Reviewed by Sara Stidstone Gronim | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 61.3

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Reviewed by Sara Stidstone Gronim | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 61.3 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

The American Way: A Geographical History of Crisis and Recovery. By Carville Earle. (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003. Pp. xviii, 449. $69.95.)

Reviewed by Sara Stidstone Gronim , C. W. Post Campus, Long Island University

The American Way is an outstanding capstone to a distinguished scholarly career. Carville Earle asserts that politics makes space and does not merely take place within it. If readers need convincing that human history and geography are mutually and inextricably constitutive, this is the book that will convert them. Earle has written a macrohistory in which he seeks to demonstrate that geographic patterns over the course of the past four hundred years in the area that is now the United States have been caused by the alternating dominance of two distinct political philosophies. Perhaps like the authors of all such ambitious studies, Earle sometimes adjusts the historical details to fit his theory and walls off some phenomena that cannot easily be accommodated to it. Yet the sheer volume of evidence he has amassed and the clarity of its organization, the result of deep and sustained investigation, make this a book many historians will find worth picking up.

Earle labels the two ideological configurations that have characterized the United States throughout its history "republican" and "democratic." These are notoriously slippery terms, but Earle offers clear definitions and genealogies for each. Both drew on aspects of the commonwealth republicanism and the Lockean liberalism of early modern England. Earle defines commonwealth republicans as primarily concerned with the preservation of the sovereign nation and supporters of a vision of a roughly egalitarian (because propertied) citizenry. He describes Lockean liberals as primarily concerned with liberty, particularly commercial liberty such as international free trade and competitive innovation, and thus oriented toward the support of talented, aggressive elites. He then argues that the "American Way," formulated in the wake of the Revolution, was to split the components, such that republicans retained their emphasis on national sovereignty but shifted toward preferential protection for innovative elites and (his substitute term for liberal) democrats retained their commitment to free trade but adopted a concern for the mass of citizens. (These are not to be confused with the current Republican and Democratic political parties, and, indeed, the clarity of his prose is such that the reader is never tempted astray.) Earle devotes the bulk of the book to demonstrating how alterations in policy regimes responded to the inevitable periodic crises of a capitalist economy in ways that reconfigured space and, more importantly, generated a repertoire of experience that enabled the United States to persevere without deviating into the extremes of absolutism, socialism, communism, or fascism.

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