formed America's founding political philosophy, Barry Alan Shain challenges us to reconsider what early Americans meant when they used such basic political concepts as the public good, liberty, and slavery. We have too readily assumed, he argues, that eighteenth-century Americans understood these and other terms in an individualistic manner. However, by exploring how these core elements of their political thought were employed in Revolutionary-era sermons, public documents, newspaper editorials, and political pamphlets, Shain reveals a very different understanding--one based on a reformed Protestant communalism. In this context, individual liberty was the freedom to order one's life in accord with the demanding ethical standards found in Scripture and confirmed by reason. This was in keeping with Americans' widespread acceptance of original sin and the related assumption that a well-lived life was only possible in a tightly knit, intrusive community made up of families, congregations, and local government bodies. Shain concludes that Revolutionary-era Americans defended a Protestant communal vision of human flourishing that stands in stark opposition to contemporary liberal individualism. This overlooked component of the American political inheritance, he further suggests, demands examination because it alters the historical ground upon which contemporary political alternatives often seek legitimation, and it facilitates our understanding of much of American history and of the foundational language still used in authoritative political documents.
Treese's book provides a popular history of Pennsylvania during the Revolutionary period from the vantage point of the heirs of William Penn. Most Pennsylvanians are familiar with the story of William Penn and the founding of Pennsylvania in 1681 as a haven for religious dissenters. But few may know what became of Penn's enterprise (the "proprietorship") in the years after his death in 1718. And fewer still may realize that Penn's descendants played an important, and increasingly unpopular, role in the coming of the American Revolution to Pennsylvania. The Storm Gathering, based on Penn family correspondence and other contemporary records, tells this fascinating story, focusing primarily on Thomas and John Penn, two of the last members of the Penn family to figure significantly in Pennsylvania's affairs before the colonies declared independence in 1776. Lorett Treese begins her story with Thomas Penn, William Penn's son who eventually became chief proprietor. Thomas groomed his nephew John (sometimes called "indolent") to be governor of the colony. When John took up his duties in 1763, at the end of the French and Indian War, the Penn proprietorship faced serious problems in managing Pennsylvania. The sheer size of the colony made it difficult for the Penns to collect their rents, and settlers moving westward clashed with Indians on the frontier, threatening the peaceful relationship that William Penn had established with native peoples. A stubborn legislature resisted Penn family control at nearly every turn, and Ben Franklin led an effort to thwart the Penns and make Pennsylvania a royal colony. According to Treese, these domestic problems diverted the Penns' attention from the growing movement in America toward democracy and independence. But by 1768, after the British parliament had passed the Townshend Act taxing the American colonies, John Penn and his uncle Thomas began to realize the magnitude of their troubles, referring to the growing rift between America and Britain as "the Storm gathering." Events began to overtake the Penns by 1775. In that year Thomas Penn died, and the bloodshed at Lexington and Concord brought war closer. In Pennsylvania, John Penn wrote that "The people here are forming themselves into companies & are daily exercising in order to be prepared for the worst." When the Second Continental Congress met in Philadelphia that summer, John knew that the end of Penn leadership was near. "Our form of government still continues," he wrote, "but I think it cannot last long . . . ." In 1776, as radical sentiment grew, the colonies declared independence from England, and Pennsylvania rewrote its constitution, divesting the Penn family of governing powers and making the colony a commonwealth. When war broke out, radical patriots forced John Penn into exile, and he eventually retired to his country home where he waited out the war. Treese concludes this engaging story with the end of the Revolution and its aftermath. While Pennsylvanians began the difficult work of reconstructing their government, the Penns attempted to salvage their personal fortunes. Many former officers of the Penn establishment participated again in government, but Penn family members were pushed outside of American government.
The Concise Encyclopedia of Democracy is a single-volume version of the award-winning Encyclopedia of Democracy. Not a condensation, the new Concise was created to address the special needs of smaller libraries. The more than 300 articles include concepts, countries, and individuals, emphasizing the historical and practical, rather than the strictly theoretical. While the coverage is international in scope, special emphasis, in the Concise, is given to the democracies of the West. As well as including the most important entries from the four-volume original work, the Concise Encyclopedia of Democracy also includes new entries on the Constitution of the United States, general government practices in the democracies, etc. The 150 maps, photographs, charts, and timelines are designed to present the researcher with information in a concise, visual form.
The fourteen essays in this volume address the pros and cons of multiculturalism and explore its relationship with liberal democracy.
Frontier Democracy examines the debates over state constitutions in the antebellum Northwest (Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin) from the 1820s through the 1850s. This is a book about conversations: in particular, the fights and negotiations over the core ideals in the constitutions that brought these frontier communities to life. Silvana R. Siddali argues that the Northwestern debates over representation and citizenship reveal two profound commitments: the first to fair deliberation, and the second to ethical principles based on republicanism, Christianity, and science. Some of these ideas succeeded brilliantly: within forty years, the region became an economic and demographic success story. However, some failed tragically: racial hatred prevailed everywhere in the region, in spite of reformers' passionate arguments for justice, and resulted in disfranchisement and even exclusion for non-white Northwesterners that lasted for generations.
Locates the origins of constitutional law in the Enlightenment attempt to control the violence of the state by subjecting power to reason, then shows its evolution into a tradition of rational inquiry embodied in a community of lawyers and judges. Continues with discussion of how the tradition's 19th-century presuppositions about the autonomy and rationality of constitutional argument have been undermined in the 20th century. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR