| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Robert W. Smith. Keeping the Republic: Ideology and Early American Diplomacy. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. 2004. Pp. x, 196. $38.50.
In this engagingly written and thoughtful book, Robert W. Smith explores the complexity surrounding some of the most critical questions of foreign policy facing the founders of the new American Republic. Was it possible to employ a republican ideology, or worldview, as the foundational guide to the conduct of both domestic and foreign policy? Was it prudent to even try this experiment in a world where other nations were not restrained by similar ideological considerations? Could the founders discover "a republican realpolitik" (p. 3)?	1
Quite appropriately, Smith replaces the overly simplistic realist/idealist dichotomy used by prior diplomatic historians to explain the foreign policies of the newly created United States with a more sophisticated hermeneutic: the ideology of republicanism. He traces the evolution of the meanings of republicanism through a detailed discussion of the philosophic perspectives of John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. Although it makes perfect sense that Smith includes these four founders—all intellectuals, all powerful politicians—the omission of George Washington seems puzzling. To be sure, Washington's contributions to political theory were rather sparse, especially in comparison to the others, but when the focus of study is foreign policy in the early republic, this reader wanted to know how Washington fit the ideological scheme. Nevertheless, all four of the men who are the focus of the analysis were republicans, even though there were important differences in their particular variations on the ideology. In fact, there were more significant differences than Smith acknowledges.	. . .

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