American Political Thought – Fall Term 2014
Institute for North American Studies
King’s College London
Tutor: Dr. Joshua Simon
Contact: joshua.simon@kcl.ac.uk
Course Description:
Today, the United States is the world’s largest economy, foremost military superpower, and
principle producer of popular culture, but only two centuries ago, it was a sparsely-inhabited
collection of former colonies, struggling to make its way in a world dominated by the great
powers of Europe. Contemporary historians and social scientists attribute this extraordinary rise
to the United States’ political institutions—the government framed by the Constitution, and
filled in by formal laws and informal norms of civic behavior. This course examines the ideas
underlying these institutions, tracing the evolution of American political thought from the
founding to the present day.
Weekly readings are drawn from primary sources, selected to highlight the themes that
distinguish American political thought from the broader Western tradition of which it forms a
part. In class, we will critically examine arguments offered for and against independence,
federalism, the separation of powers, slavery, socialism, women’s enfranchisement, civil rights,
income redistribution, and immigration, discussing the political context in which America’s most
influential political thinkers lived and wrote, and asking what, if anything, American political
thought has to offer the rest of the world.
Course Structure:
Week 1
The Peculiarities of American Political Thought
Week 2
The Ideas of Independence
Week 3
American Constitutionalism I: Federalism
Week 4
American Constitutionalism II: The Separation of Powers
Week 5
States Rights, Slavery, and Civil War
Week 6
READING WEEK
Week 7
Socialism, Social Darwinism, and Progressivism
Week 8
Women in American Politics
Week 9
The Long Civil Rights Movement
Week 10
Egalitarianism and Libertarianism
Week 11
Immigration and American Identity
Reading:
Each week’s reading is divided between required and recommended texts. Students should read
all of the required readings each week and as many of the recommended readings as time allows.
All required readings will be available in electronic format, on the course’s KEATS page. If you
encounter any problem in acquiring the reading for a given week, alert me immediately. Do not
wait until our class meeting to let me know you’ve been unable to read the week’s assignment.
Beyond the required and recommended readings for each week, the following books may be
consulted at any time as general surveys of American political institutions and ideas:
Theodore J. Lowi, Benjamin Ginsberg, Kenneth A. Shepsle, Stephen Ansolabehere, American
Government: Power and Purpose Brief 13th Ed., (New York, 2013).
Bryan-Paul Frost and Jeffrey Sikkenga, eds., History of American Political Thought (Lanham, 2003).
Judith Shklar, Redeeming American Political Thought Stanley Hoffmann and Dennis F. Thompson,
eds., (Chicago, 1998).
Participation:
Weekly seminar discussions are a central component of this class, a chance for all of us to refine
our understanding of required readings, to think critically about the arguments they make and
the evidence they offer, and to develop possible essay topics. Students must come to each of our
meetings having read the required texts closely, located and considered further primary and
secondary sources as appropriate, and ready to ask questions and offer their perspective on what
they’ve read.
In order to facilitate participation, all students will be asked to submit a brief reflection on the
readings to a KEATS forum by midnight on the day before each of our meetings. These
reflections should be 3-4 sentences long, and take the form of an argument or a question. On the
day of class, all students should take an hour or so to read and think about the posted reflections.
No reflections are required for the first class meeting.
Assessment:
Assessment for the course will be based on one 4000-word essay on a topic of your own design
Essays should take one of two forms: (1) a ‘position paper’, in which you clearly state a thesis
early on and provide support for that thesis, drawing upon both primary and secondary
resources or (2) a ‘literature review’, in which you put forward a research question and describe
the existing scholarly literature relevant to that question, then conclude by pointing to gaps in
our current understanding and proposing a research project that would help fill these gaps.
Essays should be submitted electronically, through KEATS.
Week 1: The Peculiarities of American Political Thought
Required Reading:
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Author’s Introduction.
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/preface.htm
Frederick Douglass, “What to a Slave is the Fourth of July?”
http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/what-to-the-slave-is-the-fourth-of-july/
Recommended Reading:
Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the
Revolution (New York, 1955).
Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom (W.W. Norton, 1975).
Rogers M. Smith, “Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America”
The American Political Science Review, Vol. 87, No. 3. (Sep., 1993), 549-566.
Jennifer Hochschild, Facing Up to the American Dream: Race, Class, and the Soul of the Nation
(Princeton, 1996).
Mark Hulliung, ed., America’s Liberal Tradition Reconsidered: The Contested Legacy of Louis Hartz
(Lawrence, 2010).
Aziz Rana, The Two Faces of American Freedom (Cambridge, MA, 2010).
Week 2: Ideas of Independence
Required Reading:
Thomas Paine, “Common Sense”
http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/common-sense/
Thomas Jefferson, “The Declaration of Independence”
http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/declaration-of-independence/
Recommended Reading:
Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 1967).
Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (Oxford, 1976).
Gary Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (New York, 1978).
Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1991).
Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York, 1997).
David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge, MA, 2007).
Jack P. Greene, The Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, 2011).
Daniel Allen, Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality (New
York, 2014).
Week 3: American Constitutionalism I: Federalism
Required Reading:
The United States Constitution
http://constitutioncenter.org/constitution/full-text
Publius (Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay), “The Federalist Papers”, numbers
1, 3, 6, 10, 11, 15.
http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/federalist-papers/
Brutus (Robert Yates), “Brutus I”, “Brutus II”
http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/brutus-i/
http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/brutus-ii/
Recommended Reading:
Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill, 1969).
Herbert Storing, What the Antifederalists were For: The Political Thought of the Opponents of the
Constitution (Chicago, 1981).
Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York
University Press, 1984).
Richard Beeman, Stephen Botein, and Edward C. Carter II, eds., Beyond Confederation: Origins of the
Constitution and American National Identity (Chapel Hill, 1987).
Bruce Ackerman, We the People: Foundations (Cambridge, MA, 1991).
David Hendrickson, Peace Pact: The Lost World of the American Founding (Lawrence, 2003).
Max Edling, A Revolution in Favor of Government: Origins of the U.S. Constitution and the Making of the
American State (Oxford, 2003).
Akhil Reed Amar, America’s Constitution: A Biography (New York, 2005).
Week 4: American Constitutionalism II: The Separation of Powers
Required Reading:
Publius (Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay), “The Federalist Papers”, numbers
41, 47, 51, 57, 62, 69, 78.
http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/federalist-papers/
Brutus (Robert Yates), “Brutus III”, “Brutus IV”, “Brutus V”
http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/brutus-iii/
http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/brutus-iv/
http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/brutus-v/
Recommended Reading:
See works listed for Week 3.
Week 5: States Rights, Slavery, and Civil War
Required Reading:
John C. Calhoun, “Fort Hill Address”, “Slavery a Positive Good”
http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/fort-hill-address/
http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/slavery-a-positive-good/
Abraham Lincoln, “Speech at Peoria”, “Second Inaugural Address”
http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/speech-on-the-repeal-of-the-missouricompromise/
http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/second-inaugural-address/
Recommended Reading:
Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War
(Oxford, 1970).
Merrill D. Peterson, The Great Triumvirate: Webster, Clay, and Calhoun (Oxford, 1987).
James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (Oxford, 1988).
Forrest McDonald, States Rights and the Union: Imperium in Imperio (Lawrence, 2000).
John Majewski, Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation (Chapel
Hill, 2009).
Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York, 2010).
Robin Blackburn, The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation, and Human Rights (London, 2011).
George Kateb, Lincoln’s Political Thought (Cambridge, MA, 2014).
Week 6: Reading Week
Week 7: Socialism, Social Darwinism, and Progressivism
Required Reading:
Eugene Debs, “Unionism and Socialism”
http://www.marxists.org/archive/debs/works/1907/unionsandsocial.htm
William Graham Sumner, What Social Classes Owe Each Other, chapter 1.
https://mises.org/books/socialclasses-web.pdf
Herbert Croly, “The Promise of American Life”, Chapter 1.
http://books.google.com/books?id=3BASAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_
summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
Recommended Reading:
Richard Hofstader, Social Darwinism in American Thought (Boston, 1944).
