Introduction: Reexamining the Roots of Anglo-American Political Thought
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 October 2009
Summary
This project is as an effort to address some of the problems contemporary political theorists and intellectual historians have encountered in writing about the Anglo-American political tradition. At least since the demise of Marxist and progressive methods of interpretation, with their emphasis on subrational interests and economic and material forces as the major, if not only, motivational springs for political and constitutional thought and practice, scholars of the Anglo-American tradition have largely agreed on one fundamental interpretive and conceptual premise: ideas matter. The broad, almost universal, consensus among scholars of the field is that early modern Anglo-American thought is defined by a set of principles and deeply held commitments to certain notions of government and law, rights and citizenship. It is now generally assumed that Anglo-American political thinkers and actors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries operated within a distinctive framework, or perhaps distinct frameworks, with established categories of thought, ideological assumptions, and philosophical premises.
The bad news, or at least the other side of this overarching “superconsensus,” is the deep contentiousness that has characterized the study of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Anglo-American thought in the past four decades. Ideas matter, but as we have come to realize, scholarly interpretations of these ideas may matter even more. The deepest fault line in contemporary scholarship on Anglo-American thought lies in the divide between the liberal and republican, or Lockean and civic humanist, schools of interpretation.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004