Liberalism, Republicanism and the Politics of Therapy: John Locke's Legacy of Medicine and Reform

1989 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-54
Author(s):  
Richard Nelson
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Therapeutic Approach ◽  
Political Corruption ◽  
Religious Thought ◽  
American Political Culture ◽  
Central Figure ◽  
Political Tradition ◽  
Medical Paradigm ◽  
Anglo American

The current historiographical debate over the relation of John Locke's philosophy to the republican political tradition has ignored the medical orientation which Locke brought to his political writings. Recognizing that Locke wrote within a medical paradigm, which he derived from Calvinist religious thought, permits us to see that Locke was working within a variation of republicanism and not in opposition to it. Locke attempted to “cure” political corruption, much as Puritans had tried to cure their society of sin's corruption. The failure of Locke's therapeutic approach to political virtue has provided the basis for recent criticisms of liberalism and a challenge to the convention that Locke was an original and central figure in creating Anglo-American political culture.

The Reassociation of Ideas and Purposes: Racism, Liberalism, and the American Political Tradition

2006 ◽  
Vol 100 (3) ◽  
pp. 385-401 ◽  
Author(s):  
STEPHEN SKOWRONEK
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Intimate Relationship ◽  
Processes Of Change ◽  
Woodrow Wilson ◽  
Racial Hierarchy ◽  
American Political Culture ◽  
Political Tradition ◽  
American Liberalism ◽  
Political Traditions ◽  
Over Time

Racist and liberal ideals are said to anchor competing political traditions in America, but a juxtaposition of ideals obscures key processes of change in the cultural lexicon and misses much about how a political tradition comes to bear on the development of a polity. Attention to the reassociation of ideas and purposes over time points to a more intimate relationship between racism and liberalism in American political culture, to the conceptual interpenetration of these antithetical ends. Cuing off issues that have long surrounded the reassociation of John C. Calhoun's rule of the concurrent majority with pluralist democracy, this article examines another southerner, Woodrow Wilson, who, in the course of defending racial hierarchy, developed ideas that became formative of modern American liberalism. Analysis of the movement of ideas across purposes shifts the discussion of political traditions from set categories of thought to revealed qualities of thought, bringing to the fore aspects of this polity that are essentially and irreducibly “American.”

The Fall of New Netherland and Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Imperial Formation, 1654–1676

2014 ◽  
Vol 87 (4) ◽  
pp. 666-708 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. H. Roper
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
The Political ◽  
New Netherland ◽  
Metropolitan Government ◽  
Anglo American

The English takeover of the Dutch colony of New Netherland in 1664 illustrates the enduring centrality of colonial agendas in the political culture of the seventeenth-century English Empire but also provided an occasion by which the metropolitan government and its perspective ironically assumed greater weight in colonial-imperial relations.

scholarly journals Book Review: American Political Culture: An Encyclopedia

2015 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 174
Author(s):  
Carla Wilson Buss
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Cultural Pluralism ◽  
Reliable Information ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Melting Pot ◽  
American Political Culture ◽  
Israel Zangwill

Anyone seeking reliable information on American political life since the 1970s will be pleased with Michael Shally-Jensen’s work, American Political Culture. This three-volume set covers topics from abortion to Israel Zangwill, the nineteenth-century author who coined the phrase “melting pot” and who appears in the entry for “Cultural Pluralism.”

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