Political thought in America .

This volume is based on a broad conception of American political thought. One reason the field has not excited more interest in recent years has been the tendency to define its subject matter in such a way that much that is interesting, new, and important is excluded. In teaching the birth of the Constitution, we have not hesitated to examine the records of the Philadelphia Convention or to pore over the pages of The Federalist to see how Hamilton, Madison, and others expected the governmental system to work, but in teaching political thought since the Civil War, we have slighted the study of political and governmental processer in favor of the study of socio-economic issues. We study the Woodrow Wilson of The New Freedom but not the discerning political analyst of Constitutional Government in the United States. Although it is clear that interest groups and political parties are central to the working of the American governmental system, these subjects have commonly been omitted from books on American political thought. A great deal of attention has been devoted to the sub stance of particular legal decisions and relatively little to the judicial process and to questions touching on the position of the Supreme Court. The pros and cons of issues have been examined, but there has been little concern for their social and psychologi cal implications. The Depression and the New Deal, for example, raised not only questions about the redistribution of income and the proper role of government in economic affairs, but also a host of other questions relating to the impact of the economic crisis on social and political behavior and on the ideas that men held and lived by. In this book author has tried to treat adequately these vital and exciting topics that are so often slighted. In this book I have tried to see the development of American political thought in a larger perspective to note the continuities and discontinuities and to explain both. The effort to achieve a developmental view of American political thought should help alert the student to the emergence of new issues and the decline of older issues. Puritan thought gave way to Revolutionary thought and the latter to a concern for the establishment and consolidation of a new government. period gave way to the issues of slavery and the nature of the Union. turn, were supplanted by a series of new issues that emerged following the Civil War. New political ideas were developed and modified under fire. When and why is it legitimate for a colony to revolt against the mother country? On what principles should the new government be established? How far is it safe to trust the masses by extending the vote to them? Was slavery a legitimate institution? If not, what should be done about it? How were the pressing political and economic problems of an in creasingly industrialized society to be dealt with? American political thought is developing today, no less than in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in response to changing needs, problems, conditions, and ideas. For that reason I have been slow to dismiss certain issues as "economic" or "social" rather than political, Issues originating in those spheres, if they are serious ones, have a way of becoming political issues. If the teaching of American political thought is to be anything more than simply the history of earlier thought, it must help the student reach out and grasp the emergent issues of the day.