“A Trust That Cannot Be Delegated”: The Invention of Ratification Referenda

2015 ◽  
Vol 109 (4) ◽  
pp. 803-816 ◽  
Author(s):  
JEFFREY A. LENOWITZ
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
American Political Thought ◽  
Early American ◽  
The People ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Future Evaluation ◽  
The Way ◽  
Constitution Making

A ratification referendum is a procedure in which framers submit a constitution to the people for binding approval before implementation. It is widespread, recommended, and affects the contents and reception of constitutions, yet remains unstudied. Moreover, the reasons or justification for using the procedure remain unexplored. This is troubling because ratification referenda are optional, and thus should only be implemented for good reasons that, today, are no longer given. This article begins correcting this oversight by identifying those that brought about the first ratification referendum and explaining why they did so. I demonstrate that the Berkshire Constitutionalists called for the procedure during the events leading up to the creation of the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution, and that they justified their actions by asserting that the people have an unalienable right to ratify their constitution through a referendum, for this provided needed protection against potentially corrupt elites. This argument remains the most fully developed justification for the procedure to date. My analysis not only reveals ratification referenda to be another product of early American political thought, but also points the way forward for future evaluation of the procedure, and forces reflection upon the importance of having solid grounds for the choices involved in structuring a constitution-making process.

The Populist Theory of the State in Early American Political Thought

2017 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-126 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Peel
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Final Section ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Imagination ◽  
American Political Thought ◽  
Early American ◽  
The People ◽  
Democratic State ◽  
Deep Reservoir

That the “state” and the “people” are antonyms of American political thought is a widely held assumption. This essay argues that it is a mistake—Americans early in their thinking about politics distinguished the state from government and defined the state as the people themselves. Building on a deep reservoir of political thought pioneered by seventeenth-century theorists, Americans believed that to raise questions about the state was to inquire about the legitimacy of governmental action. The essay has three parts. It begins by explicating Quentin Skinner’s recent research on the concept of the state, supplemented by the work of other scholars, to apply that research to the American context. The essay then turns to a discussion of the concept of “the people” in the American context to orient the final section of the paper. Finally, the paper explicates James Wilson and St. George Tucker’s influential and rival populist theories of the American state. The overall aim of the essay is to stretch our political imagination and thus help us begin to reimagine the concept of the democratic state in more fruitful ways.

What Kind of Book is The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution?

2018 ◽  
Vol 91 (1) ◽  
pp. 147-171 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Nelson
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Consciousness ◽  
American Political Thought ◽  
Early American ◽  
The Relationship

Most scholarship on the ideology of the American Revolution asks the question: “What did American patriots think about politics”? But The Ideological Origins asks instead: “ How did patriots think about politics”? At issue here is the distinction between political theory and political consciousness. Once we get this distinction properly into view, we can rethink the relationship between two great, and apparently rivalrous, historiographies on early American political thought.

The Anti-Federalists and Early American Political Thought.

1996 ◽  
Vol 101 (3) ◽  
pp. 909
Author(s):  
Richard Buel ◽  
Christopher M. Duncan
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
American Political Thought ◽  
Early American

The Anti-Federalists and Early American Political Thought.

1996 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 405
Author(s):  
Robert W. Hoffert ◽  
Christopher M. Duncan
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
American Political Thought ◽  
Early American

The Idea of ‘Character’ in Victorian Political Thought

1985 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
pp. 29-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Collini
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Classical Economics ◽  
The People ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Way

When in the summer of 1902 Helen Bosanquet published a book called The Strength of the People she sent a copy to Alfred Marshall. On the face of it, this might seem a rather unpromising thing to have done. Mrs Bosanquet, an active exponent of the Charity Organisation Society's ‘casework’ approach to social problems, had frequently expressed her dissatisfaction with what she regarded as the misleading abstractions of orthodox economics, and in her book she had even ventured a direct criticism of a point in Marshall's Principles. Marshall, then Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge and at the peak of his reputation as the most authoritative exponent of neo-classical economics in Britain, was, to say the least, sensitive to criticism, and he had, moreover, publicly taken issue with the C.O.S. on several previous occasions. But perhaps Mrs Bosanquet knew what she was about after all. In her book she had taken her text from the early nineteenth-century Evangelical Thomas Chalmers on the way in which character determines circumstances rather than vice versa, and, as the historian of the C.O.S. justly remarks, her book ‘is a long sermon on the importance of character in making one family rich and another poor’. Although Marshall can hardly have welcomed the general strictures on economics, he was able to reassure Mrs Bosanquet that ‘in the main’ he agreed with her: ‘I have always held’, he wrote to her, ‘that poverty and pain, disease and death are evils of greatly less importance than they appear, except in so far as they lead to weakness of life and character’.

Zippin’ Up My Boots, Going Back to My Routes

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 186-197
Author(s):  
Eddie Chambers
Keyword(s):  
African Diaspora ◽  
Family Histories ◽  
The People ◽  
Racial Biases ◽  
Dominant Society ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Moynihan Report ◽  
Tv Show ◽  
The Way

This discussion essay on Hazel V. Carby’s Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands considers the contrasting ways the dominant society and the people of the African diaspora approach and regard research into family histories. Beginning with reflections on the somewhat dreaded though seemingly benign question, “Where are you from?,” the essay explores the shortcomings and racial biases of popular genealogical websites, contrasting these with the deeply and profoundly nuanced ways Carby’s book tackles fundamental questions, shortcomings, and difficulties in endeavors to trace ancestry. Along the way, the essay references Alex Haley’s Roots and then takes up the Moynihan Report and Maury Povich’s daytime TV show, Maury, both of which, the author asserts, reflect the pathology of depicting the black father as absent and deviant. The essay concludes with considerations of an inevitably settled yet nevertheless creatively fertile “mixed upness” of the creation of African diaspora family histories.

Comment on McCloskey

1957 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 130-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Diamond
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
American Political Thought ◽  
The Way

McCloskey's essay offers a justification for and an approach to the study of American political thought. Justification is needed, as he puts it bluntly and persuasively, because American political thought is second-rate. His proposed approach to its study constitutes a solution to the problem posed by that second-rateness. That is, he offers not just one possible valuable way to consider American political thought but, rather, the way which justifies the study.The justification for studying second-rate thought, he tells us, cannot be the same as that for first-rate political thought. To use his example, the study of Plato can be defended on the ground that it is somehow “intrinsically self-warranting.” He distinguishes another major justification for the study of first-rate thought, namely, its relevance to the understanding of politics, that is, presumably, to the understanding of politics regardless of time or place. But the study of American political thought, because it is second-rate, cannot be justified on the first ground; the student of American political thought “must stand on the leg of relevance if he is to stand at all.”

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