{"title":":You Mean It or You Don’t: James Baldwin’s Radical Challenge","authors":"Susan McWilliams Barndt","doi":"10.1086/723444","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/723444","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41928,"journal":{"name":"American Political Thought","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46018251","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The idea of a unitary executive is based on a mistaken understanding of the origins and purpose of the federal bureaucracy in the American regime. Strictly speaking, there is no “executive branch” in our system—if by “executive branch” we mean a network of governmental departments that have their origins in, and that are strictly subordinate to, a unitary executive president. This mistake has manifested itself in two recent books examining the relationship between Donald Trump, the unitary executive, and the federal bureaucracy. Though each book offers a valuable critique of the Trump presidency, both books overlook the constitutional advantages of a relatively autonomous bureaucracy, one that is strictly answerable neither to Congress nor to the president. Drawing on classic work by Herbert Storing, I suggest that the federal bureaucracy advances authentic constitutional ends by, among other things, restraining and refining the excesses of a demagogic president.
{"title":"Thank God for the Deep State: Presidential Demagoguery and the “Unitary Executive”","authors":"Charles U. Zug","doi":"10.1086/723443","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/723443","url":null,"abstract":"The idea of a unitary executive is based on a mistaken understanding of the origins and purpose of the federal bureaucracy in the American regime. Strictly speaking, there is no “executive branch” in our system—if by “executive branch” we mean a network of governmental departments that have their origins in, and that are strictly subordinate to, a unitary executive president. This mistake has manifested itself in two recent books examining the relationship between Donald Trump, the unitary executive, and the federal bureaucracy. Though each book offers a valuable critique of the Trump presidency, both books overlook the constitutional advantages of a relatively autonomous bureaucracy, one that is strictly answerable neither to Congress nor to the president. Drawing on classic work by Herbert Storing, I suggest that the federal bureaucracy advances authentic constitutional ends by, among other things, restraining and refining the excesses of a demagogic president.","PeriodicalId":41928,"journal":{"name":"American Political Thought","volume":"12 1","pages":"113 - 140"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45994510","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abraham Lincoln’s “Lecture on Discoveries and Inventions,” taken with his contemporaneous “Address to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society,” presents a coherent view of the role of science in a democratic society. While often read either as a celebration of technology or as only a subtle condemnation of slavery, these speeches are best understood in the context of an antebellum divide between Whigs and Democrats about science and technology. Lincoln’s deft deployment of biblical language in “Discoveries and Inventions” suggests that he shared the Whig concern about the social effects of unconstrained technology.
亚伯拉罕·林肯（Abraham Lincoln）的《发现与发明讲座》（Lecture on Discoverys and Inventions）与他同期的《威斯康星州农业协会演讲》（Address to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society）一道，对科学在民主社会中的作用提出了一致的看法。虽然这些演讲通常被解读为对技术的庆祝，或者只是对奴隶制的微妙谴责，但最好在南北战争前辉格党和民主党在科学和技术问题上存在分歧的背景下理解。林肯在《发现与发明》中巧妙地运用了圣经语言，这表明他与辉格党人一样关注无约束技术的社会影响。
{"title":"What Did Lincoln Mean to Say about Technology in His “Lecture on Discoveries and Inventions”?","authors":"D. Klinghard","doi":"10.1086/723453","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/723453","url":null,"abstract":"Abraham Lincoln’s “Lecture on Discoveries and Inventions,” taken with his contemporaneous “Address to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society,” presents a coherent view of the role of science in a democratic society. While often read either as a celebration of technology or as only a subtle condemnation of slavery, these speeches are best understood in the context of an antebellum divide between Whigs and Democrats about science and technology. Lincoln’s deft deployment of biblical language in “Discoveries and Inventions” suggests that he shared the Whig concern about the social effects of unconstrained technology.","PeriodicalId":41928,"journal":{"name":"American Political Thought","volume":"12 1","pages":"83 - 112"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46834403","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
After the Civil War, Black newspapers, from the Loyal Georgian to the San Francisco Elevator, encouraged lawmakers to leverage public land as a means of emancipation. Drawing on neoclassical agrarian theories that link civil freedom to a wide distribution of property, African American writers made a case for treating tens of millions of acres—including abandoned plantations—as an ager publicus for the settlement of Black homesteads and the creation of free schools. Seen within a broader agenda centered on civil rights expansion, the land reform proposals of the Black press point to a distinctively republican understanding of freedom, encompassing the positive rights of both self-government and economic independence, which defied the late nineteenth-century rise of both laissez-faire liberalism and socialism within American political thought. These aspirations, moreover, provide a historically grounded benchmark by which to assess the achievements and setbacks of the postbellum era.
