The American Counter-Revolution in Favor of Liberty
How Americans Resisted Modern State, 1765-1850
- Editore:
Springer-Verlag GmbH
- EAN:
9783030037321
- ISBN:
3030037320
- Pagine:
- 279
- Formato:
- Hardback
- Lingua:
- Tedesco
Descrizione The American Counter-Revolution in Favor of Liberty
This book presents the case that the origins of American liberty should not be sought in the constitutional-reformist feats of its ¿statesmen¿ during the 1780s, but rather in the political and social resistance to their efforts. There were two revolutions occurring in the late 18th century America: the modern European revolution ¿in favour of government,¿ pursuing national unity, ¿energetic¿ government and centralization of power (what scholars usually dub ¿American founding¿); and a conservative, reactionary counter-revolution ¿in favour of liberty,¿ defending local rights and liberal individualism against the encroaching political authority. This is a book about this liberal counter-revolution and its ideological, political and cultural sources and central protagonists. The central analytical argument of the book is that America before the Revolution was a stateless, spontaneous political order that evolved culturally, politically and economically in isolation from the modern European trends of state-building and centralization of power. The book argues, then, that a better model for understanding America is a ¿decoupled modernization¿ hypothesis, in which social modernity is divested from the politics of modern state and tied with the pre-modern social institutions.