James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy ad Progressivism in European and American
Thought (Oxford, 1986).
Daniel Bell, Marxian Socialism in the United States (Ithaca, 1996).
Mike Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860-1945: Nature as Model and
Nature as Threat (Cambridge, 1997).
Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (New York, 2001).
Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 18701920 (Oxford, 2003).
Ray Ginger, The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene V. Debs (New York, 2007).
Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Wolfe Marks, It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the
United States (New York, 2010).
Week 8: Women in American Politics
Required Reading:
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments”
http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/declaration-of-sentiments/
Jane Addams, “If Men Were Seeking the Franchise”
http://tigger.uic.edu/depts/hist/hullmaxwell/vicinity/nws1/documents/hullhouse/addams/addams-men_franchise.htm
Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, Chapter 1.
Phyllis Schlafley, The Power of The Positive Woman, selections.
Recommended Reading:
bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: black women and feminism (New York, 1981).
Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, 1987).
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York, 1990).
Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, 1990).
Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Women’s Rights Movement in the United States (Cambridge,
MA, 1996).
Jean Bethke Elshstain, Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy: A Life (New York, 2002).
Catherine Rymph, Republican Women: Feminism and Conservatism From Suffrage Through the Rise of the
New Right (Chapel Hill, 2006).
Nancy Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis (London,
2013).
Week 9: The Long Civil Rights Movement
Required Reading:
W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, Chapter 1.
http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/of-our-spiritual-strivings/
Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from the Birmingham City Jail”.
http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/letter-from-birmingham-city-jail/
Malcolm X, “The Ballot or the Bullet”
http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/the-ballot-or-the-bullet/
Recommended Reading:
Taylor Branch, America in the King Years, 3 vols., (New York, 1988-2006).
Adolf Reed, W.E.B. Dubois and American Political Thought: Fabianism and the Color Line
(Oxford, 1997).
Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton,
2000).
Dean Robinson, Black Nationalism in American Politics and Thought (Cambridge, 2001).
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past”
The Journal of American History, Vol. 91, No. 4 (Mar., 2005), pp. 1233-1263.
Robert Gooding-Williams, In the Shadow of Dubois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America
(Cambridge, MA, 2009).
Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (New York, 2011).
Week 10: Egalitarianism and Libertarianism
Required Reading:
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Chapter 3.
Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Chapter 7.
Recommended Reading:
Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge, 1982).
Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York, 1983).
Jonathan Wolff, Robert Nozick: Property, Justice, and the Minimal State (Stanford, 1991).
John Gerring, Party Ideologies in America, 1828-1996 (Cambridge, 1998).
Thomas Pogge, John Rawls: His Life and Theory of Justice (Oxford, 2007).
Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (Oxford,
2011).
Mark Bevir and Andrius Galisanka, “John Rawls in Historical Context” History of Political
Thought, vol. 33, no. 4 (2012), pp. 701-25.
Thomas Pikkety, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA, 2014).
Week 11: Immigration and American Identity
Required Reading:
Samuel P. Huntington, “The Hispanic Challenge”, Foreign Policy.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2004/03/01/the_hispanic_challenge
Rogers Smith, “Living in a Promiseland?: Mexican Immigration and American Obligations”
Perspectives on Politics.
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=8384537&fulltext
Type=RA&fileId=S153759271100274X
Recommended Reading:
Daniel Tichenor, Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in America (Princeton, 2002).
Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, 2004).
Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens (Cambridge, 2004).
Roger Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants Since 1882 (New
York, 2004).
Carol Swain, ed., Debating Immigration (New York, 2007).
Aristide R. Zolberg, A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America (Cambridge,
MA, 2008).
Joseph Carens, The Ethics of Immigration (Oxford, 2013).
Aviva Chomsky, Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal (Boston, 2014).