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Book Review
Comparative/World
| Jügen Heideking and James A. Henretta, editors. Republicanism and Liberalism in America and the German States, 1750–1850. Assisted by Peter Becker. (Publications of the German Historical Institute.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 2002. Pp. x, 309. $65.00.
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| The once heated scholarly controversy over the transition from "classical republicanism" to "liberalism" and its impact on the American founding no longer throws off many bright sparks. These debates, skeptical contributor A. G. Roeber remarks, "have become increasingly sterile" (p. 89). Jürgen Heideking and James A. Henretta gamely resist such skepticism, suggesting that the "task" confronting contemporary scholarship is "to assess the proportional share or the specific 'mixture' of ideas, concepts, and values from republican and liberal sources" (p. 4). Happily, their contributors pay little heed to this editorial injunction. Far from calibrating the precise "mixture" of intellectual influences in different historical circumstances, the essays in this rich collection fly off in various interesting and eccentric directions. |
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Willi Paul Adams impatiently dismisses the fine distinctions that republican revisionists discovered (or projected) into the American revolutionaries' Whig ideology, emphasizing instead the divergent trajectories of political development in North America—simultaneously and indistinguishably "free, democratic, republican, liberal"—and the successive "failures," beginning with the French Revolution, that marked "the painful growth of liberalism in Europe" (p. 146). Roeber's fine comparative essay on the development of charity law, civil society, and attitudes toward the state in Weinigerode and Pennsylvania jettisons republicanism and liberalism altogether. |
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Robert E. Shalhope's essay on political development in Bennington, Vermont, and Henretta's on the "birth of American liberalism" in New York state both proceed from the problematic premise that the revolution established a republican regime that then became liberal in the decades leading up to the American Civil War. But their understandings of republicanism and liberalism differ radically. Shalhope's republicanism persists as a form of false consciousness: by appealing "to popular virtue—the reification of an independent yeomanry—Bennington's Whig and Democratic leaders helped produce a society of capitalists oblivious to the spirit of their own enterprise" (p. 164). Henretta, by contrast, eschews ideological mystification: Martin Van Buren and his fellow liberals knew exactly what they were up to when they mobilized against the gentry to overthrow the "neomercantilist policies" of the "republican 'commonwealth'" (p. 165). |
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Paul Nolte's ambitious comparative essay adds to the terminological and interpretative confusion, arguing that the market revolution in the two countries led to "the last revival of notions of classical republicanism" in Germany and the United States in the 1830s and 1840s, explaining "the particular partisan dynamics of that time in both countries" (p. 205). Yet Nolte recognizes that the American Second Party System did not simply pit "republicans" against "liberals," thus complicating—and obscuring—these "dynamics." The situation is still further muddled in the German states, where the "identity of a liberal consisted of a political rather than an economic confession" and where "one single, liberal party" embraced a development-oriented "'market' wing" and a "petty-commercial 'community' wing ... more skeptical of rapid economic development and market integration" (pp. 204, 203). |
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