{"title":"Emancipation, the Ager Publicus, and Black Political Thought","authors":"Benjamin T. Lynerd","doi":"10.1086/723439","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/723439","url":null,"abstract":"After the Civil War, Black newspapers, from the Loyal Georgian to the San Francisco Elevator, encouraged lawmakers to leverage public land as a means of emancipation. Drawing on neoclassical agrarian theories that link civil freedom to a wide distribution of property, African American writers made a case for treating tens of millions of acres—including abandoned plantations—as an ager publicus for the settlement of Black homesteads and the creation of free schools. Seen within a broader agenda centered on civil rights expansion, the land reform proposals of the Black press point to a distinctively republican understanding of freedom, encompassing the positive rights of both self-government and economic independence, which defied the late nineteenth-century rise of both laissez-faire liberalism and socialism within American political thought. These aspirations, moreover, provide a historically grounded benchmark by which to assess the achievements and setbacks of the postbellum era.","PeriodicalId":41928,"journal":{"name":"American Political Thought","volume":"12 1","pages":"27 - 53"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47661104","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article brings into conversation the democratic thought of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Black feminists Anna Julia Cooper and Ida B. Wells. I discuss how Cooper and Wells approached the challenge of shaping a turn-of-the-century white public constituted in part through Black women’s subjection and exclusion. Prominent accounts have at times contrasted their political efforts. However, I read differences in their democratic thought as a question of aesthetic politics rather than ideology. The contrasting strategies they employed in writing point to distinct but complementary means of shaping the publics in which their words would be received in the future. Reading Cooper’s and Wells’s works to represent two facets of the broader Black feminist intellectual and political milieu of which they were a part invites consideration of the ways hoped-for democratic solidarity can rely on, and be shaped by, more agonistic efforts in the present.
{"title":"Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells, and the Jim Crow Public","authors":"Daniella Henry","doi":"10.1086/723441","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/723441","url":null,"abstract":"This article brings into conversation the democratic thought of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Black feminists Anna Julia Cooper and Ida B. Wells. I discuss how Cooper and Wells approached the challenge of shaping a turn-of-the-century white public constituted in part through Black women’s subjection and exclusion. Prominent accounts have at times contrasted their political efforts. However, I read differences in their democratic thought as a question of aesthetic politics rather than ideology. The contrasting strategies they employed in writing point to distinct but complementary means of shaping the publics in which their words would be received in the future. Reading Cooper’s and Wells’s works to represent two facets of the broader Black feminist intellectual and political milieu of which they were a part invites consideration of the ways hoped-for democratic solidarity can rely on, and be shaped by, more agonistic efforts in the present.","PeriodicalId":41928,"journal":{"name":"American Political Thought","volume":"12 1","pages":"54 - 82"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45740028","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
What accounts for the persistence of school book banning controversies in the United States? In Island Trees School District v. Pico (1982), the Supreme Court ruled that book removal violates children’s right to read, but school book challenges have only increased since then. I argue that Americans have been unable to put this controversy to rest because a misleading narrative of censorship framed the Pico case and has continued to frame the question since. That narrative depicted what is fundamentally a contest between competing adult authorities—educational professionals and parents—as instead a contest between children and adults. By reconstructing the development of this narrative by young adult authors and professional educators in the 1970s, I show that the invention of children’s “right to read” in this period sought to discredit the legitimate democratic authority of school boards over curricular decisions in a way that left the conflict simmering and unresolvable.
