American Political Thought

Abstract

American political thought is rooted in an assumption of popular sovereignty first articulated in Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville. Despite this shared assumption, the story of American political thought has been told in many different ways. Three genres stand out. The first is written within the larger framework of intellectual and cultural history, taking the form of anthology and narrative summary. Among its most prominent features are an eclecticism of the sources and a heavy emphasis on British philosophical and religious context, especially in New England, and on the relationship of those contexts to the American Revolution. A second form is constitutionalist. Charting the major struggles over legal and institutional relationships through time, this perspective gives prominence to the constitutional founding and landmark court decisions and underlines major constitutional issues in party conflict in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the rapid expansion of rights in the periods following. The third genre is populist‐Progressive. Here the story of American political thought is narrated to stress the struggles to achieve democracy in the past and to reaffirm in the reader a commitment to extend the struggle into the future. While the three genres overlap, the selection of canon, the connecting links, and the use and forms of periodization vary considerably.