{"title":"There Is No Such Thing as a Banned Book: Censorship, Authority, and the School Book Controversies of the 1970s","authors":"Rita Koganzon","doi":"10.1086/723442","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/723442","url":null,"abstract":"What accounts for the persistence of school book banning controversies in the United States? In Island Trees School District v. Pico (1982), the Supreme Court ruled that book removal violates children’s right to read, but school book challenges have only increased since then. I argue that Americans have been unable to put this controversy to rest because a misleading narrative of censorship framed the Pico case and has continued to frame the question since. That narrative depicted what is fundamentally a contest between competing adult authorities—educational professionals and parents—as instead a contest between children and adults. By reconstructing the development of this narrative by young adult authors and professional educators in the 1970s, I show that the invention of children’s “right to read” in this period sought to discredit the legitimate democratic authority of school boards over curricular decisions in a way that left the conflict simmering and unresolvable.","PeriodicalId":41928,"journal":{"name":"American Political Thought","volume":"12 1","pages":"1 - 26"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42764549","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In this review essay, I consider two recent books that have something to say about liberalism. In Liberalism and Its Discontents, Francis Fukuyama offers a spirited defense of the doctrine. In Prophet of Discontent, Jared Anthony Loggins and Andrew Douglas engage the though of Martin Luther King Jr. in ways that encourage us to move “beyond” liberalism.
{"title":"Should You Be among Liberalism’s Discontents?","authors":"Nicholas Buccola","doi":"10.1086/723436","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/723436","url":null,"abstract":"In this review essay, I consider two recent books that have something to say about liberalism. In Liberalism and Its Discontents, Francis Fukuyama offers a spirited defense of the doctrine. In Prophet of Discontent, Jared Anthony Loggins and Andrew Douglas engage the though of Martin Luther King Jr. in ways that encourage us to move “beyond” liberalism.","PeriodicalId":41928,"journal":{"name":"American Political Thought","volume":"12 1","pages":"141 - 148"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44850641","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":":Radical Conversion: Theorizing Catholic Citizenship in the American Liberal Tradition","authors":"C. Henry","doi":"10.1086/723438","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/723438","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41928,"journal":{"name":"American Political Thought","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47893627","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In recent years, conservative political scientists have increasingly turned away from the textualist and originalist arguments of their legal academic compatriots by reviving defunct historiographical templates to reorient the Right’s constitutionalism around a fundamentalist orthodoxy centered on the Declaration of Independence. This essay considers C. Bradley Thompson’s America’s Revolutionary Mind (2019) as a contribution to this project that manifests its valorization of political violence, misrepresentation of the relation of revolutionary era ideas and events to contemporary politics, and misconstrual of the American founding that underwrote the events of January 6. By contrast, George Thomas’s The (Un)Written Constitution (2021) argues for moving beyond constitutional theory debates about the interpretive methods most likely to remove politics from constitutional law by imagining a polity constituted by a commitment to good-faith civic deliberation over core liberal democratic principles, manifesting the true Spirit of ’76.
{"title":"The Spirit of ’76 and the Spirit of January 6","authors":"Ken I. Kersch","doi":"10.1086/722099","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/722099","url":null,"abstract":"In recent years, conservative political scientists have increasingly turned away from the textualist and originalist arguments of their legal academic compatriots by reviving defunct historiographical templates to reorient the Right’s constitutionalism around a fundamentalist orthodoxy centered on the Declaration of Independence. This essay considers C. Bradley Thompson’s America’s Revolutionary Mind (2019) as a contribution to this project that manifests its valorization of political violence, misrepresentation of the relation of revolutionary era ideas and events to contemporary politics, and misconstrual of the American founding that underwrote the events of January 6. By contrast, George Thomas’s The (Un)Written Constitution (2021) argues for moving beyond constitutional theory debates about the interpretive methods most likely to remove politics from constitutional law by imagining a polity constituted by a commitment to good-faith civic deliberation over core liberal democratic principles, manifesting the true Spirit of ’76.","PeriodicalId":41928,"journal":{"name":"American Political Thought","volume":"11 1","pages":"560 - 578"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44696522","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Bryan M. Santin. Postwar American Fiction and the Rise of Modern Conservatism: A Literary History, 1945–2008. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. 290. $99.99 (cloth).","authors":"Brian Danoff","doi":"10.1086/722113","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/722113","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41928,"journal":{"name":"American Political Thought","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42045637","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：